Pay per click campaigns need to be properly planned

October 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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If you want to market a product or service, the internet is the only place where you can get a large audience. All the other forms of marketing and advertising cost a lot of money. Also, there is no  guarantee that you would reach the intended group of people. But with  the internet, you can target exactly those people who would be interested in using your product or service. One of the best tools that  are available for companies that are looking to market through the  internet is the pay per click option.

There are a lot of people who think that the pay per click option is very costly and does not give the desired results. But that is not the case.

When done properly, it would generate a lot of traffic to your  website and help you in creating awareness of your products and  services. When you use a pay per click service, you would be placing ads  in websites that see a lot of traffic and are in some way related to your products and services. You would have to pay these websites money based on the number of clicks that are generated by visitors and users.

For a pay per click campaign to be successful, you need to do proper research regarding which websites to place your ads in. It is also necessary to keep a track of the websites in which you have placed the ads so that you would know from where you are getting the traffic.

If a particular website is not being effective and is not generating much traffic for you, then you need to take your ads out of that website and place it in another website that has the potential to generate more clicks.

If you have decided on going for a pay per click campaign, you need to have a proper strategy to make it successful. You can always take the help of professional marketing companies that would be able to place your ads in all the right places so that you would be able to generate a steady stream of traffic to your website. Using the right keywords and having the proper landing pages would help you in your quest for more visitors. Once a visitor clicks on your ad and lands on your website, it would be your responsibility to ensure that you keep him interested.

Darin Carter

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The Basics of PPC Campaigns and Contextual Advertising

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The internet as we know it is constantly changing and facilitating to
the needs of people all over the globe. Every day there are new
applications and pieces of software being produced like people spewing
out of a revolving door. With every new innovation on the web comes an
enormous influx of visitors. The flooding of online searches has caught
the eye of many entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. There are two main
players when it comes to making money off of all of this traffic. One
is the advertiser and the other is the publisher. The online advertiser
has several ways to promote his or her product. It is widely known that
pay per click advertising or PPC is the leading form of online
advertising. Advertisers usually run campaigns where they get charged a
specific amount of money every time their ad is clicked. The other
player is the publisher or search engine marketer. Essentially, the
publisher or search engine marketer is the person that displays the
advertiser’s ad to targeted audiences on the web. Now, it is important
to understand that both of these topics are so intricate that they could
be discussed for days. However, this article will explain the overall
ideas and concepts associated with both.

The ultimate goal for advertising campaigns is to make money. Any
good marketer knows that there is no better way to make money than to
advertise in front of a specific, targeted audience of visitors. This is
exactly where the internet shines. For example, a billboard is another
form of advertisement where an ad is placed in front of thousands of
people driving about in their cars each day. A billboard is going to
display an ad in front of a large, un-targeted audience. Let’s examine
what happens when a fast food ad on a billboard is viewed by three
people. One is an average person that eats fast food regularly. The
other is a diabetic who is on a strict, healthy diet. The other is a
vegetarian who never eats fast food. Do you see what’s going on here?
The result of un-targeted advertising is low conversion rates. With the
internet, a baseball bat company can advertise on specific, baseball bat
niche site where every visitor is interested in baseball bat. Do you
see the difference? Having targeted visitors greatly increases the rate
at which visitors become buyers, and advertisers make money. Now, it is
time to introduce the topic of contextual advertising. Contextual
advertisements are excellent for a single reason, they can captivate the
reader’s attention and thus increase the click though rate. The click
through rate is the percentage of visitors that visited a specific site
and clicked an advertisement. So basically PPC campaigns are a great way
to not only increase the public’s awareness of a particular product,
but also increase sales. In fact, there are a growing number of people
out there that make their entire living off of taking a product,
creating a pay per click campaign, and reaping the profits. The idea
behind this lucrative strategy is simple. If an advertiser gets charged
ten cents every time their ad is clicked and makes a fifty dollar sale
for every twenty five visitors, then a forty seven dollar profit was
just made. With the right product, one could potentially make some
serious money. With any pay per click campaign there are two important
aspects to understand. The first is choosing the right topic. Hot topics
and necessities are always a good choice. The next topic is the
conversion rate. Every product will have a different conversion rate. It
is important to know this statistic like the back of your hand if you
plan on making any money, especially when you are spending money to make
it.

