Pay per click or PPC advertising is possibly the easiest and most effective way to market your business online. Getting your website listed in the search engines is vital due to the fact that the majority of website traffic (statistics say over 80%) comes from the search engines. Effective PPC management begins with devising a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your website.
PPC (PPC) advertising is simply advertising your website
through the use of the search engines’ “sponsored listings”. When using PPC you
bid on keywords or keyword phrases that your targeted prospects may use to find
whatever your website offers. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture)
for instance, only considers the bid amount in ranking a site. The most popular
PPC Google AdSense uses bid value and your success (click through) rate.
To develop a your PPC strategy and plan, you must conduct
market research. This should consist of identifying your target market
(preferably a niche market), identifying keywords that your target market uses
to search for what you are offering, and analysing the keywords and alternative
keywords that will appeal to your target market.
During your keyword analysis, you will want to find out how
popular keywords are and what the average bids are for certain keywords you are
considering for budgeting purposes since defining a budget is a necessary part
of PPC management.
Budgeting for PPC advertising involves not only determining
how much money you can spend on your campaign, but basing that on the monetary
value of a click to your website since you are paying per click.
Your conversion rate, the number of unique visitors divided
by the number of sales, plays an important role in determining the value of a
click to your site for PPC advertising budgeting purposes as does the average
net profit per sale. By dividing your net profit per sale by your conversion
rate, you can accurately determine the value per click to your website. The
price per click that you pay for your PPC advertising should not, of course,
exceed this value.
So, if you’re selling a product that gives you a £10 profit,
and a particular keyword takes 50 visitors to create a sale you would bid no
more than £0.20 per click to break even.
A few tips about PPC if you DIY.
1. Don’t put more money than you have to into your account –
sounds obvious but….!
2. Test, test, test have at least two separate ads for the
same product at the same time. Drop the lower performing adverts and add a new
one until you are satisfied with the results.
3. Make sure to keep up with your results daily at the very
least and adjust your strategy according to results.
4. Continue to look for new keywords and as you find new
ones lose the poorer performers.
If you approach PPC advertising logically, follow the direct
marketing mantra of test, test, test, monitor results regularly and make
adjustments only according to results PPC advertising is a powerful tool for
driving profitable traffic to your site.
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