PPC Marketing, commonly known as Pay Per Click Marketing is a popular method of promoting your web site or business on the internet allowing traffic to be driven to your website sometimes within hours rather than weeks or months as with more traditional page ranking methods such as SEO.
Commonly found on search engines, PPC advertising revolves around sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed at the top or to the right of the organic search results (usually in a coloured or shaded box). An advertiser pays an amount of money for visitors who click on these links and land on his or her web page.
Pay Per Click advertising involves bidding for the top or leading positions on search engine results pages and listings. Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services.
Generally, the rule has always been the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results. This has changed slightly in recent times with the addition of a quality score introduced by Google.
However, essentially the idea is to get as high as you can in the listings so more people will find the ad (and click on it) to go to your website. Advertisers would then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through to their website.
PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Pay Per Position
Pay Per Ranking
Pay Per Performance
Pay Per Placement.
Setting up a PPC campaign would typically involve the following procedures.
Opening an account with a selected PPC search engine provider (usually free)
Researching and organizing a keywords list or phrases known as long tail keywords relevant to your business.
Bidding on the keywords or phrases to determine your position in the rankings.
Constructing a compelling attention grabbing ad copy.
Setting up a 'landing page' for your ads that will convert your prospects like crazy.
Placing the advertisement in the search engine.
There are numerous benefits to Pay Per Click advertising that can make it a very effective way of promoting a business 'online'.
You can launch almost immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly. They can go live within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.
PPC provides you extremely targeted traffic. The whole process of browsers clicking on a link that they are interested in narrows visitors down into 'qualified' prospects who are actually looking for specific products and/or services that you offer.
PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, other than the organic search engine results that you may get from your SEO efforts, thus widening your reach.
Track and monitor your campaign. PPC advertising uses a tracking system that will record who comes to the website and what they do once they arrive. You can track the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are invaluable tools allowing you to monitor statistics such as your return on investment (ROI), the acquisition cost of each visitor and customer conversion rates allowing you to see the percentage of visitors that are converted to customers once they reach your landing page.
There are some important things to consider and adhere to when planning a pay per click campaign:
1. Understand your product and the reasons people would want to buy it. Understanding this allows you to determine which keywords or phrases will trigger the best reaction in your prospects, thus giving them a motivated reason to click on your ad.
2. Determine your daily or monthly budget and stay with it. This means keeping your budget in the forefront of your mind and not getting drawn into bidding wars. If a chosen phrase is too expensive then research another one. You might be bidding against a large corporation with very deep pockets.
3. Learn how to bid sensibly and effectively. A bid that is too high will rapidly wipe out your budget, while a bid that is too low can lose you a high and relevant spot on the page rankings. Carry out research on your competition. Discover how much are they are bidding on similar words?
4. Watch your profit margin. The purpose of the campaign is to return more in sales or leads than it costs you to get them. Measure your margin against your spending. Know when to pull out of the campaign.
5. Don't just guess on your keywords. Carry out some research using the free Google AdWords tool. Make an informed decision about which keyword phrases to bid for. Focus on specific and niche keywords. Avoid general terms and phrases. For example "Best Prices for Televisions" is very general whereas "Best Price for Sharp 54-inch Super Widescreen TV Model XYZ" is far more focussed and probably a cheaper keyword.
6. Construct compelling ads. A good PPC ad is one that grabs the prospect by the eyeballs and can command a call to action. There are several approaches to this:
Major benefits (Lose weight)
Direct Instructions (Go there now)
Discount offers
Free goods, reports or information
Testimonials.
Famous celebrity/endorsements
Money back guarantees
Free trials
Reverse Psychology (Get it now, this offer may be withdrawn at any time, scarcity etc)
7. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your landing page should be optimized to convert. After all, you've paid real money to get the prospect to your site, so now is the time to sell them what they want.
8. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. Your website should be simple and designed in such a way that it will be easy to navigate and fast to load. Avoid animated start ups forcing your visitor to sit through a fancy flash introduction. Most visitors won't share your love of the creative. They will simply click away.
9. Include contact details to create a good impression and a feeling of security among potential customers. After all, the visitor may well be new to your site and knows nothing about you, your products or your services.
By using these simple rules and taking the time to learn about the various tools that are available, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing strategy that will maximize your return on investment and drive visitors and sales to your site much quicker than SEO alone
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