Now that we have talked about the advertising end of the spectrum,
let’s talk about the search engine marketer’s end. Search engine
marketers are most notably known as webmasters, or people who own
websites. These people are the ones that have the ability to harness the
mass amounts of traffic that flood the web each and every day. The
source of all of this targeted, organic traffic is through search
engines. They have the option to choose which method to monetize their
traffic. One of the most well known forms of monetization is contextual
advertising. Many contextual pay per click advertising networks are
great for making money because they have the ability to recognize the
main point of a particular page’s content and then serve related ads
based upon that content. If you remember from earlier on in the
discussion, then you know that targeted advertising is key for making
money on both sides of the spectrum. So, webmasters decide on which
advertising network to use and create ads for their websites. After all
customizations are finished, the ad is inserted into the website’s
template and the ads are served to visitors. The publisher then earns a
certain percentage of each click. The percentages earned for each click
are weighed upon a variety of different factors. Some topics or keywords
pay more per click than others. Essentially, the network splits the
amount of money earned with the publisher because, quite frankly, the
publisher is helping them make more money. Every advertising network is
going to have different rates or percentages shared with the publisher.
The anomalous part about it is that not all networks choose to list this
“shared” percentage. So publishers never really know what percentage of
each click that they are getting. Anyways, publishing targeted ads on a
website is a highly effective method of harnessing the power of traffic
into a steady stream of income. There have been many principles covered
in this article that I hope you found useful. Remember that the basic
essentials of successful advertising are volume and targeted visitors.

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Integrating Social Media with PPC to Improve Customer Retention

January 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
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One of the biggest fallacies in the world of search engine marketing is the idea that the choice between using social media and pay per click to promote your site is an either/or decision. The fact of the matter is that it is possible to use both social media and PPC to get customers and to keep them.

To understand when it is best to use PPC and when it is best to use social media, it is important to understand the difference between the two strategies. PPC is when you pay every time that a potential customer clicks on an advertisement that takes them to your site. Social media is something that engages potential customers, giving them a reason to keep coming back, and occasionally allowing them to interact.

In short, pay per click is a great way to attract customers in the first place, and social media is an excellent way to keep them interested. Combining these two strategies into one is excellent if you have both the money and the time to do so. Of course, the amount of time and money that you will want to invest in each strategy will vary depending on how your business operates.

In the majority of cases, if you are using pay per click technology, you are most likely selling a service or a product. This is in contrast to other types of web businesses, which may provide social media itself as their primary product, selling advertisements. There is a good chance that most of the ads that you are paying for through PPC are listed on these types of sites. If you decide to use social media, you will need to treat it differently. Social media should be thought of more like a product of its own. Think of a social media project like a site that provides your customers with free content, and will advertise your product for free.

Be aware that the type of customer who is drawn to social media is often a different type of customer than the type who will click on an advertisement. In most cases, those who are willing to click on an advertisement are already looking for something to buy. Those who come for social media, however, are usually looking either for entertainment or for information. This doesn’t mean that traffic from social media is bad, but it does mean that you will have to realize that it needs to be treated differently. Social media can drastically increase the amount of traffic that your site pulls in. You can expect, however, that a smaller fraction of the traffic brought in by social media will buy your products in comparison to the traffic brought in by PPC.

For this reason, it is often a good idea to keep the social media and PPC sections of your website separate from one another. When somebody clicks on an advertisement for a product, they will expect to be brought directly to that product. If they are brought to a blog instead, they are likely to leave rather than attempt to find the product on the site.

Similarly, a blog that acts merely as a promotion for your products is not likely to bring you repeat customers. Remember, the purpose of social media is to entertain or educate customers. Customers will not have anything to come back for if they know that your blog is simply one big long advertisement of everything that you have to offer.

There are several ways that you can use social media to build a customer base. The way that you choose to use it will depend on the types of products and services that you sell. You might provide consistent information that is relevant to the field of your products and services, rather than information about the products themselves. You might develop free software packages for phones or computers that encourage people to link back to your site. You might start an entertaining video blog that excites viewers and encourages them to share your site and link people to it.

The important thing to remember about social media is the fact that its effectiveness will depend on the content itself, not on what it says about your products and services. The more interesting or entertaining the content, the more attention it will get, and the more your customers will keep coming back.

To leverage this, you have to treat your social media project as though it is a product in and of itself, the same way the sites that sell advertisements do. Don’t go overboard, however. The idea is that the social media should be related to the subject of your site, so that visitors will be compelled to learn more about your product. You will then surround the content of your social media site with links to your products.

