Pay per click advertising refers to the placement of an advertisement on the search results page. The advertisement is chosen in a course that involves the keywords that are used in the search. When the advertisement is clicked, the visitor is taken to the website of the advertiser and the advertiser is charged a sum of money.

There are two original steps involved in developing a pay per click advertising campaign. These are to decide the budget and to decide on the keywords. It must be noted that not all keywords cost the same amount of money. The way in which the actual cost is calculated is quite complex and is frequently misunderstood.

When an advertising campaign is set up there is the option to decide a large number of keywords. Naturally some of these will be more suitable to the advertisement then others. When these have been selected then a bid is made on them; this indicates the maximum price that the advertiser is willing to pay for a click-through.

Once these have been resolute the advertisement must be designed. This is invariably a short advertisement with a title, two lines of text and a link. As it is so short it is necessary to chose words with a great deal of care.

When a searcher makes a query, the search engine decides whether the query terms match the selected keywords, and determines the value of a parameter called the Quality Score. This reflects the degree of match between the selected keywords and the actual text of the advertisement. The higher the Quality Score, the more highly the advertisement will be featured in terms of it’s positioning on the search results page.

This also influences the amount charged for a click on the advertisement; for instance, if it is at the lowest position then the lowest possible sum is charged; if it is at the top of the list or above the search results then the maximum amount will be charged.

The ranking of an advertisement is decided by multiplying the maximum cost per click amount by the quality score; the higher this product, the higher the rank; the higher the rank the greater the cost.

Targeting is the process of displaying your marketing message in front of groups of people who are the most likely to want to do business with you. The most obvious targeting decision for paid search is in what geographic markets to run your ads. Sometimes this is an easier decision than others.

If you operate at a local level, and all of your customers are within your local market, then it makes no sense to advertise nationally. You will just waste your money. In this instance, it makes much more sense to concentrate your budget on your home market. The major search engines each have a way for you to specify that your ads should only be shown on Web browsers that are located within specific markets.

If you operate on a regional basis, then you should specify only geographic markets that are within the region you service. One decision is if you should combine all of your markets into the same campaign or run a separate campaign for each one. The single campaign option is quicker, but you have more control and will generate better data with separate campaigns.

For instance, it might turn out that there are certain geographic markets that are much more profitable than others. In this case, you would generate a higher ROI by focusing your budget on the more profitable markets. The only way to do that is to have separate campaigns running for each market.

The same holds true for those marketing on a nationwide basis. The problem here is that maintaining a separate campaign for each market could result in an unrealistically high number of campaigns. A better option here might be to set up larger geographic markets that encompass several cities or even states. This will still allow you to generate geographic performance data. You just might have to work harder to extrapolate that data.

In Google, there is another advantage to geographic targeting, and that is that Google paid search listings display the market name if an ad has been specifically targeted for that market. For instance, if I run ads in a campaign targeted to Tennessee, Google users in Tennessee who see my ad will see the word “Tennessee” beneath the ad copy. This points out that I am an advertiser specifically advertising to people in Tennessee, rather than a nationwide advertiser. This could help with clicks and conversions.

Another way to target your campaigns is by day of week or time of day. If you are in an industry with abundant keyword inventory, then this might be an excellent targeting strategy for you. It may be the case that during business hours you are competing against many other advertisers, which is driving click costs up past the point of profitability. In this instance, it might be a good move to try only running your ads during non-peak hours. You may find that you can still buy plenty of traffic, but that traffic may cost much less on a per-click basis.

Or maybe there are certain days of the week that are more profitable. If you can generate reports showing your account performance at different times and on different days, then this might give you the data you need to make these kinds of decisions. Otherwise, you will have to test your ads at different times to compare performance.

Targeting can help make your pay per click campaigns much more effective. Although it takes some time generate and analyze the data you need, it is an important part of the process of maximizing your paid search return on investment.

Banner advertising is very popular with pay per click (PPC) advertisers; the ability to broadcast an ad in many places related to the ad is a very tempting offer. If you have ever owned a Google Adwords™ account, you will know that a large mass of clicks come from banner or contextual advertising. When advertising on search engines, you are paying for your text advert to be positioned in the search engine results, but contextually based advertisements can be placed anywhere online. As attractive as that sounds to the advertiser, is it really such a good idea?

