Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The ABC's of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

By Rick Davison

Advertising services and products on the Internet is a lucrative career option, but can also be a cutthroat endeavor, so you must be properly prepared. There are uncountable ways of luring consumers to your website, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. This article discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and why you should consider it to get people to see your products and services.

Pay-per-click and SEO are both aimed at placing your website as close to the top search engine results list as feasible. But a fundamental difference between the two is that it takes a few minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign, as opposed to months that can go into a successful SEO campaign.

Pay-per-click is a seemingly simple way to advertise that can be utilized on the most used search engines. You write an ad, bid on keywords that you think people will use to find your product or service, and if they click on your ad, you then pay the bid price. The person who clicked on the ad is then taken to your website. That is the easy part. The harder part of pay-per-click is understanding exactly how to find the right keywords and how to get the most clicks for the smallest bid.

There are definite advantages and disadvantages of using pay-per-click versus some of the other methods to get people to your website. One of the biggest advantages of pay-per-click is that to move up in the rankings, you can up your bid to get the ranking you want (amongst other possible tactics). This compares to having to update your website to make imrpvements if you are using SEO to get people to your website.

The biggest downside to pay-per-click advertising is that if you aren't smart about how you approach your bidding, you can end up in a bidding war. Raising your bid price is the quickest way to move up in the rankings. However, it is not the only way. This is where having a very good understanding of how PPC really works comes into play. If you rely on just raising your bid, you may be quickly outbid to the point where the keyord becomes unprofitable, so you must understand your other options.

By doing some basic calculations, you can figure out what your maximum pay-per-click bid can be before you start to lose money. You can figure the amount by dividing the the profit of your website by the number of visitors. If 1,000 visitors makes you $600 in profits, each visitor has a value of $0.60 to you.

When we calculate the $0.60 break even cost, it gives us the maximum amount that you could pay for a click and not lose money. But of course, we want to make money, not just break even, so the bid per click would have to be somewhat less.

You should be aware that the most sought-after keywords cost substantially greater than 60 cents a click. To work around this, you could choose to bid less per click or you could improve your campaign so that you price per click were to come down. You could also do more research on your keywords to find those that do not cost as much to advertise on.

In the pay-per-click ad, the written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not only to attract quality visitors, but to be as specific as possible to get the lowest price for your keywords. In general the keyword should match the ad copy, which matches the website that your prospective client is taken. Understanding these details of PPC will determine whether you will be profitable in you advertising endeavor.

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