In order for your online business to succeed you must get targeted traffic to your website. No matter what product or service you are selling, if you dont make sales you wont be in business for very long! One of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website is through Pay Per Click Ads. If you have spent any time surfing the world wide web or used search engines to seek out a particular keyword or phrase then you have more than likely seen Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. Two of the most popular PPCs are Google Ad words http://www.google.com which are featured prominently on many websites on the net and Overture http://www.overture.com which list sites in search engine results like Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, etc, across the net. However, there are literally thousands of PPC search engines on the web today to choose from. PPC ads offer a way to attract relatively cheap targeted traffic to your website and product or service. Here is how PPC ads work. You bid on specific keywords or key-phrases to have your search engine listing or short ad come up when people search for that specific keyword. For example, if you are selling Golf accessories, you would bid to have your site ad come up when a person searches for "Golf Clubs". If the person sees your ad and is interested and they click on it and you simply pay your bid amount. That is targeted traffic. You may bid $1 to get listed at the top of the search result, but your competitor could then bid 1.05 and outbid and move ahead of you. This does happen unless you are able to bid on less popular search terms that your competitors do not and still many people use. Bids for the top positions vary from pennies to a few dollars, but most PPC search engines have keyword suggestion tools to help you find keywords and their search results to suit your budget. You may bid on as many keywords as your budget can handle. A general rule of thumb would be to aim for one of the top two positions for keywords with low bid searches and aim for top 5 for keywords with higher volume searches. You must be careful though to bid within your means! PPCs are all about conversion rates. For example, if your conversion rate is 2 visitors per 100, and you make $10 per sale. Your maximum bid would be the following: conversion rate x profit per sale. In this example, it would be .02 X $10= 20 cents You should bid 20 cents or less to be profitable. This is something you must figure out on your own if you are using PPCs for the first time in order to be successful. Finally, your ad should follow certain guidelines. You want to describe your product or service in your ad as precise as possible. Remember you are not looking for tire kickers because you are paying for their click whether they buy something or not! Link the ad to the specific product or service you are selling instead of sending prospects to your home page so the prospect does not have navigate to find what they clicked on originally. Try to include the keyword in the title or description. Statistics have shown this method to produce higher clicks. Good Luck! Copyright 2004 Dirk Wagner |
