Strategies for successful Pay per click advertising

Summary; This article provides you with a high-level view of pay-per-click marketing and offers strategies and examples of how to achieve success and make the best use of your budget.

What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay per click advertising, Paid Search or PPC is defined as the bidding and purchase of clicks against a specific keyword or keyphrasess on Search Engines. A link to a destination page is displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase.

On Google, PPC listings show up in the Adwords column at the top and the right-hand side of the screen. Other engines, such as MSN Adcentre or Yahoo Search (formerly Overture) display PPC listings as 'sponsored listings' in the same column as the natural search results.

The ads are purchased through PPC advertising suppliers, the two largest being Google and Yahoo. Google's program is called Adwords and displays results on Google.com, AOL, Ask and many smaller search engines. Yahoo's PPC program, formerly Overture, results appear on Yahoo, AltaVista, and many other syndication partners. MSN launched its own PPC programme in 2007 called MSN Ad Centre.

The Pay per click ads are ranked based on how much a business is willing to pay to advertise on each search phrase. However the ranking order in Google is a combination of both the bid amount and the popularity of the ad. For example a search for ‘DVD players’ the current top advertiser is currently paying .76p per click, one penny more than the #2 advertiser. Note: Given that Google represents approximately 70% of UK search volumes it is important monitor and refine the frequency of clicks to maximise success.

..And the disadvantages

PPC advertising can be expensive if not managed correctly. It's easy to get caught up in a bidding war over a particular keyphrase like mortgage or travel and end up spending in excess of your potential return. Some PPC engines, such as Yahoo Search offer convenience features such as 'autobid' that will automatically increase your bid amount to maintain a particular rank. That sounds great on its face, but it can get expensive in a big hurry.

Also, return on investment (ROI) can be very hard to measure. Some PPC engines (Adwords and Yahoo Search, specifically) provide conversion measurement tools, so that you can track whether your pay-per-click campaigns are generating the desired result. But these tracking tools aren't 100% accurate, and at the time of this writing the smaller PPC providers don't deliver any conversion tracking.

Pay-per-click advertising does not scale. If you get more traffic, you pay more money in direct proportion to that traffic - your cost per click stays constant, and your overall cost increases. Compare that to natural search engine optimization, where you invest a fixed amount of time and/or money to achieve a better rank, and your cost per click goes down as you draw more traffic.

Click fraud is increasingly a problem with pay per click advertising. Although the extent of click fraud is impossible to measure with any certainty, its persistence has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Pay per click

The advantages of Pay-click-advertising

Pay-per-click advertising can generate huge amounts of traffic and potential customer straffic right away. It's simple: If you spend enough, you can get top placement, and potential customers will see you first.

PPC advertising is fast: With some systems, such as Google Adwords, you can generate targeted traffic within a few minutes of opening an account.

PPC advertising is nimble: Where natural search engine marketing or other forms of advertising can take weeks or months behind changing audience behavior, you can adjust most pay-per-click campaigns in hours or days. That provides unmatched ability to adjust to market conditions.

PPC can also be a cheap : Sometimes, you can find keyword 'niches' for which the top bid is around 10p- in that case, PPC is a great option, because you can generate traffic to your site for a fraction of the cost of any other form of paid advertising.
How do you make PPC successful?

How do you engineer a successful pay-per-click advertising campaign? By paying more attention to conversion, and less to clicks.

Here are five rules key recommendations for success

1) Track Conversions

If you want to stay on budget, you have to track conversions. What's a 'conversion'? It's any time a visitor to your web site takes a desired action. Examples of conversions might be:

Visitor makes a purchase

Visitor completes a sales inquiry form

Visitor downloads a white paper and registers

A conversion doesn't have to be a sale. But a conversion has to be worth something to you. If you can't think of any measurable, useful outcome of a visit to your site, do not spend money on pay-per-click advertising - there's no point.

Google and Yahoo provide conversion tracking - most other pay-per-click services do not, so you'll need to look at third party tools such as Urchin, which is also an outstanding site traffic reporting tool, or GoToast, or my own firm's Xed.

If the pay-per-click service you're using doesn't offer a conversion tracker, and you can't afford to pay for a third-party tool, try something more basic: In a spreadsheet, track the number of conversions, total, per day. Do the conversions increase after you start your campaign? If so, you're likely on the right track. If not, then there's very little chance that your pay-per-click investment is working.

2) Set a Sensible Budget
A lot of folks ask us how much I typically spend on clients' PPC campaigns. My answer is always 'just a bit less than too much'.A little glib, I know, but the there is no 'right' amount. Track Conversions

3)Tailor ads to each search phrase
Build unique ads for each search phrase. It takes a lot more time to write a unique ad for each search phrase relevant to your business rather than creating one ad for all of your search phrases, but the extra work will definitely be rewarded. Ads that are aligned with the corresponding search term receive more clicks, which will mean more targeted traffic, and in some cases paying less per click (on Google Adwords) due to the intricacies of how the advertising is priced.

4) Send visitors to the most appropriate pages of your website.
If you place an ad for a specific product within your online store, don't send visitors to your homepage and force them to dig for what they just searched. This will frustrate your visitors and increase the chance that they'll hit the dreaded Back button.

5) Write good ads which convert
Most pay-per-click advertising requires that you write a very short descriptive phrase about your service. Don't underestimate the importance of this phrase - make sure, at a minimum, that your grammar, spelling and overall language is correct and appropriate for your audience. Also verify that your language adheres to the rules enforced by the pay-per-click service - Google, for example, won't allow ads with superlatives ('the best', 'the greatest', etc.), with repeated keywords, or with excessive capitalization.

6) Refine, refine and improve
Don't set up a pay-per-click campaign and then forget about it. You need to monitor your ads on at least a weekly basis. Search patterns change all the time.In my experience, a well-designed campaign needs to be 'tweaked' every few weeks.

Conclusion:
Pay-per-click is an established form of Internet marketing making up over 50% of all UK internet spend in 2007. Very few businesses can now afford to ignore it. People are searching for what you are selling at this very moment, Go for It.