Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a paid form of online advertising where visitors are directed to an advertiser’s website after clicking on an ad. These are text ads placed near search results or image/text banners near relevant content. The advertiser pays a small amount when a visitor clicks on the ad. This is a highly measurable-performance based channel made available to online advertisers.
It offers better control and better ROI of campaigns compared to traditional channels. In fact, compared with other marketing methods, search marketing offers the lowest cost per acquisition. With PPC, you choose your price, your keywords, your display options and you only pay for successful actions. Unlike any other marketing medium, it also offers you the ability to test real-time results, get immediate feedback and tweak the campaigns on the fly.
There are several advertising networks available for your online marketing needs: Google Adwords, Bing (formerly Microsoft adCenter), Yahoo Search Marketing, Ask Sponsored Listings, Search Feed, Miva, Amazon Clickriver and more. The larger pay-per-click search engines generally offer better traffic quality and are less susceptible to fraud.
Of those networks, Google is the dominant player with about 62 percent market share or 7.2 billion searches per moth. Aside from the Search Network, Google also has a vast Content Network comprised of major websites such as About.com, How StuffWorks.com, NYTimes, SourceForge, YouTube and more. Its content network is said to reach more than 80% of worldwide Internet users (comScore analysis). According to Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark, Google also offers better ROI (at 4.2) versus Yahoo (3.2) and MSN (2.9).
Setting up a PPC campaign is pretty easy. Most platforms have a guide that can show you the step-by-step approach.Part of the initial steps is setting your geographic target, choosing your keywords and writing your ads.
For keywords, think of what your customers would use to find you. You can target keywords in the Search Network where you engage users when they are actively searching for your brand, product or category. You can also target keywords in the content network, where you engage users who are reading web content directly related to your brand, product or category. And last, but not the least, you can use site targeting, where you can engage users when they visit sites about their affinities. There are also keyword matching options such as broad match, “phrase match”, [exact match] and –negative keywords.
When you write your ad, highlight what makes your offer compelling. There are three parts of the ad: the headline, the description and the display URL. Remember that the characters allowed are limited. For Google, only 25 characters (including spaces are allowed on the headline). The 2-line description allows 35 characters per line (also including spaces). So, be straight to the point, include a specific benefit to the user and include a call to action.
The key to successfully launching and maintaining a campaign is in measuring your goals. There are several metrics for PPC. First is Impressions, this is the number of times the ad was shown. It is dependent on your bid strategy, your display settings and the Quality Score allocated to your campaign. Next you have Clicks, or the number of times the ad was clicked. The combination of both results in the Clickthrough Rate or the CTR calculated with the formula clicks/impressions.
Once the costs are estimated, you can get the Cost Per Click or CPC – this is the amount you actually pay for per click and the Conversion Rate (conversions/clicks). In the end, what you’d want to achieve is high impressions, clicks, CTR and Conversion Rate while keeping your CPC low.
As a final note, PPC campaigns need to be continuously monitored and improved. Take note of display times when the conversion is highest, test new ad copies and deactivate campaigns that are costing you more than you are getting in profit.
I would add that you can save alot of money be thinking of long tail key phrases that are less common with less competition from other advertisers. Sure you will only get a few clicks a day, but think up enough of these and you can keep your cost per click down while still getting decent traffic.
Posted by: Ray | March 05, 2011 at 04:36 PM