Elements of Successful Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click advertising is a Search Engine Marketing Strategy that requires that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad taking them to your site. The fee is the amount that you pre-bid on how much you are willing to pay per click based on a selected keyword or keyword string vs. the other bidders. Your bid affects placement of your ad in relation to the other bids. You only pay each time someone actually clicks the ad and visits your site.

Optimally, the ultimate goal with any PPC campaign is conversions. Conversions are the amount of click-throughs that are converted into your goal, normally making a sale or receiving a lead etc…. Since 80% of all searches online are done on search engines, the more exposure that you receive on search engines, both naturally and paid, the more traffic you should receive. Search engine placement naturally for any given term where you want the listing to appear can both take a lot of your efforts and take a long time to achieve. PPC cuts the time to time invested setting it up and monitoring the bids. Hence, producing traffic and conversions much faster.

The key objectives of any PPC campaign are to maximize impressions, clicks and conversions once they are on your site while minimizing cost per conversion.

Four ‘Best Practices’ to enhance to any PPC campaigns success are:

Keyword Research and Targeting – prior to launching any campaign you must research your keywords and phrases. It is also to your advantage to analyze what keywords your competition is targeting. Target the ‘long-tail’ phrases. For example, bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard’ is going to be both expensive and very competitive. The person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard’ may or may not be just beginning their search. Bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ will cost less, have less competitors bidding on the same phrase and the person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ has most likely already narrowed down their search and be closer if not at the final decision stage of their searching.

Creative Ad Copy – research PPC ad copy strategy. There are plenty of tools available like Keyword Spy, Link Diagnosis, Wordtraker and others that will help you analyze the current ads including performance stats. From this information, you should be able to formulate a reasonably successful, creative Ad.

Bid Management – If you cannot manage your bids daily, most people cannot, hire a service like ours or if necessary, use a 3rd party bid management tool. The 3rd party tool is much better than not monitoring it at all, but using a service usually more than pays for itself just in bid savings. Why pay 75 cents for even 1 click when the next highest bidder just dropped his bid to 25 cents?

Tracking, Reporting and ROI Analysis – Without feedback, you cannot improve. The amount of data that can be retrieved and analyzed from a PPC campaign can be mountainous. Look specifically a keyword performance, specific Ad copy performance, conversion rate and of course, ROI.

In conclusion, the money that you spend mounting a PPC campaign and specifically utilizing a PPC service such as the service offered by AES through our site will far out weigh the loss in sales that you are experiencing and your competitors are reaping by not having a PPC campaign and letting then reap the rewards.

Look for our next post titled ‘How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign’. Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.