Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Basics

Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising is by far the most affordable form of advertising available today. By 2008 PPC search engine advertising is expected to reach $8 billion. PPC is all about creating leads which will help potential customers find specific websites with the product or service they want or need and is often included as part of website optimization .

PPC advertising, however, is not just about generating leads. It is also about providing useful information to potential buyers so that they will click on "your" site and eventually make their purchase there. Relevant information is a powerful asset in PPC advertising that is often overlooked by many websites. If provided with useful information in the beginning, buyers are more likely to buy from you the first time rather than continue their search.

When used correctly PPC advertising will provide "qualified" traffic to your site. When shoppers click on a PPC ad, they generally select it because it has already identified the particular product or service they were searching for. This is accomplished by the use of "keywords" and is the fastest way for an advertiser to get a reasonable return on their investment.

PPC advertising is the process of "bidding" to establish the price of a given "keyword". The advertiser selects certain "keywords" depending on the product or service they are selling. They then begin bidding on those keywords through Google, Yahoo or other popular search engines. Depending on the popularity of a given keyword and the budget of the companies bidding, prices for keywords can go from a few cents to a few dollars in a matter of minutes.

The web sites that you see at the top of the page when you do a search in Google or Yahoo for a particular keyword are the companies who won the bidding for that keyword. As you go down the list these are the companies who came in second, third, fourth, etc. It is not always necessary to be number one on all of these pages. Most of the time shoppers will click on the top one or two simply on impulse, but will continue shopping after browsing these pages. I myself will often select listings at random from the first page of the search results but will rarely go past that page. However, the closer to the top of the page your site is listed, the better your chances of being "clicked" on by a qualified buyer.

If you choose PPC as a component of your overall advertising campaign, and you should, there are a couple of things you need to remember. Effective PPC advertising requires constant monitoring and analysis as to how a particular keyword is performing. When you see that a particular keyword is not producing the results you want or expected you need to turn it off and bid on another keyword. This is one of the aspects that make PPC so cost effective. If an ad (keyword) is not performing you can simply turn it off and select another, whereas with most other advertising you are locked in for a week or month depending on your contract.

The overall cost of PPC advertising is dependent on the number of times potential customers "click" on your ad and the amount is subtracted from the initial amount you committed. Therefore, if you won the bid at $1 per click and committed $1,000 to the campaign, 1,000 potential customers could click on your ad before it was moved or replaced by another bidder. This is where the monitoring comes in. You want to be sure that your keywords are performing.

Selecting keywords is not a matter of throwing darts at your web page. In fact, this is where many businesses fail to get the most out of PPC advertising. Selecting keywords must be done very carefully and requires some research. Start by doing your own searches on keywords you think potential customer may use and see what results you get. You can also search your competitor’s web sites and see what they are using. The Internet offers many "keyword analysis" tools that are either freeware or can be purchased for minimal cost.

Now go get those customers!! Good luck!!