Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 5

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, provide listings on a per bid basis called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. PPC has evolved into one of the most exciting forms of online advertising. In the past, websites received traffic through organic results. Note: Organic results are accomplished by website optimization, link popularity, and many other factors. The highest bidder for keyword phrases typically drives PPC results. The more you are willing to pay for a click the higher your link moves to the top of the paid results. PPC is one of the most effective online advertising methods.

Practical example: A banner ad campaign might cost you $50.00 per thousand impressions. You can expect a 0.5 percent click through rate that should result in 5 clicks to your site. That means that you are paying $10.00 per click. Let’s say you have a 1 percent conversion rate, and you need 100 clicks to get one sale. The 100 clicks will cost you $1000.00. Now, consider your margins. Can you afford to advertise through banner ads?

Why Use PPC?

PPC advertising is infinitely more effective than banner advertising. Instead of paying for impressions, you are paying for clicks. To take it one step further, you are paying for qualified clicks. Only people searching for your selected keywords see your PPC ad, therefore, only interested web surfers will be able to click your ad. PPC give the advertiser more control than any other form of advertising technique. In addition to getting immediate traffic to your site, PPC can help you get quick feedback.

PPC can help your business with your organic search efforts. Before you optimize your site for a certain keywords phrase, you can test it in a PPC campaign. Once you quickly test the conversion rate for a keyword, you can dedicate more time to improving organic results for the same keyword. You might believe that a certain keyword is the most important keyword for your site. With the help of PPC, you can test your theory. If your theory was incorrect, you can try another keyword. It’s better to spend a few dollars on a theory than to spend several months. The instant feedback is one of the most revolutionary aspects of PPC advertising.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 4

The Players

The three largest PPC companies are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are many other smaller players on the market, but the above three own the search market. Smaller search engines have minimal traffic compared to the big three.

Use the big three for the following reasons:

· Yahoo, Google, and MSN handle over 95% of all Internet search. The smaller search engines have little traffic.
· They are reputable companies, actively fighting click fraud
· Quick feedback
· Scalable performance
· Excellent tracking
· They provide higher quality traffic
· Simplified management

Losing Money With PPC

Running a successful PPC campaign requires skills. It takes time to learn the ins-and-outs of PPC. Expect to lose money, et least in the beginning. Start with a small budget. Think of the money you spend as tuition. You are learning a valuable skill that helps you build a successful business.

The following are among the most important subjects you have to learn:

· The buzz words such as CPC, CTR, etc
· Writing effective ad copy
· Testing ads
· Bidding practices
· Ranking strategies

Learning is important because you are up against larger companies with more experienced PPC managers. Not only that your competitors know more than you, they might have larger budgets. As you study your competitors’ PPC ad campaigns, you might be looking at something that has been tested for years.

Bid Management Strategies

Never start the bidding process until you’ve determined the highest amount you can bid on a keyword phrase. Pay no attention to how much others are paying for a keyword. The two most important factors to determine Before you do anything else, understand your conversion rate and your average order size. If your average order size is $100.00, and your average CPC (Cost Per Click) is $2.00 with a one percent sales conversion rate, it will cost you $200.00 to make $100.00. Sounds like a bad idea.

Your conversion rate and your average order size are the two most important factors determining your maximum CPC. The maximum CPC is not set in stone. Improving you conversion rate will decrease your CPC. Let’s see how the results of the previous example influenced by doubling your conversion rate. Your average order size of $100.00 with a two percent conversion will result in a much lower CPC. Now, with 2 percent conversion you CPC is $1.00 instead of $2.00.

As the cliché goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. PPC advertising is a business process that has to be measured. Understanding the numbers is essential as you determine the effectiveness of your campaign. Is your business growing as a result of PPC advertising?

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 3

Developing A Successful PPC Campaign

The most effective method to develop a successful PPC campaign is by considering your profit margin. Let’s say your average order is $100.00 with a profit margin of 20 percent. That leaves $20.00 profit for each order. With a one percent conversion rate you can expect one sale for 100 clicks. If you have $20 margin to play with for 100 visitors, your maximum CPC is twenty cents.

Revenue is another consideration for developing your PPC advertising. If your goal is to spend 10 percent of your revenue on PPC, your budget is $10.00 per every $100.00 revenue.

Writing Your Ad

Research the most effective keywords for every one of your ads. Avoid generic terms. Even though you are paying for each click, you are still competing with other advertisers. If you select the right keywords, you might get better results than a higher ranking ad with poorly selected keywords.

Study printed advertising materials as you write your PPC ads. Many techniques easily translate to online advertising. Pick up a magazine and study the wording within the ads. Experiment with some of the same words in your own ad. Embed keywords in your ad. Some of the search engines highlight the keywords in your ad that match the search query.

