Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Top Tips For Improving Your Pay Per Click Campaign

 

Pay per click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to your website. While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it's actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can't live without.
But as I said, it can be a little daunting to begin with, so here are some top tips that will help you create and monitor your Pay Per Click advertisements.
Different Search Engines
There are many search engines that offer Pay Per Click advertising. The two most commonly used are Google and Yahoo. It is generally recommended that when you start your PPC campaign, have a low budget and spread it over a few different search engines to see where your target audience is.
Pay Per Click users who use Google tend to have better success advertising technically orientated products or services such as computer hardware or website design. On the other hand Yahoo has been reported to bring great results for products that general consumers search for such as toys, video games and music.
Choosing the right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is the pretty much the most vital stage of your PPC campaign. You will need to select the keywords specific to the service or product you are offering, while being careful not to target an overly competitive phrase. If your phrase is extremely competitive, you are likely to spend a lot of money.
To begin with, ask yourself what phrase would you search for if you were looking for the product or service you are promoting.
Begin by searching for your product or service with a variety of variations of your phrase. For example if you sell mobile phones, variations could include "Buy mobile phones", "Buy new mobile phones" or "buy latest mobile phones".
By searching for variations of key phrases, you can also see what your competitors are also targeting. Make a note of the phrases that you see.
Be aware that there is usually a fine line between keywords that are either too specific or too general. You don't want to waste your money on untargeted traffic.
Attracting People to Your Ad
Title:
Once you have selected your keywords, they need to be enticed into clicking your adverts. One of the simplest, yet most effective way is to including your keywords in the title of your advert. This has been known to increase click-through rates on adverts by over 50%
You should also be aware that you can often create a more appealing advert by including other keywords into your advert. You could do this if you are targeting a very specific part of your product, it will ultimately mean that your clicks will decrease but should improve the quality of the visits.
Description
When you have written your title, you need to create a description for your advert. It needs to be direct and to the point. Realistically a user needs to be prompted to click your advert, so the description needs to be appealing.
A good method of prompting people to click your advert is to give them a direct instruction. For example, a phrase like "try our demo" or "download" will provide the push that they need.
It is important to make your advert different from your competitors, if you offer a good product or service that is different, say why in your description. After all, you want people too choose your advert over the others.
Reducing Your Click Through
Despite what you may think, for the majority of the cases it is important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC advert is receiving. A high number of clicks does tend to indicate that your visitors are potentially from a market that you are not directly targeting.
If you think this is likely, you should make the description of your advert more descriptive and even include your price. This will more than likely reduce the number of clicks, but improve your click to sale ratio.
Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions
You need to know if your campaign is successful, to know this you need to be able to track your clicks and conversions. If your adverts are not successful, then ultimately your money is better spent elsewhere.
Luckily Google and Yahoo PPC include built in tracking and conversion tools so you can track how well your adverts are doing.
You will need to know exactly how much money you are making per pound or dollar spent on every advert. If you are making more money than spending, then that advert is successful. If this is the case, you can use your knowledge and experience to potentially increase that.
If your advert is costing you more than it is making, you can either reduce the amount you are spending on that advert, or remove it altogether. PPC has a lot of trial and error associated with it depending on your market.
Take the advice in this article, hopefully it will improve your Pay Per Click campaigns. Always remember that it can take time and effort for you to find the perfect key phrases for your market, but once you have found them, the rewards can be great.
Good Luck

This article is written by Jonathan Walker of PCC, offering Pay Per Click Jobs and PCC Jobs

How to Get To The Top Of The Search Engines Fast

 

