Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Developing a PPC Advertising Campaign

By Joseph Summers

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an advertising model based on the internet. It's used to promote products by way of attaching them into websites in which people would click on them. If you want to know some tips on how to create good advertising through PPC, then read on.

Sound confusing? It's not. Here's how PPC advertising works, in a nutshell. First you create a page title, description and link as you want it to appear on the search results page. Next, you choose the keywords that will lead people to your ad. Then, you decide how much you are willing to pay for each click of your ad. Finally, your bid is compared to all other bids for the same keywords. Your bid's place relative to the other bids will determine how far up on the search results pages your ad will appear. He who bids highest, ranks highest!

Setting up negative keywords in your ad campaigns is quite simple. They may be included in each individual ad group, or set to affect the campaign as a whole. Depending on how you wish to see your ads perform, you may want to limit specific words to ad groups, so as to better manage performance. Google provides a tool within the AdWords program to assist you in determining which words are best to use.

The way PPC advertising works is that you bid on how much you are willing to pay to be listed for a particular word or phrase. The highest bidder gets the highest and most important ad position. However, it is not always in your best interest to do this because you can easily blow through your cash. Instead, achieving a moderately high position in other areas, or a top spot for a less popular word or phrase is much more desirable, particularly as you're learning the ropes.

Like most things in life, there are pros and cons to embarking on a PPC advertising campaign. On the plus side, this is straightforward and simple to set up. No special computer or online knowledge is required to make it work. Further, PPC can be economical, as long as you stick to a budget. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times the ad is displayed.

Make someone an offer but be sure that you can back it up immediately once they click on your link. This is the art of developing finely tuned, highly specific landing pages that convert those visitors into clients and customers. Your page has to have all of the information a person that clicked on your specific ad would want to see. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for someone who ends up on your landing page to take the action you want them to take.

Finally, remember that with PPC advertising campaigns you always have to be optimizing, testing and making changes. Bid prices change over time, as do competitor strategies and visitor trends. You have to stay on top of all of those factors, while always improving your own ads and landing pages in order to be successful. If you follow all of the above steps, then PPC advertising could produce a windfall of new customers for your business.

About the Author:

No comments: