A Basic Guide to PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines will help to drive targeted traffic to your website. You only pay for the traffic you receive and for new sites the cost of getting traffic can be lower in comparison with search engine optimization (SEO).

The major players in the world of PPC are Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture.

Bring targeted traffic to your site with Google AdWords

All of the PPC search engines have rules as to the style of your advertisements and relevancy which establish what words you can bid upon for your website, some engines will not allow trademarked terms in the ads or the keywords, do not use superlatives such as BEST and CHEAPEST in your PPC adverts as the editors will reject them, same goes for excessive capitalization.

Here are some guidelines to help you start your pay-per-click campaigns

1) Come to a decision about your objectives: do you wish to promote your whole website, just a certain product category or even just one product?

2) Perform keyword research: this can be done in part using the tools provided by the PPC search engines, so you are only bidding on words consumers are actually searching for.

Do not be too generic with keywords, words such as “shirts” may provide a lot of traffic however sales will undoubtedly be low making the term unprofitable. Research less popular, cheaper keywords and phrases for example “pure cotton shirts” as those suggest more about what the customer is looking for.

If using Google Adwords remember to use Broad, “Phrase”& [Exact] Match the three key phrases pure cotton shirts, “pure cotton shirts” and [pure cotton shirts] will give different results.

3) When writing ad copy use descriptive titles: put the search term or phrase in every title, this can be done very easily and dynamically in Google Adwords by using {KeyWord:default title} the default title is used if the keyword phrase is over 25 characters.

Using titles in this way makes it clear to the customer just what you are selling and therefore discourages clicks from uninterested users by as a filter; it attracts good traffic to your site and deters bad traffic that is less likely to lead to a sale.

4) Use deep linking: do not send all the traffic to your homepage as the customer then has to search your for what is he is looking for, deep link directly to the page which details the product related to the search term. Make it easy for the consumer to find what you offer or they will simply use the back button and click through to your competitor.

5) Continually monitor your PPC campaigns: adjust budget, keyword costs, ad copy, all of these will help them to become more cost effective and increase ROI. Also weed out ineffective keywords and continue keyword research.

Increase traffic to your website. Get Google AdWords.

Using PPC to its best potential requires a lot of time and effort, ok you can simply cobble together an advertisement and a set of keywords and they may show a profit however that is a very hit and miss approach and for every successful campaign there will be a number of failures.

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