Most new website owners find it hard to learn how to use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. The way PPC works is simple: you sign up for a free account with a search engine like Google or Yahoo, then you place an ad for your website with a list of words (called "keywords") that you want your ad to show up for. You also say how much you are willing to pay ("bid") for each visitor who clicks the ad and ends up on your website, and you set a daily maximum budget. The PPC search engine will then start sending people to your website. This is called "traffic."
When someone uses one of your keywords in a search engine, your ad will come up. How high it is on the list will depend on how much you "bid" on the keyword. The person who bids the most gets number one, the next highest person gets number two, and so on (in the event of a "tied" bid, the position is decided on first come first served basis). The higher up your ad is, the more people will see it and the more likely it is that people will check out your website. It is called "Pay Per Click" because you only pay when someone clicks on the link to your website. There is no charge for showing your ad.
The first thing to keep in mind is that even though the way PPC works is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy to use. Some people seem to pick up PPC as easily as breathing, but for the vast majority of people, PPC has a steep learning curve and requires a lot of experimenting and testing. Some people have a lot of trouble and frustration with PPC, and they sometimes waste a lot of money on it. Here are a few simple tips for people who are just starting out with Pay Per Click advertising.
Search Engine Size Matters.
When you first start using PPC Advertising, you can choose from a huge number of search engines. Some of these smaller companies will take bids on keywords for a small fraction of what the bigger search engines require as their minimum bid. But it would be a waste of money to only look at price. You also need to think about the amount and quality of traffic, as well as the time it takes to run your advertising campaigns. Between them, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are in charge of about 90% of all search engine traffic. The rest of the traffic goes to the many smaller search engines. This means that you might need to set up campaigns with 20 small search engines to get as much traffic as you would from one Yahoo campaign. You might get cheaper clicks this way, but managing the campaigns would take 20 times as long. Time is money, so when you first start using PPC advertising, stick with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Wait until you have more experience to try out small companies.
Don't pay more for a visit than it's worth.
You want as many people as possible to visit your website, but don't be tempted to raise your bids above what you know will make you money. There's no point in being number one for a search term if you have to pay more per click than a visitor could make for you. Work out your conversion rate (i.e., what percentage of people who visit your website actually buy something) to figure out how much each visitor is worth and make sure your bids stay below that number so you have a comfortable profit margin. Use more keywords, use the search engine's keyword research tool, choose keywords carefully based on their relevance, and add them to your campaigns.
Don't Do What's Easy
Look for cheaper, less popular keywords and keyword phrases and use them to bring in visitors at a much lower cost than the obvious popular keywords. Most people use and pay the most for single words and short phrases of two or three words. Use keyword research tools to find longer keyword phrases, similes, and terms that people don't search for as often. Make sure that your research on keywords fits each search engine. The best keywords for Yahoo might not work well for a Microsoft campaign, so use the keyword tool that each company offers to build your keywords and keyword phrases for each search engine.
Don't say, "I've seen one, I've seen them all."
Spend some time learning how each one works. PPC works the same way everywhere on the Internet, but each search engine has a different way to use it. The best way to set up and run a campaign is different for each one, so you need to take the time to learn how each one works. If you don't do this, you might have to do things the hard way or, even worse, it might cost you money. There are different rules for how words can be used in ads and how keywords relate to your landing page for each search engine. This means that you can't just upload your Yahoo ads and keywords into a Google or Microsoft campaign. Make sure you know exactly how to set your maximum bid and daily budget for each campaign. If you get this wrong, you could waste a lot of money.