Contextually based ads are spread to any website that the advertising agency (or search engine) considers being congruent with the ad. As accurate as this can be, it may be able to very well result in adverts being misplaced on non-relevant information WebPages, more often than not, on compatible informational sites. It makes sense to advertise where information is relevant, like an informational site, but if the end-user is looking at material about a product usually they are, regularly, not ready to buy it. Of course this is not true for every field, and in some cases (when marketing to high school students for example) contextual based adverts can be very beneficial.

In most cases where you are selling a physical product, service online, or online product, search engine distributed adverts give a much better response. With a long tail keyword list, that is, a very specific group of keywords targeted at buyers in that specific topic, the conversion rates can be extremely high on search engine positioned ads. The conversion rate of contextually based ads has been proven to be significantly lower than its search based counterpart. Simply, this means a lot of clicks and not many sales. The search engines know this and put a lower price per click per contextually based ad.

Google’s contextual ad broadcasting system is a system called Google Adsense™. It is complementary to Google Adwords™ and displays those ads that are created within each Adwords™ campaign with contextual advertising enabled. Every site with Google Adsense™ is “spidered” for content relevancy, and once the topic and keywords have been pulled from the site, it displays the appropriate ads. For the majority of the time this is pretty well correct. But if the content is very generic or does not contain the suitable keywords and lexical words, it could very well display something unrelated.

When advertising on pay per click, patience is a vital key. Putting up an ad campaign and expecting thousands of clicks in a day only works in some fields, and without contextual advertising you may only get a few clicks through to your site. The majority of the time it is going to be a few weeks before you see results, that is, without good keyword research. With the correct keywords you can see a sale within minutes or hours.

So how do you choose what is right for your particular campaign? Generally if you want to have more targeted traffic and create sales only use search engine placement, and turn off contextual advertising. If you are trying to create awareness contextual based advertising is a great way to do that.

This post is part two of: Pay Per Click – (PPC) Budget – “How Much Should I spend”

Once you have done thorough key word research and developed a good overview of the key words for the PPC campaign. It is at this point that you obtain your “average cost per click”. A figure that allows you to grasp the cost and expense to your business per month. This 3 step process is covered in Pay Per Click – “How Much Should I spend” .

Before setting your campaign live you should double check your key words. Ad spend can be wasted in two main areas, the first being key words that are too general. These are keywords that are usually one word without a defining tail. For example if I were a shoe company running a campaign with the keyword “shoe” I would in most cases experience budget seepage. Money would be wasted on people searching for information on shoes but may not necessarily actually wanting to buy. This is fine if I’m running a campaign with a large budget and wish to saturate the market with a branded PPC campaign, but this is not a priority for most small to medium businesses. The second main area to look out for before setting a campaign live is key words that are phrase or broad matched that will attract customers you do not want or simply cannot accommodate. For example if one of your phrased key words is “Cheap Shoes” and a potential customer searches “Sport Shoes Cheap” then your add will appear and may be clicked on. You may sell shoes, but you may not necessarily sell sports shoes.  This is where negative key words come into play within a pay per click campaign. I will do a post on this at a later date.

Once you are happy with your key words and have completed your campaign set up, it is at this point that you can start factoring in ROI (Return on  Investment). Please note, that you should give a campaign at least 3 months before you start making decisions based on ROI. As the first 3 months is generally viewed as data collection and a expectation of high ROI within these first months is not recommended.

Once the campaign has been running for a minimum of 3 months your real time average cost per click is obtained, you can work out how many clicks it takes you to get a sale on average and use this figure to assist with structuring your budget. It is important to constantly monitor your bids and cost per click so that you are getting the most out of your allocated budget.

This was written by Focus Search, based in Melbourne Australia.

Successful pay per click management depends on testing a number of variables to determine the optimum strategy for your company. Doing what someone else is doing probably won’t work. Every business is different. Every marketing message is different. Every potential customer is different. To maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns you need to manipulate the following seven variables, trying different things for each until you find the right mix.