As an example, say that you are an online store that sells hardware products. You can attract customers that are already looking for a specific product by using PPC to harness the content on other people’s sites to bring customers directly to your product page. You can then set up a separate “how to” section of your site. This will be your social media section of the site. It will provide your customers with free advice on how to embark on specific do-it-yourself projects. The key
here is that the majority of this content will focus on the “how to” aspect, and only a small portion of it will be devoted to your actual products. You might explain how to build a tool shed, for example. You could start the article off with a section labeled “Things you need,” and list several of your products such as hammers and nails, etc. The remainder of the article would then focus entirely on building the tool shed.

When using social media, you have to find the right balance. The majority of the content should not be related to your products, it should be interesting in its own right, but it should revolve around the subject of your products so that people who are interested in the content will also be interested in your products. You should also make it easy for them to find the product as soon as they realize that they want it.

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Pay Per Click Management – Part 1

April 9, 2001 By 2 Comments
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Ok I have decided to write a series on Pay Per Click Management. I have managed many Pay Per Click accounts in my day … and I can’t tell you how important it is to follow some Very Basic however Very Important steps to running a successful account! In Part 1 of this series I will show you the VERY 1st Step and Most Important Step to creating a Pay per Click Account.

Just like everyday life … you must be organized. The files on your computer are organized … your documents are in your “My Documents Folder”, your Pictures are in your “Pictures” file, even those alternative files you don’t want anyone knowing about are in a “FILE” somewhere on your computer.

Organization is the 1st Key to running a Successful PPC Account. Just like your Paper Files in a filing cabinet … you have the Light Bill in the Light Bill folder, the Water Bill in the Water Bill folder and the Telephone Bill in the Telephone Bill folder. I can’t stress why this is so important … and I will let you know why this is an important factor later on in this post!

Ok so lets get started … I will have to use an example of a site to get the point accross so think about your site when reading this and constructing your PPC Account!

So lets say I own a “Car Parts” related eCommerce website.

I sell parts such as wheels, exhaust, engine components and interior components.

If you notice Google, Yahoo and MSN all now follow the same account structure, because they understand it is important to be organized to run a successfull Pay Per Click Account!

So you have your Account, then Campaigns in that Account and Ad Groups in your Campaigns, so you have 3 levels to a PPC Account.

You have 1 Account that can have Several Campaigns and in Each Campaign you can have Several Ad Groups.

Ok, so I have my Account Set up and now I want to create Campaigns … what do I do from here, what do I name them? Great question, if your in eCommerce you probably have 2 levels at this point, you have 1st Level Categories (ie. wheels, exhaust, etc) Generic Categories to your site … you should create Generic Campaigns so For example I would create:

Wheels, Exhaust, Engine Components

My 2nd Level are Brands, so I could create Campaigns with my Top Brands (ie. Borla, Tenzo-R, AEM) These campaigns will come in handy because they are your top sellers and as the market moves you want to be able to find your keywords to adjust accordingly so For example I would create:

Borla, Tenzo-R, AEM

So now that you have some Campaigns set up now you need to set up Ad Groups in those Campaigns so same concept here … think and plan out the best names for your Ad Groups so for my Generic “Wheels” Campaign i’m going to create the following Ad Groups:

Truck Wheels, Car Wheels

For my Brands Category Under “AEM” i’m going to create the following Ad Groups:

AEM Air Intake Systems, AEM DRYFLOW Air Filters, AEM High Performance Electronics, AEM Digital Gauges

OK! So our PPC Account should look like this so far!

Account: “MyCarPartsStore.Com”
Campaigns: Wheels, Exhaust, Engine Components, Borla, Tenzo-R, AEM
Ad Groups: Truck Wheels, Car Wheels, AEM Air Intake Systems, AEM DRYFLOW Air Filters, AEM High Performance Electronics, AEM Digital Gauges

This type of organization in your PPC Account will allow you to quickly make changes and find keywords in your Account on the Fly.

I have seen many accounts using the generic Naming Convention and to find the keyword 17 inch truck wheels could possibly take valuable time away from you being able to do something productive for your business … with the Structure above the generic keyword would be in the Wheels Campaign, Truck Wheels Ad Group!

Once you have this hierarchy in place it will make Managing your Campaign a breeze!

In Part 2 of this series we will discuss Keyword Generation so stay tuned!

Darin

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