Pay Per Click advertising is placing ads for products or services on search engines and on content sites across the Internet. They are typically the first results presented following a search query. Payment is made when users clicks through to the web site from the search engine link. Link position on a results page is normally set by what's called a quality score. The quality score is made up of your click-through rate, and the bid price the advertiser is willing to bid. It is what ultimately determines your position in the search listings after a search query.
Pay per click advertising has evolved rapidly over the last couple of years, though relatively new in the market. From its inception in late 90s it has taken internet marketing and advertising to exciting new levels. Prior to the Pay Per Click model it was very difficult if not impossible for new advertisers to get to the top of the search results on major search engines. With the advent of Pay Per Click all that changed. Now the subtle difference between a seller doing well and another doing better on the internet usually boils down to targeting the right keywords and sending the searcher to the right landing pages.
The debate rages on about the viability of pay per click campaigns. Many companies feel is all they need to do is set up a pay per click campaign and that's it. They mistakenly believe that just getting customers to their website is the ultimate goal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting prospects to the website is just the beginning of the selling process not the end. When advertisers understand this basic concept then they look at pay-per-click with a new appreciation.
Why? Because there's something to gain for everyone here; the customer finds the product, the advertiser generates business and profit, and the search engine gets paid for it! With all the analytical tools that are readily available today Advertisers can invest money on the keywords they expect potential customers would enter in search queries.
Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center are the popular names when it comes to PPC marketing. Although there are some similarities between the three the submission process does vary with each engine. Unless an advertiser has plenty of time on his hands it is probably wise to outsource the submission and maintenance to a third party firm experienced in dealing with the nuances of each engine.
By just paying for the traffic companies can make sure that their product or service gets listed high in the search results. Believing that search engine optimization is free is a big mistake. There can be a huge cost associated with creating in-bound links, understanding and applying the correct keyword density and designing a site that still converts at a reasonable return on investment.
Speed is one of the best features about pay-per-click campaigns. It's perfect for testing sales promotions. If companies sell seasonal products like chocolates, greeting cards and other gifts which become hot selling items during festive season of Christmas. A PPC model makes sure the advertiser's products or services will be found by consumers in time to purchase them.

Robert Gantt is the online expert who has helped train hundreds of entrepreneurs how to promote their businesses and make more sales. Learn how to improve your sales, increase your cashflow and fatten your customer base with targeted effective search engine advertising PPC The Easy Way

PPC Search Engine

 

PPC Basics: Your guide to PPC search engines and advertising
You've probably heard a lot about PPC and you want to know what exactly PPC is and how PPC can help you? We're going to attempt to provide the answer to the first part of that question here but the second part is some thing that you will find elsewhere in another article.
PPC stands for Pay per click. Pay per click is an internet marketing tool that allows you to make money by carrying another person's banner on your site or gives you the option of putting in an advertisement of your own onto someone else's website or search engine.
Pay per click advertising on search engines gives one the option of choosing keywords that you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. For example, If you are a shoe manufacturer then you would want that your site should appear on the page when someone types in the keyword "Shoes".
As a customer you decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords that you choose.
There are a lot of pay per click search engines and an equally large number of people who have adopted Pay per click search engine advertising. If you want to get ahead in the race you are going to have to do some research and pay top dollar to the Pay per click search engine advertising firm.
Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on the keywords of your choice and how much traffic these keywords are likely to draw.
The biggest PPC services providers are Yahoo, Google, Overture, although Google is not a PPC search engine but Google providing PPC services in the form of text and ADD boxes which can be seen at right of the search result. And these all are part of other sites PPC campaign.
There a number of other search engines out there and although these search engines are not as popular as Google, they generally offer one advantage. Usually these search engines have lower costs per click for a keyword than the larger search engines.
In addition to the general pay per click search engines, with a little effort you may also be able to find thematic search engines that serve your industry or specifically cater to your target audience.
There is one more point which is worthy to keep in mind that never go for big investment to your PPC Campaign just start from a low budget and absorb how PPC Campaign is performing for you to get traffic and what percent of traffic is converting in your paying customers.
Before entering into any kind of a deal with a pay per click search engine, be sure that you have the answer to the following questions:
- What is the magnitude of searches being performed by the search engine on a monthly basis?
- Who are the major search partners or affiliates that the search engine has?
- What is the magnitude of searches that the affiliate or search partner generating per month?
- Is it necessary for you to agree to have your advertisement be hosted by all the affiliates as well?
- Does the search engine guarantee fraudulent check mechanisms?
- How can a fraudulent clicks report be filed?
- How do you ensure proper accounting?
Once you are assured that the Pay per click search engine is actually working in your favor you can take up the option of Pay per click advertising. Once you find the right pay per click search engine advertising programme you will see your business soar. How? That' an entirely different article altogether!

