Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising is a type of advertising that is also known as “PPC” and “sponsored search”. It is one of the fastest and most flexible methods of online advertising today, and has the further benefit of being measurable.

PPC ads are typically placed above or to the right of the free listings on Google, Yahoo, and the other popular search engines. The privilege of being listed in search engine results in this manner is paid for–or more accurately–bid on in an auction. We say that PPC is measurable because it is possible for you to determine the actual effectiveness of each ad that you place, often within a matter of a few hours. Since you only pay for the ads that visitors click on, you can adjust your advertising budget as you see fit.

A web search for a specific term–such as day care centers for example–will typically call up a large number of pages comprised of PPC listings as well as free or organic listings in the search engine results page or SERP of the major search engines. The highest PPC site at the top of the list is the one that has probably paid the highest bid. This high position will result in a higher likelihood that they will be clicked. For every person who clicks on that site, the owner will have to pay the PPC company, which neatly illustrates one of the main advantages of PPC advertising, which is that you do not have to pay a single cent unless someone clicks on your site’s link. Compare that to TV or radio advertising, where you pay for the privilege of airing your ad, regardless of whether or not anyone is actually watching or listening.

Nowadays, the Internet has allowed users the ability to head straight for what they’re looking for, without a lot of time investment involved. The PPC offers users the same service by presenting a result that is relevant to their search quickly and easily. Since your landing page is already there right at the top of the SERP, he or she will most likely click on it and not even bother to check out any other website.

Now, you may be wondering about the sites that appear towards the top of the free or organic listings. This is also a good position to be in and you may be thinking to yourself that this is at least as good as a PPC listing–if not even better–because it is free, right? This is in fact true to some extent, but what you have to realize is that it takes a lot of SEO work, knowledge and time to get your site to that position. In contrast, you can start to determine the effectiveness of your PPC campaign within hours.

Even if you are already ranked high in the free/organic listings, you may still realize benefits to using PPC. Recent reports have shown that more than 80% of all searchers focus on the PPC listings to the exclusion of all others. You can only imagine how many of those people actually click on a PPC link. In fact, many web users do not even know the difference between listings and merely head straight for the top listing, assuming that it is the most relevant one.

You can even decide to use PPC until your site rises to the top of the free listings. When you do get there, you can either discontinue your PPC campaign or you can choose to continue it. Studies have shown however that appearing in both PPC listings and free listings will greatly improve your chances of drawing in a customer.

The key to a successful PPC campaign is bidding on effective and relevant search terms. To this end, you have to determine what your potential customers typically type into the search engines to find your sites such as yours, and which of these terms are still available to you. You will want to use search terms that are different from your competitors, so that they do not steal any traffic away from your site. Try to be as specific as you can, since using search terms that are too general can cost you unnecessary expense. For a baby care site for example, paying for a term such as “baby” will cost you a lot of money without bringing any results. You would be better of choosing specific terms such as “baby care”, “baby health” and so on.

Ideally, you should try to bid on as many relevant terms as possible. Since you can readily measure the results of a particular term, you can easily try new terms out, keep the ones that get you plenty of results, and discard those that do not perform so well.

When creating your PPC ad, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. Foremost of these is that most ads are made up only of text, and in the headline itself you are limited to only 25 characters. In the body part of the ad you can have 2 lines, each one of them comprising up to 35 characters. The URL typically contains up to 35 characters too. Keeping these limitations in mind, you have to focus your efforts on being as visible and unique as you can possibly be.

One good strategy that you can use is to place your particular search term in the headline. Aside from that, you can experiment with different search term placements and adjust as necessary.

When your visitors finally reach your landing page, you will hopefully have enough there to convince them to purchase your product or service. You only have a few seconds to convince them, so you should really strive to give them exactly what they are looking for.

When you have narrowed down your list to the most effective search terms, bid on them accordingly, continually monitor your results and adjust for maximum effectiveness, you are well on your way to making PPC work for you.