What is PPC
PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click marketing and the simplest explanation to start with is that you provide advertising banners or text ads for your business or product which are then displayed on Googles´ Search Results Pages at NO charge to you – if someone clicks on your ad then you pay Google a predetermined sum per click – hence Pay per Click marketing. Each time your ad is displayed is called an impression and the ad positioning on the page ie, top position or 2nd or 3rd is determined by how much you are prepared to bid on the keyword that displays your Ad.
In order to display your ad you you initially have what is called a campaign, this can have a single keyword or keyword phrases relevant to your product but you can also have one or many thousands which can be grouped into themed adgroups and then have different ads within the same campaign.
PPC and Adwords can be a very effective way of advertising and/or testing whether or not your product will sell as you are effectively buying traffic which you can instantaneously send to your site, you can then monitor sales/conversions and immediately add/delete keywords from the campaign and make changes to adverts to improve it´s effectiveness.
PPC can initially be a little daunting and there are many traps that the uninitiated can fall into, the main one being that people generally underestimate the amount of traffic that can be produced and even a multi thousand dollar budget can quickly be swallowed, however, the converse is also true and a small hundred dollar budget can produce spectacular results.
Prior to Xmas 2009 I was promoting a product on one of my campaigns with a commission of $13.50 – I was making a sale every 11.7 clicks (very unusual!!) and my average cpc (Cost per Click) was just 0.16c – a very profitable campaign.
I also tried to compete in a very lucrative and competitive niche and tried various keywords/bids/ads and Landing Pages (the page the customer lands on) and at the end I had had and paid for 1347 clicks and did not make one sale.
Due to the enormous amount of metrics that are available to the person who places the ad, demographics, geo-targeting, date/time placement etc etc but to mention a few, test test test is the way to maximise any campaign and keyword tracking is absolutely vital – if you or anyone is trying to convince you that you can blindly run a PPC campaign without any form of tracking then you are throwing money away – take my word for it – even if you are only using five keywords!!!
PPC can be very effective on Local Search as although the volume of traffic may be low, you can laser target your potential customers and their Intention to Purchase and hence CTR (Click thru Rate) is often very high
If you are thinking of running a PPC campaign and are not sure where to start or how to manage it then we can offer some advice or even manage the campaign for you using our years of experience with Google/Yahoo/MSN – I generally have over 100 hundred PPC camnpaigns running at any time so why shouldn´t you take advantage of my experience!.
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