1. Bids. You might think that the number one spot on a search engine results page will yield the best results, and you might be right…or you could be dead wrong. We have seen numerous occasions when, while looking at keyword performance at various positions, the second or third (or even lower) position maximized our traffic. You won’t know what your best position is until you try different levels of bids, which will place your ad in different positions (all else being equal), and then look at the performance data to see which positions generated the most clicks or conversions.

2. Keywords. What you are probably going to find is that there is a small set of keywords that generates most of your traffic. Those keywords are also probably your most expensive ones. You need to constantly expand the keywords in your campaign, trying to find the ones that generate leads at less cost, even if they produce far fewer of them.

3. Ad copy. The secret to discovering what ad copy works best can be boiled down to three words: testing, testing, testing. That’s not just the secret to writing paid search ad copy – it’s the secret to writing any advertising copy for your business. You should run multiple ads for all of your ad groups. Then periodically turn off the ones that are not performing and create new ads that are slightly different from the ones that are working.

4. Landing page copy. The same secret applies here. You could argue that landing page copy is more important than ad copy. If the visitor has already clicked your ad and arrived at your site, then you’ve already paid for the visit. So this is where you have to make your money. The only way to know what landing page copy will generate the most conversions is to split-test different pages. To do that, all you have to do is create duplicate ads that link to the different pages. You also need to make sure that you have conversion tracking scripts in place. If you don’t know which pages generated sales or leads, then it’s a pointless exercise.

5. Search engines. Google is the king of paid search, with Yahoo! a reasonably close second, but there are many more options. Microsoft still doesn’t have nearly as much search traffic as the top two search engines, but it is constantly adding new features to its search marketing platform and doing everything it can to catch up. It’s a good option. Ask is the fourth major option. Beyond Ask, you begin dealing with second tier search platforms such as Miva and Enhance. The second tier platforms will be much cheaper, but likely provide much poorer performance. But the only way to know is to try out different platforms until you find what works best for your business.

6. Targeting. If you sell products or services to a local market, then you should concentrate your paid search budget on that market. If you sell primarily to teens or some other well-defined age group, then you should seek search marketing options that allow you to target your ads to that group. If your target market has these kinds of specific properties, then you should configure your pay per click campaign to target those groups.

7. Desired action. Decide exactly what action you want your paid search visitors to take and concentrate your landing page copy and design on getting them to take that action. The last thing you want to do is send the visitors to your home page and give them lots of different options. So it is critical that you decide from the start what you want your visitors to do. Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Contact you via a form? Buy a product? Decide on ONE thing and focus your efforts on getting your visitors to do that one thing.

The above list represents the seven major variables you need to manipulate to achieve the greatest possible return on your pay per click investment. It is highly unlikely that your campaign will be profitable right from the start. It takes time to figure everything out. Even if it is, you should never stop testing these variables. Just because you’re profitable doesn’t mean you can’t be MORE profitable. Now get to work!

It wasn’t that long ago that an entrepreneur could generate some good money using an affiliate program and Google Adwords. That is just not the case anymore but there are still some questionable “make money from home” courses on the market that continue to perpetuate that myth.

The challenge behind what they say is that in order to get those cheap clicks the would be marketer must select search phrases that don’t get a good volume of traffic and are fairly low in competition.

As a result, that would be marketer who just bought that program is doomed before they even start.

There are two reasons for this.

To begin, the only way to generate sales is to get your message out to lots of customers. There is no way around it. In the world of online marketing, traffic is king.

Assuming that your content is of high quality the more people who see your sales pitch the more sales you will make. So if you are forced to use keywords that only have low monthly searches then your chances to earn a commission are already minimized if not doomed.

Next, reasonable costs per click are relative to the quality of clicks they can attract. When a so called PPC GURU makes a statement like “finding 30 cent costs per click is a bargain” but fails to inform you that a poorly targeted audience only leads to wasting your money then that GURU is doing a disservice. The new person to internet marketing, hoping they have stumbled upon a legitimate source of income, will probably not see any sales and be so frustrated that they just stop trying.

What is needed are ad servers with quality traffic and excellent volume at profitable costs per click. And not just that, but for those ad servers to have easy to understand and follow rules that don’t limit the individual from being as creative or as simple as they choose. If a small affiliate marketer wants to save some money and have their ad point directly at their vendor’s sales page – why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that? THEY SHOULD! Adwords has failed US in that sense alone.

