Saturday, April 26, 2008

Secrets for Successfully Managing Your Pay-Per-Click

By Kirt Christensen

They are not telling you lies. You can have outstanding profits with low expense of effort in a short period of time with PPC marketing. As far as ad campaigns go, it can be the goose that laid the golden egg. What they aren't telling you is that the ppc marketing campaigns that are a success, result from cunning minds and many hours of manpower.

For a ppc to be a success, the advertiser needs to first choose a search engine to associate with. Of course Google and Yahoo do the most business quantity wise, but they are not the only game in town. Research done by Pay Per Click Universe showed these results for the Top 10 ppc advertising programs.

1. Google

2. Yahoo!

3. ABC Search

4. Search Feed

5. 7 Search

6. MIVA

7. Enhance Interactive

8. Findology

9. Microsoft adCenter

10. Ask.com

These resources will be thoroughly used by the smart marketer. He will test to see which of them can bring the most to your business.

Selecting the best keywords is the next thing to do on your pathway to ppc success. Good keywords are the ones that are general while not being too general; you don't need to have a college diploma to think of them but you also don't want a high percentage of non productive leads because the words are too unspecified.

Many search engines make available a database that contains the most popular keywords that are used in the latest searches. You want to think of these as the beginning of your list not the whole list. Too many of the popular keyword phrases are just too generic to get a good quantity of quality leads.

Once you have selected your keywords you need to decide how much you will bid for those keywords. Search engines display their ppc advertisements based on how much the ads maker will pay whenever someone clicks on the ad. Hey, they want to make money also.

The ads at the top of the list are the ones with the greatest bids therefore they have the top listing. The advantage to this is that they will be seen first. The significance of this is that most searchers are not going to scroll through dozens of pages to get what they want; when they don't find it in 5 or 10 they will most likely forget it.

Finally, there is no such thing as too much micromanagement when it comes to managing a pay per click marketing campaign. It is essential that a marketer know at all times precisely how much business their advertisements are bringing in. This allows them to redirect the campaign if it seems that the advertisements already in place are not doing their job, make minor adjustments as necessary and avert small problems before they become full blown disasters.

When diligence in management and research are applied you can make hundreds of dollars in pay-per-click advertising; still this is a trial and error venture. Discouragement can be avoided by remembering that you won't likely see large amounts of money showing up in your bottom line right after you set up your campaigns. Remember: Patience is a virtue.

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