February 13, 2008
Succeeding with Pay per Click Advertising
If you are a newbie starting out your site or an affiliate trying to get customers for the product, you must be aware that it is an extremely difficult exercise to get traffic to your sites with organic searches from the search engines. With many search engines and their different ranking algorithms, it is also a time consuming activity to optimize the site to get into search engine rankings. Even a small change in the website can lead to huge drop in your rankings and your income. Pay per Click advertising gives a ray of hope in getting the much awaited traffic in a very short duration.
In Pay per Click advertising, you bid on your choice of keywords to get the visitors. Since you pay for each visitor click, Pay per Click advertising can also lead to huge costs. But if managed correctly, PPC advertising can work wonders for your site and sales. Before you dive into PPC advertising, there are certain important factors that you should consider. Below listed are some of the factors:
Keyword: Keyword is probably the most important factor when it comes to getting a visitor. You should start with researching for the relevant base keywords for your ads. Base keywords are the generic keywords associated with your site or product. If you are promoting weight loss products then "weight loss", "losing weight", "lose weight" can be some of base keywords.
You should then use these base keywords to create a list of keywords that you would target in your ad. There are a lot of free as well as paid tools are available for keyword research. You can start off with the free tools like www.goodkeywords.com, freekeywords.wordtracker.com, www.thedowser.com, or Google keyword tool. These tools will help you identify the similar and relevant keywords used in organic searches. These tools will also help you understand the competition for each keyword.
You should continue your research till you manage to find keywords with relatively smaller competition. Generic keywords should be avoided since such keywords will have a huge competition and very high bids. Long tail keywords will have lesser competition and will produce good results.
If your site or product is about weight loss exercises, people searching for "How to lose weight with exercise" will find your site useful rather than someone searching for a weight loss pill. Once you get a list of relevant keywords, you should optimize the list by using various modifiers and negative keywords.
Ad Text: After you have a list of keywords that you plan to use for the PPC campaign, you need to create an advertisement. You usually get about two lines of 50 characters and one line for AD title to create your advertisement. You have to be creative enough and make the most out of this space. Usually if the advertisement text contains the targeted keyword, it gets a high click though rate. Ad titles starting with "How To", "Secrets to" will also attract more clicks. Depending on whether you are targeting a site visitor or trying to sell a product, keywords like "Discounted", "Benefits" will also find many clicks.
Landing Pages: The next important factor is the landing page where the visitor lands upon clicking your ad in the search engine. You may have used perfect keywords and created a perfect advertisement but if you do not work on the landing page, all the money spent on acquiring the visitor will be lost.
The landing page should always be relevant to the keyword used in the ad text. If you had clicked on the advertisement with text "weight loss exercises" and ended on a page selling "weight loss pill", would you stay on that page? Usually it is always good to create separate landing pages relevant to the keywords used in the ad text. If you promote weight loss pills but your ad text talked about weight loss exercises, you should build a landing page based on weight loss exercises. You can then have a link to the page that sells weight loss pills. This way the visitor will find relevant content and a reason to stay on your site, plus you will get an opportunity to make your visitor look at the page selling "weight loss pills". Landing pages are also important for split testing of your PPC ads.
Analysis: after you have created your ad campaign, the last important task is to track your campaign on a regular basis. You should make it a habit to visit and view your campaign reports on a daily basis. These reports are an important source for valuable data. You will get to know which keywords are performing better and where you are losing your money. Combining these reports with analytic sites will help you monitor the health of your ad campaign.
During campaign monitoring you should watch for the keywords which become inactive for search either due to low quality or due to low bid amount. Though you can keep the keyword by increasing the bid amount, it is not recommended. Ideally you should take such keywords out from the campaign and put them in a separate list. Inactive keywords might also indicate that they have been placed in a wrong group and hence have a low quality score. Removing such keywords will also ensure that the overall score of the campaign increases thus reducing the cost per click.
Pay per Click advertising is definitely not a cup of tea for everyone, but if used correctly it is also not less than a gold mine.
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Filed under Internet Marketing, Marketing, Online Business, Online Marketing, PPC by Ryan
Comments on Succeeding with Pay per Click Advertising »
shariha @ 4:59 pm
Internet Marketing: A ringside view:
If your business involves products or services spread across the globe or even within a region, internet marketing can be effective in showcasing your product/service to the discerning buyer. The first step towards a successful internet marketing campaign would be building a suitable web-site. Your web-site should be simple but elegant looking. Crisp and precise presentation often scores over too many colors, too many promises or in short too much of anything. The prospective customers would be looking for valuable information that he can instantaneously use.
Great web sites often offer some freebies like music downloads, software downloads, computer games, graphics etc. to attract customers. So if the freebies you offer are attractive enough for the target customer profile, the traffic to your site will also rise rapidly. Internet marketing is indeed a long drawn process where you first build a web-site and then nurture it through all its stages till you can figure at the top of the search engine results.
Search Engine optimization and link building are the two most popular methods to improve the ranking of your web-site. Internet marketing cannot ignore these tools even though they come at a hefty price. Enter any search string into the most popular search engines, and you will stumble upon several hundred, if not thousand pages of information relating to that subject. People searching for information tend to look at the first few web-sites that come up from the search result. Chances are that the information they sought would be contained in those pages. Therefore, most searches do not get beyond the first page of the results. Imagine if your web-site figures in the 20th or 21st page, the traffic it can generate for you would be only closer to zero. This makes search engine optimization relevant to make your web-site work for you.
What are the main attributes of search engine optimization? Keywords and link building; these are the two major attributes that would help you to optimize your web-site for the search engines. Keywords are the possible search strings that a user will enter into the search counter. For example, someone looking for a Home Theatre can use terms like "Electronic product manufacturers" or "Theatre Equipment dealers" or "Home Theatre manufacturers" or even "where can I buy a Home Theatre". Though all these search strings have a commonality, they are also distinct. Therefore, a web-site representing Home theatre should have all these phrases somewhere in their content, preferably in the first page and right on top. Search Engines crawl through several thousand pages at lightning speed and return with the optimal results. Keywords and key phrases should be coined by experts to get the best results.
Link building is another important aspect of internet marketing. Most popular search engines will look at the number of links that your web-site has to other web-sites and blogs. If the number of links is high, it indicates the popularity of your web-site and hence get ranked at the top.
Article marketing – There are several article banks which will accept your submissions and then feed to
People look for information on various topics. So, if you are in the business of solar energy, you can create or hire people to write articles on solar energy, submit to the article banks, with a link to your web-site. This will induce the visitor to look at your site and when the number of articles is large, the number of visits to your web site will also rise in proportion. Article marketing is yet another tool to lead you to success in internet marketing.
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Axcell Van Geyt @ 1:23 am
Those keyword tools were pretty helpful. I welcome you to visit my site at http://www.squidoo.com/onlinemarketguide
NewSunSEO @ 7:16 pm
This is a very detailed article and very informative. Do you find certain PPC's to be better than others though? Google, Facebook, etc.
ez index @ 10:07 pm
ez index…
This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so much competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketin……
NewSunSEO @ 4:59 pm
Thank you for the very well detailed article. This covers just about everything there is for beginners to know before starting a campaign.
Travis Liu @ 2:58 am
Even though you research your keyword but sometime you could be paying more for your ad to display on "Search" network, if thats the case you could choose your ad to display on "Content" network and paying less for the same keyword. The traffic coming from "content" network will not be so targeted but your ad get more exposure.