Fortunately (and contrary to what Google would want you to believe), we have more choices than simply Adwords.

Introducing Philip Mansour’s Confidential Conversions.

I found Philip’s course a short while back and it is, without reservation, a change in the face of PPC forever. He demonstrates real results from actual campaigns running right now and he is consistently achieving .05 cent per click with keywords in topics like debt consolidation. He makes no sacrifices in his choices of search phrases. A lot of the keywords are getting millions of searches every month. All of his results are current and they tackle the first problem of high traffic keywords at low costs.

Philip has spent thousands upon thousands of his own money and years of research in overcoming the second issue. During his research he identified many advertising servers that provide billions of ads served annually (both in impressions as well as click throughs) and he even identified those ad servers who QUALIFY their TRAFFIC so you only present your ads to those who are interested in what you are selling! There is at least one host that doesn’t charge for clicks if your ad was mistakenly displayed to a non-targeted audience.

How excellent is that?

When you consider the volume of traffic as well as the quality, Confidential Conversions has really knocked it out of the park.

So if you have had enough of unreasonable costs and regulations and need to make money today using the Pay Per Click model and affiliate marketing then I urge you to take action and sign up now. Philip has made his offer risk free with, not only $75 in FREE advertising credits, but also a no questions asked – any reason you want – 100% money back guarantee. Sign up, put it to work an hour form now, see the results and start making money today!

In short, “pay per click” is an Internet advertising model where advertisers only pay when their ad is actually clicked. Typically, advertisers will bid on keywords or phrases relevant to their target market. PPC can also use the “affiliate” model, where financial incentives (a percentage of revenue) are offered to affiliated partner sites that host the ads. Google Content Network is a good example of this. The system is actually pay-for-performance as far as affiliates are concerned; if they don’t generate clicks or impressions, there’s no cost to the merchant. Sponsored links will show up next to or above organic results on search engines, along with relevant content or search results. Thus, the actual cost per click will vary according to the demand for the keyword and the search engine itself (pricing models differ). Google and others have automated systems to head off abusive clicks from competitors and other types of click fraud.

FLAT-RATE PPC
On a flat-rate PPC setup, the advertiser and publisher arrive at a fixed amount that will be paid per click. Usually the publisher will have a rate card for cost-per-click. It’s a common setup for comparison-shopping engines, with sites that are compartmentalized into narrower categories. Page content that generates more traffic and more valuable, interested visitors will generally have a higher cost per click than more esoteric or obscure content. Sites such as Shopping.com, Bizrate.com and Pricegrabber.com use this method.

BID-BASED PPC
Bid-based pay per click has advertisers competing with each other for keywords in an advertising network. The auction is done online in an automated system, with each advertiser having set a top-dollar amount that he is willing to pay. The auction takes place according to how many times an ad spot is part of a search engine results page, whenever users are looking for the given keyword. Factors like ad quality and relevance often figure in as well.

Publishers and advertising networks also place ads on 3rd-party properties in a “content network.” Ads on content networks are referred to as contextual ads, as they are placed on pages that have relevant keywords on them. As third parties sign up to host ads, they receive a portion of the ad revenue, which can range from 10% to 30% of the gross revenue for the ad. Ads on content networks (which can also include newsletters and emails as well as websites) have a lower click-through and conversion rate, and are generally cheaper and have less value. So, advertisers pay on each click, with the auction setting the actual amount paid.

Automated bid management systems are usually deployed, with the system taking into account goals such as maximizing profit and traffic. Bid management systems are tied to the quality and amount of data they have available to them — low-traffic ads have a scarcity of data that can make bid management difficult to near impossible.

The most effective Pay per Click Strategy is reviewing the data carefully and making optimizations based on keyword research, trends, goals and conversions. The keywords, ad text and landing pages must be all relevant for optimum conversion rates and ROI. While third party software and automated systems have some usability, the human factor is very important with PPC.

If you seek effective results and positive ROI from your PPC Campaign, contact us.