Use active verbs in your ad, especially in the beginning of your title. Some sample titles with good active verbs in the beginning are: “Avoid Late Payment,” “Reduce Your Monthly Bills,” or “Save Big Now.” Active verbs breath life into your PPC ads.

Don’t Bid For The #1 Position

The top position is the most expensive spot. By insisting to the in the top position, you are putting your business at disadvantage. By being the first, you guarantee that you are spending the most per click. Your competitors will know that you have to work with narrower margin because of your higher CPC.

Serious buyers don’t make the purchase on the first website. Online buyers visit multiple sites before they buy. There is no reason to be the first because most shoppers will click through at least the several top results. It is unlikely that a consumer will click on the top result and buys without looking further. By allowing searchers to find you in lower positions, you let them pre-qualify themselves. A lower positioned ad is safe from compulsive clickers, and it is more likely to attract serious buyers.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 2

Don’t Pay More Than You Have To

PPC bids are often separated by pennies.The top bid might be $2.00, the second $1.97, the third $1.96. If you recognize larger gaps, you can reduce your CPC.

Bid Position CPC
1 $2.00
2 $1.97
3 $1.96
Bid Gap $1.25
5 $1.24
6 $1.23
7 $1.20
Bid Gap $0.95
9 $0.94

Is it worth to pay $1.96 instead of $1.25, to move from position four to position three? It might, or it might not. It depends on your maximum CPC. If your CPC is closer to $1.25 than it is to $1.96, it is an easy decision to make.

Contextual PPC Advertising

Contextual advertising is a great way to add relevant advertising to any web page. It is the ideal revenue source for content-based websites such as a blog, a news site, or an article site. With this form of advertising, targeted ads appear determined on the page content.

Contextual advertising is a hotly debated topic among PPC advertisers. Many advertisers complain that contextual PPC offers poor ROI (Return On Investment). PPC advertisers often don’t understand the difference between regular PPC and contextual PPC. As regular PPC ads show within search results, contextual PPC ads show on content network sites.

Contextual advertising is similar to banner advertising. The sites displaying the ads are hoping that the site visitors will click the ads at some point. Contextual advertising converts at a lower rate than normal PPC, because, instead of clicks, it mostly generates ad impressions. In other words, just like most banner ads, contextual ads are mostly ignored. This form of advertising might not result in great sales results, but it might be great to create brand awareness.

If you are new to PPC advertising, it is best to turn off this feature. Once you become more experienced, you might start contextual ads for some of your best converting campaigns. Lower your bids for contextual advertising until you have a chance to measure performance.

Geo Targeting

Refining your PPC campaign might require geo targeting. Geo targeting is the technology that enables PPC advertisers to target certain geographical areas. Search engines perform this task by filtering searchers based on IP address.

Geo targeting enables your business to limit searches to people within your desired geographical area. For example, if you own a flower shop, you might only want your advertising to appear to searchers in your immediate geographical area.
Taking advantage of geo targeting might reduce the number of competitor websites you have to compete with for your keywords. Geo targeting also helps you focus in on the specific market.

A good PPC search engine should enable you to target your ads to:

· a radius around your business,
· any zip code,
· any metropolitan area, or
· any defined coordinates.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 1

Fighting Click Fraud

Click fraud is one of the most pressing concerns among PPC advertisers. Even though search engines try to minimize the problem, people are concerned about click fraud. In a recent survey of nearly 50 percent search marketers had planned to monitor click fraud. The key to fighting click fraud is to have a plan tailored to your own campaign.

Even though the major search engines monitor click fraud, you can take certain measures to help them.

· Monitor your CTR (Click Through Rate). Look for sudden changes such as a sharp increase.
· Watch for changes in conversion rates. If your ad campaign normally converts at 2 percent, and it suddenly drops for no obvious reason, it might be a sign of click fraud.
· Observe how quickly you go through your daily budget. If it used to take your business to go through your daily budget in ten hours, and now it only takes 4-hours, it could indicate click fraud.
· Check your log files for suspicious IP addresses. Some PPC search engines offer IP address filtering.
· Monitor your account for traffic from unusual geographical locations. If you haven’t done it already, turn on geo targeting.
· Scrutinize your conversion rate.

Market Research With PPC

PPC is a great tool for testing. Let’s say you want to introduce a new product, but you are unsure about the name. After a brainstorming session, you could come up with a few potential names. Then, you could set up a PPC campaign for each of the product names. Within a day you would have you own research project running. What used to take weeks or even months, can now be done in a matter of days. Market research through PPC costs money, but it is a lot less expensive than traditional methods.

