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How to get instant traffic to your website for just one nickel!
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most profitable methods for Internet business owners to meet potential customers. It provides you with instant traffic and allows you to test your business model in real time.
At the same time, pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising is not as easy to use as PPC companies will make you believe. If you enter the system without preparing to "track" your results, do a thorough keyword research, establish your ROI and, most importantly, test your ads, you will lose a lot of money really quickly.
Before you start talking about the main PPC engines, here is a brief description of what you need to know.
The basics of pay per click
There are some terms you should know if you want to understand any discussion about PPC. Some of these explain themselves, others that you may have heard before. Either way, read this section and be sure to read the parts you don't know.
The PPC model
In the PPC advertising model, it has three main elements: keywords, ads and offers. These three elements are combined with the 'location' to create an advertising model that shows 'relevant' ads on search engines (in response to keyword searches), portals and websites that choose to display those ads on their pages ( the ads that will be displayed are determined by a keyword analysis of the page).
For a PPC campaign, you must know the keywords you are targeting. For example, for a niche site that promotes a time management product, you would create a list of keywords that include groups of keywords that contain terms related to time management, productivity, time savings, personal improvement and maybe even business skills. As I have told you before about keyword research, you should have a great list to capture most, if not all, of your target traffic.
The next step is to write the ad copy for the ads that will be displayed in your searches. The copy of the ad is extremely important because along with the amount of your offer, this will determine the "conversion rate" (explained below) of your ads. Write concise and compelling advertising texts that highlight the benefits of your website / product, and avoid fluff.
Once you've written your ads, it's time to bid. The bid mechanism differs from one PPC engine to another, but the idea is the same: the amount of your offer is the maximum cost (usually calculated in US. It is important to know how much you can pay in terms of bidding costs to avoid entering bidding wars with your competitors, and also to not spend more than what you earn in this campaign.
Cost per click
The cost per click (CPC) is the amount you pay each time a potential customer "clicks" on one of your ads that you see in the results of your search engines or websites. This is usually less than the maximum bid amount you set for each keyword.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the proportion of clicks on impressions (the number of times your ad shows on searches or page loading on websites). A typical conversion rate is between 2 and 3 percent, that is, for every 100 impressions, you get 2-3 clicks on your ads.
The conversion rate is closely related to the quality of your ad copy and also the location, which we will discuss next.
Placement
If there is more than one person bidding for a keyword (as is almost always the case), the placement of the ads (which ad appears in the first space, which appears in the second, etc.) is determined by the Amounts of each competitor's offers The higher your offer, the better your location (Google adds the conversion rate in your location calculations, and I will tell you how later). Your conversion rate depends, to some extent, on how high your ad is placed in the "rankings" and this leads advertisers to make high bids just to rank at the top. The problem with this approach is that you can enter a bidding war with your competitors and lose a lot of money.
Tracking
Tracking refers to measuring which keywords provide you with the best potential customers or sales, and what keywords bring you ‘shop window buyers' - people who are 'compulsive clicks' and do not buy or register. Tracking your advertising campaign will help you further refine your ads and improve your ROI.
ROI
Your return on investment (ROI) is determined by how much you spend on how much you earn in net earnings from your advertising campaign. It is important to establish a base ROI before starting your advertising campaign, assume a conversion rate of 1 percent, so you do not spend too much and can run this campaign within your budget.
The world of pay per click
Currently, there are two main engines of PPC, Google AdWords and Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing). While there are many alternatives such as Espotting (now Miva), MetricsDirect and Kanoodle, the two main PPC engines are a separate class when it comes to delivering results.
However, one of the first tips you'll hear from most people is that larger PPC engines, such as AdWords and Overture, are too 'expensive' to enter (with CPC for first positions easily spending $ 3- $ 4 for many keywords, and reaching $ 10 for really competitive keywords).
Actually, if it is just beginning, it is essential that you choose one of the two main PPC engines. Why?
Traditionally, marketers judge PPC engines according to the following criteria:
Reach: how big is your potential target market.
Cost per click
Traffic quality: do the leads fit your customer profile? Are you willing to spend on your products?
Quality of service: the tools and help offered by PPC engines.
Overture and AdWords outperformed their competition in all these metrics, except CPC. However, the benefits of "cheaper" clicks are more than offset by the ease of use of the two big ones and, more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, Overture traffic quality and AdWords is much better than other PPC engines.
Overture
Overture was bought by Yahoo!, And recently renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing The name is not catchy, but with Yahoo! Behind the second largest PPC PP engine on the Internet, you can expect traffic quality and services to improve over the next year. The acquisition of Overture by Yahoo is the main reason why advertisers have started paying attention to Overture again, although Google AdWords still demands respect.
Overture is a manually edited PPC engine. When you write ads for your website, these ads (and the keywords you specify) must be approved by human publishers before they can appear in the search results on Overture's partner websites. While this ensures that the quality of the ads remains above a certain level, this is also a nuisance, since new advertising campaigns may take several days to approve, and there is a different delay between the time you plan to improve a section of your campaign (for the test) and the moment when those changes are really activated.
Overture keyword bids are fully transparent, which means that any advertiser can see at any time what other advertisers are paying for that particular keyword. This is useful and damaging: advertisers can accurately target their 'ad placement' positions, but knowledge of the amounts of the main 2 or 3 offers can easily lead to a bidding war, and competitors undermining their ads to Post an offer that is $ 0.01 higher than yours.
Google ads
Google AdWords is the leading PPC engine on the Internet, although Overture follows closely. Combined, the two PPC networks are distributed on almost every search engine or portal.
Google is fully automated: your ads run within minutes of being written. This is one of the two significant advantages that AdWords has over its competition: it is not necessary to wait for the "approval" of your keywords and ads, which may take a few days in other PPC engines.
Google AdWords, like Overture, does not charge you the maximum amount of your offer, but only a penny more than the offer lower than yours. On the other hand, AdWords offers are not transparent like Overture: bidders have no idea what their competition offers. This reduces the threat of bidding wars.
Simply put, your ad may have a higher ranking than your competitors, even if you are bidding lower, just because it has a higher conversion rate. AdWords rewards the ads that are best written and therefore provides a subtle barrier against advertising spam.