This part #3 of the “how to Google Adwords” series. In the last 2 you should have learned the basics. Now we get to do the fun part! Here is what we are going to cover…

Signing up for adwords Preparing Your Keywords Preparing Your Adgroups Writing Ads That Work

Pretty simple right? Yeah I can hear it now…”sounds to complicated, I don’t have a technical background!”  Your going to have to figure it out, and if you don’t, your never going to make any money as an entrepreneur. So Take Charge!! I will give you the general guidelines but actually implementing them is up to you.

Signing up for Google Adwords is really simple. Go to google.com/adwords, on the right hand side click on “start now”. It’s then going to ask you which addition you would like, pick “standard” and press continue. You will then pick an email and password, if you already have a gmail account pick the option to use that account. It’s good to have all your Google services within one account. Now go ahead and sign in.

It will then ask you “how would you like to pay for this account?” Go ahead and select the currency that you use(USA would be US Dollars). It will then give you a notice that your account has been created. Now just go to your email and click on the confirmation link they sent you.

Now we have to prepare our adgroup and keywords. First thing you do is set-up your “Base Keywords” which will be what you name your Adgroups as well. So consider them your foundation. I use Google Docs to keep track of everything. Its a note and spreadsheet online service, it keeps all your records for you. You can then in-turn use any computer and have access to all your records…AWESOME!!

Use the spreadsheet feature, I would start with 5 Base Keywords and keep them very short, a good example would be “make money” or “home business”. Put them across the top of your document. Now you are going to get additional keywords that include your “base keywords” in them. Exp: “make money online fast” or “home business online opportunity”. Notice how they both have the base keywords in them? Add 5 additional keywords to you base keywords list.

Use the Google Keyword Tool or Free Wordtracker, these are the tools to help you find your long tailed keywords(Google These Tools If You Aren’t Familiar With Them). The longer the keyword the more serious the prospect. Someone looking for “home business” is less serious than someone searching for “online home based business opportunity”…Specificity Is Important!

Now lets add them to your Google Adwords Account…

You have different of ways to enter them: Broad Match, which is just the word itself. This means that when someone searches on Google you will show up for any of the words in your keyword. Its not ideal way to get high quality prospects. So for example if one of your keywords is home business, you will show up for any search that has business or home in it…Hence the name “broad match”…

The other type is phrase matched. This would be a keyword with quotes around it, “home business online” would be one. This mean that whenever someone searches for a keyword that has this exact phrase, your ad will come up. A few keywords your ad would appear with are: “best home business online” or “legitimate home business online opportunity”. Making sense?

The third type is Exact Match. This is when you put brackets around your keywords, [online home business]. Then the only time your ad will show is when people type in this exact keyword. No additional words and in just that order.

Now putting the quotes and brackets into all of your keywords can be time consuming. But not anymore, there is a tool that does it for you, just put in your words and it spits them out with brackets and quotes…Go to mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwrapper.cgi and play around with it. When it spits them out just copy and paste them onto a text document and name the document according to your base keyword.

Now lets create your first campaign!!

Log onto your account. Pick a country to target, I would stay with the US until you are more advanced. In your ad you are only allowed three lines, so make them count. Learn to write persuasive ad copy, go to an online bookstore and buy books on writing sales copy, you will need it for almost everything you do online.

We will use the keyword home business for our example. In your headline make sure you put your base keyword, Google will make it bold when it shows up on searches.(When Your More Advanced You Will Know Of Other Ways Then Putting The Keyword In Your Headline To Get Attention)

Your headline might read: Lucrative Home Business

Then you have the second line which is your first description, which should be a benefit of some type your offering to the person searching. “Learn To Market Online Fast” Could be considered a benefit to people looking at your add.

In your third line which is your second description you will add a feature that describes what you are advertising. In this example it could be, “Step-By-Step Instructions”… The last step is to add your URL. Make sure to make it pretty and even. You can either add the www or take it away. I like not having it. I also add my base keyword sometimes to the end of the URL so it gets more bold in my add…

Here is how our add would look like:

Lucrative Home Business

Learn To Market Online Fast

Step-By-Step Instructions

UnlimitedEntrepreneur.com/HomeBusiness

Now go ahead and add your keywords at the bottom. Just copy and paste them from your text document . Set your daily budget high enough but low enough that it won’t break you. Now bid for your clicks, bid high at the beginning so more people are clicking on your add. And in-turn Google will reward you and cut your prices or you can cut them yourself. Now just press continue to get it posted.

