Monday, September 29, 2008

PPC Advertising Basics

By Brian Basch

Pay per click advertising, or PPC advertising, is one of the best ways to guide visitors to your site. Every day, many service providers and other businesses use PPC campaigns to reach their target audience effectively and inexpensively. Used correctly, PPC methods can be the key to more sales and improved business.

There is an ideal list of key words or phrases that relates to your product or service when starting with your PPC advertising campaigns. You just need to find it. A quality keyword strategy is what you need to make sure you get the right audience and gain a sale. So it is important to do more than optimizing these words and this is the most tricky part of PPC advertising. Reaching the customers who will buy from you needs proper targeting that will allow you to rule out people who are not interested in your products.

Keywords can trap you in a bidding war if you're not careful and the most expensive words come with the promise of high rankings on the search page. High ranking ads get much of the traffic, particularly the highest ranked three on each page. But if the person clicking on your ad decides they don't want your product, you've paid a high price for someone to look at your site. This is way targeting your keywords is the best tactic.

The keyword's popularity decides the price you'll pay for your ads and prices can vary from one search engine to another. Costs start as low as a cent per click and get up as high as a dollar and over. That's why PPC campaigners monitor their ads, so that they can get the most out of their investment. There are tools available to help you understand what's working and what's not, this way you can tell what keywords are working by measuring clicks and sales. It's best to replace words that aren't working for you.

You need to write your advertising correctly, making sure it's a genuine offer that has something in common with the keywords or phrases. A well-designed site that has a high quality scoring with Google is likely to get the best placement. You could choose to run the advertising for a certain period of time but some sites will allow you to run it every now and then and target times or specific days.

Consider you ads carefully, as failure to achieve a high placement, or failing to make your webpage attractive to visitors, are common reasons for failed PPC ad campaigns. So, be very certain that your landing page and your ad go well together. Ads should be relevant to the keywords you're using, as well as eye-catching.

It's a good idea to test your ads by seeing how high they place on the search engine's page. Often just one word stands between you and the sort of sales you want. You can test this by using variations on keywords. Google alternates ads for its clients so they can test the success of different variations.

For small to middle sized business owners, PPC advertising is a great way to spread the word and make money. A good plan and an organized campaign are the road to success. Do things right, and you'll be able to target your ideal customer, and get many more sales.

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