PPC – a Beginners Guide
Posted on July 16th, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
If your goal is to get highly targeted website traffic as quickly as possible, the best solution is pay per click advertising. This method of advertising is hard to beat for getting instant website visitors who are also likely to by buyers of your product or service. However, if you are to get into PPC, achieving a high level of success and get the most out of your campaigns is not just about bidding higher than your competitors for a better ad placement, it goes way beyond that. It’s possible to get lots of traffic and make money with PPC, but first you have to do the proper research so you can plan campaigns that will work for you. If you jump in before you do adequate research, you risk wasting time and losing money on ill-planned campaigns. The following tips will help you spend less and earn more in your PPC efforts.
One thing you must do if you want your PPC campaigns to do well is keyword testing. Testing is actually the one practice that can make the most difference in your PPC campaigns. It’s necessary to do both split testing and keyword testing for your ads. In order to get a good ROI from your campaign, you need to find the right keywords for your targeted niche. Your keywords have to be targeted to exactly the right people who are most likely to buy your product. To come up with keywords, put yourself into the place of your customers; what words or terms would you type into a search engine if you needed a certain item or type of knowledge? Your keyword research can be speeded up by using one of the keyword tools that are available online for free. When doing keyword research, you are mainly looking for words or terms that many people are searching for with not too many competing websites. You will find that some keywords have either too much competition or insufficient search volume to be worthwhile. Once you narrow down your keywords, you have to test them and find out which work best.
It’s essential that you set your PPC advertising budget at a level that will work for you. Try to come up with an amount you are comfortable with and stick to it. In general, you should only increase your budget when a campaign is profitable and you can afford to put more money into it. If you are continually making changes in your budget, you won’t be able to accurately measure your results. Whether your budget is $50/day or $1,000/day, you will have to stick to it.
Google Adwords is by far the largest PPC service; don’t, however, only advertise with them. If you want to get the same keywords at much lower bids, try out some of the lesser known search engines offering PPC. So don’t close your options, and experiment with various other services.
You can find advertising based on a similar model with Bing, Yahoo and even Facebook many of the basic principles apply with these but obviously there are technical differences. Remember to check localisation, you can target your adverts to specific countries but make sure there’s a market there first – for instance if you were looking at German customers, connect through a German proxy first to check the competition in the search engines.
As pay per click advertising has gotten more popular, the search engines have changed some of the rules and formulas. If you want to keep up with these changing rules, you should keep yourself updated in every possible way.
Don’t just rely on PPC thought, successful Internet marketers use all the resources at their disposal, PPC is yet another tool and one that can be combined with SEO tactics for instance to gain free traffic through higher search engine rankings.