There is a lot more to Google Adwords but these are enough to get you started. I recommend, if you are serious about this advertising method, that you read everyday for the next week on how you can improve your skills with Adwords. I personally have spent thousands of dollars and hours figuring out this advertising method, so if you feel overwhelmed or maybe even scared its a good thing, I was too at one time. The most important thing as an entrepreneur you can do is just dive in with a positive attitude and keep learning everyday.

If you have any questions you can email me directly or post a comment down below and I will try my best to answer what I can.

SEM or search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that promotes websites by enhancing their position in search engine result pages. Pay Per Click is one of the methods adopted in search engine marketing.

Now one may ask, what is Pay Per Click? Many consider Pay Per Click as an easy method of reaching the top rank on search engine results page. But it is not so. This method can however if used in a discreet manner one it may help to improve the rank.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is used on search engines, advertising networks, blogs, where advertisers have to pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers make a bid on keywords, which they consider as their target market may use as search terms while looking for a product or service. When a keyword query, matching the advertiser’s keyword list is typed by the advertiser, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad is visible. These ads are known as “Sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” and appear above the “natural” results on search engine results pages.

Many customers may feel that PPC being a paid marketing strategy is an easy thing to handle, when it is actually not so. The PPC advertising campaigns often face stiff competition when it comes to price bidding and it is definitely not an easy task to manage a series of advertisements, keeping into mind the financial aspect. One has to be very careful before engaging any Search Engine Placement Services.

Before engaging the Search Engine Optimization Service one should find out whether the SEO firm has the experience and expertise in PPC advertising model so that they can work out the complete PPC campaign for the client and can give assurance of its success. Moreover, the professionally qualified consultants should be able to provide the best deals on PPC services for guaranteed increase in the business prospects. The Search Engine Placement Service needs to be very competitive and cost effective, giving the best guarantee for assured results

Pay per click campaigns, popularly known as PPC have long become an important part of search engine marketing. Although it involves some investment but the mileage PPC brings is worth it. It helps buy a better position for any website on the search engine result pages.

PPC is basically an advertising technique where you need to pay for each click made by a visitor on the advertisement that has been placed by you on the search engine search. The biggest benefit with PPC is that you can select the keywords you want to target. The higher your bid for each click, the higher you will rank in the paid website sections.

Many websites highly depend on the success of PPC. Therefore, it is essential that it is well planned and managed for effective results. With rising competition, success of PPC has become even more critical. It is wise to depend on experts to ensure good results in return for the money you are investing. Most of the time PPC is outsourced to experienced agencies to conduct the campaign and to monitor it.

PPC has become popular because of its ability to reach out directly to target audience with the help of few target keywords. Since your advertisement comprises of the selected keywords, only the visitors looking for your particular services will click on it and will be guided to your website. So, you ensure quality and relevant traffic directed to your website.

It is essential to shortlist the different search engines that you plan to target for your online advertisement for PPC much in advance so that you’re other steps are taken accordingly. In some cases, you might even end up finding thematic search engines that suit your business. Smaller search engines charge lesser than the larger ones and the more popular ones. So decide your investment according to your priority. You should be sure that the returns make up for the money you invest in pay per click campaign.

When you outsource your PPC campaign to a reliable company, the SEO team provided for your project, will conduct a research and select the right keywords to represent your business and create an advertisement for you. Results are monitored continuously and reports are prepared on monthly, weekly and daily basis to judge the effectiveness of the campaign. The reports quantitatively show number of visitors coming from each engine.

However, it is not possible to rely entirely on PPC for business. Your website also needs to be attractive and engrossing enough to make the visitor linger on and browse through the pages. This means that your website also needs to be up to date with the latest trends and information in your particular industry. If the leads are being converted into business, then PPC can be regarded as a success.

Compared to other search engine marketing techniques, pay per click brings about quicker and quality results. However, it is a continuous process and all businesses with a websites that are willing to invest should opt for this online marketing strategy to generate better ROI. If well managed, PPC is a smart method to attract quality traffic to your website and to generate potential business leads.