Ppcjohn is a senior PPC Consultant with Thagodz a PPC Search Engine, Columbia based internet marketing company specializing in PPC Search Engine Advertising and Marketing.

Advantages of PPC over SEO

 

Over the years, marketing and advertising rules and guidelines have undergone a major revamp. Much of this can be attributed to the advent of the electronic media and its mass appeal which in today's scenario might be having more impact on the masses than the print media. The basic objective of marketing and advertising is to make your product or services visible to the maximum number of potential customers. Similarly, the way a product or service is projected in the eye of the consumer is also equally important. However, let us for the time being concentrate only on the first part, i.e making your product visible to the maximum number of people to enhance business productivity.
To show your product to maximum number of people, you need to know where you will find this large number of people who can be your potential customers. There is a huge potential customer market on the internet waiting to be tapped. Logically many service providers are exploiting different channels, by hook or by crook to catch the attention of these consumers on the internet. Search engines are the most common places where any person in quest for a product or a service is headed.
You can take a chance if a web visitor can't find what they're searching for in the first screen of the results following a query, that they will probably scroll down and may even look as far as the second page to find your site. It's not a good idea. Most visitors will find what they look for in the first screen of the results. That's the location your links need to be in to assure your success.
Here let us look at two paths for this destination. One is called Pay Per Click or PPC and the other is called Search Engine Optimization; or SEO. As the name suggests, PPC works on a model wherein a service provider pays to the search engine in order to get preference of display on the search page. The money is paid per click and not in lump sum say for a particular period of time. SEO on the other hand focuses on increasing the traffic on website through the search engine by only natural algorithm results. It involves proper coding, presentation, use of proper keywords in order to attain a higher rank in the search display page. It does not involve any advertising cost to be paid to the search engine.
Depending on your perspective you may feel that PPC or SEO has inherent advantages over the other, and you'd be right. Many businesses thrive using pay per click advertising. Other businesses swear by SEO. Some advantages of PPC are:
* By its very nature pay per click offers more flexibility. You can start a campaign immediately. You can set daily,weekly or monthly budgets. You can even set cost per action goals. You can pick the exact keywords you think will deliver the highest sales conversion.
* This is particularly helpful for novices, who might not be sure of which keywords can generate more traffic. So by using a PPC and alongside trying out different keywords to find out which generate more traffic can be a very beneficial exercise. One can invest heavily on such keywords later on. If one can monitor the keyword progress (which requires time investment) PPC models can give total control of spending.
* PPC is tailor made for service providers who are after blitzkrieg publicity. Seasonal promotions normally see a huge rush in PPC spending as the time for actual selling is only limited; the producer wants to have a sure shot chance of catching the customer's attention. Similar goes the case for quick response advertisings.
* You don't have to design your entire website around PPC. You can build your website strictly with your customer in mind. You're free to create a website that produces orders. PPC allows you the luxury of spending your time testing what is actually working rather than experimenting with algorithms.
* PPC models eliminate the risk factor as the advertiser will not need to pay in case his campaign doesn't work out and people do not click on his links. This option will not exist for non PPC models.
It's your choice. If you can achieve good positions with search engine optimization, my hats off to you, but while your waiting be sure to take advantage of the marketing feats you can accomplish with good PPC campaigns.

Robert Gantt is the Internet expert who has taught hundreds of people how to elevate their businesses and make more money Internet. Learn how to increase your orders, get better cashflow and increase your customer base with targeted effective search engine advertising PPC The Easy Way