Landing Page Strategies

Creating the appropriate landing page for your campaign can be the difference between failing and succeeding. Link to a landing page not your home page. Your website might list 500 products while you are bidding on 100 keywords. For best results you should have a landing page for each keyword you are bidding on. If the searcher ends up on your home page instead on the landing page for the product they are looking for, you are making the buying process more complicated. Nothing hurts conversion rates more than a convoluted buying process. The simpler you manage to keep the process, the better conversion rate you can expect.

Great landing pages have the following characteristics:

· No navigation. While we are told that navigation is part of good web design, landing pages shouldn’t have any. The reason is that you don’t want the visitor to click off the page. You have spent good money to drive them to your landing page, so keep them there. The only reason to have any navigation on a landing page is to help with closing.
· Pay special attention to your link text. People are more likely to read links than regular text. Make sure the link is appealing and easy to read.
· Use the keywords throughout the page copy. If the searcher landed on your page after searching for “keyword a,” make sure “keyword a” is loud and clear throughout the page.
· Don’t try to fit a book on your landing page. People glance at web pages. Write simple concise copy. Leave ample of white space to make it easy on the eyes.

Building Traffic For Your Online Business - Part 4

Traffic Driving Techniques

Traffic is the lifeblood of online business. There are many unique traffic-building techniques available to online businesses. The key is to attract as many as possible qualified new site visitors. How to get traffic to your site is a primary concern among online businesses. The more traffic you drive to your site, the more customers who can buy your products, or the more clients that can hire your company. Regardless, of the makeup of your company, there is no such thing as too much traffic.

Is Your Site Worth Visiting?

A completed website with excellent content is the most important first step in driving traffic to your site. Just as you wouldn’t want your customers to walk into your unfinished store, you don’t want your visitors to come to an unfinished website. By creating keyword rich valuable content you will please your visitors and the search engines. Your content must be unique. Search engines have ways to penalize your website for duplicate content.
Keep your content fresh. Up to date information is a valuable asset to your visitors that will help to establish your site as an authority site. Create as many pages as you can manage with unique content. The key here is not to create great literature, but to create great content. The unique content throughout your site will result in relevant traffic from the search engines. According to Google, about half of all searches are unique phrases. The unique content is more likely to drive quality traffic to your site.

Understand Your Keywords

Don’t dedicate your website content to one or two keywords. The goal is to rank for many keyword phrases. Aim high when you think about the number of relevant keywords for your site. Your business will benefit from traffic related to dozens or even hundreds of related keywords. It’s understandable if you are unable to create hundreds of pages in one sitting.

Practical example: A CPA based in San Diego, California could easily expect to receive traffic for hundreds of keywords. The key is to create content around the relevant keywords such as:

San Diego CPA
San Diego CPAs
San Diego CPA firm
San Diego accountant
San Diego tax accountant
San Diego accounting services
San Diego CPA services
San Diego certified public accountant
San Diego accountant CPA
San Diego CPA accounting
San Diego certified public CPA
San Diego public accountant
Accountant San Diego
California CPA

The list goes on-and-on. Keep in mind that San Diego; California has several suburbs such as La Jolla, Ocean Beach, Point Loma, La Mesa, and many more. Each of the suburbs can be plugged in place of “San Diego.” Think of all the unique web pages that could be created with the above keywords variations.

Building Traffic For Your Online Business - Part 3

Write Articles

The goal is to make progress. Make it your goal to add at least one new content page per week. Even with such a modest goal, you will manage to have added over fifty quality pages. The more pages, the more traffic you can expect to receive.
Research your keywords thoroughly. Your business can profit from more keywords you might have initially believed. Study the keywords Internet searchers type into the search engines to find products and services related to your market.

Write articles with your target keywords in mind. Then, post them to article directories. Articles directories allow authors to include links to their websites in their bylines. Links to your site with the appropriate anchor text can worth their weight in gold. You drive traffic to your site while you are building your reputation. It’s a double whammy.
Volunteer to write articles for other websites. You should contact non-competing complementary sites and volunteer to write articles to be posted in return for a link back to your site. Web masters are constantly searching for new content, and most of them will welcome the trade. As long as your article is quality content, you should have no problem getting your articles published on other peoples’ websites.
Submit your articles to online newsletters. Many newsletters are archived. The archived articles will contain your link pointing back to your website. A good technique to be published in a newsletter is to provide free content. Don’t ask for a link back the first time you make contact. Most newsletter publishers will offer anyway.
Study the source of your traffic as you write more articles. Evaluate what search terms people use to land on your website, and base your future articles around those search terms. If you have built your website around your accounting practice, and you find that most people landing on your sites type tax related search terms to find you, then add more articles about tax related topics.
If you come across a website with great content, volunteer to become a columnist. As an expert in your field, you can excel at writing. As a columnist, you will be recognized as an expert in your field. Most likely, the site you are writing for will allow you to post a byline with a link back to your site.