If Google is your search engine of choice, (Chances are it is, as Google holds a 64% market share in search traffic) you may have noticed blue links along the side and above your query results. These are pay-per-click ads. Internet Marketers use pay-per-click ads on various search engines to supplement their organic SEO results.
Most SEO initiatives have about a 6-8 month lag time before you will ever see ranking results. A well-planned pay-per-click campaign can be a great catalyst to raise your organic rankings, or supplement your traffic when your organic Internet marketing initiatives start to plateau.
With any PPC provider, you bid for rank within the search results for any given keyword of your choosing. You are only charged when someone actually clicks on your ad to go to your site. Contrast this with a PPI or pay-per-impression campaign where you pay a set amount every time your ad is shown in the results. You can bid as low as $.01 and there is no ceiling to how much you can bid for a keyword. Keep in mind however, that your ad’s ranking is directly correlated to the price you’re willing to pay per click.
To initiate a PPC campaign, sign up and register with a PPC provider. Google Adwords is likely the largest and most widely used, as referenced by the 64% market share… You will need to provide a credit card number, and in all likelihood a deposit into the account. Design your ads with a keyword-based title, body text and a link to the landing page of your site. Finally, set up your campaign and bid for clicks.
One important thing to remember is that Google’s Adwords algorithm assigns a “quality score” to the relevancy of your ad to the searched keyword. When designing your PPC campaign you may be able to further optimize by designing your ad around the most relevant keyword you can come up with.
Archive for the ‘Paid Advertising Online’ Category
Internet Marketing Techniques: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns 101
Monday, February 20th, 2012Search Engine Marketing Techniques: How to raise your Google Adwords “Quality Score”
Monday, February 13th, 2012If you’re new to running a Google Adwords campaign you may have some initial trouble optimizing your ads, specifically raising their quality score. As I’ve discussed before Google Adwords ranks ads based on their relevancy to the query in what we’ll refer to as a ‘quality score.’ Google’s motivation for using this quality-based ranking algorithm is ultimately to serve the customer, the searcher. This is likely why they’re by far the biggest search engine in the market.
This has the added benefit of allowing advertisers to have effective search engine marketing campaigns regardless of budget. The key to optimizing your ad campaign, and achieving a higher quality score, is providing the most relevant and highest quality content, products, and services. Your Quality Score is made up of very many factors, but the four most important are:
Click Through Rate (CTR) – The number of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of times it’s seen (an impression). This ratio essentially measures how enticing your ad is, or the probability someone will click on it if they see it.
Max Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is the maximum bid you’re willing to pay for a click in the search results of any particular keyword.
Ad Text – The relevancy of the text in the ad to the keywords or phrase queried in the search engine.
Landing Page – This is how relevant the content on your landing page is to the keywords or phrases queried in the search engine.
Here’s an example of how this might stack up in an actual market:
| Max CPC | CTR | Quality Score | Ad Position | |
| Advertiser 1 | 0.60 | 5.9 | 3.20 | 1 |
| Advertiser 2 | 2.01 | 1.6 | 3.06 | 2 |
| Advertiser 3 | 3.80 | 0.7 | 2.28 | 3 |
| Advertiser 4 | 1.20 | 1.8 | 2.15 | 4 |
Notice how Advertiser 1 has the lowest maximum bids for clicks, but thanks to a high click-through rate is able to garner the number one spot. Even though Advertiser 3 is spending a fortune for clicks, his CTR is poor due to (most likely) poor quality or irrelevant content on his landing page.
So, it seems, Content is still king. When designing any Adwords campaign, it’s worth the investment in time to carefully word your advertisements and landing page content. If you’re not confident doing this yourself an experience copywriter can provide you with content that converts visitors and improves your Google Adwords Quality Score.
Advantages of Paid Search Campaigns
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012Organic search traffic is free, which I can’t argue with, and is a great boon to new businesses. But to say organic traffic converts better than paid searches indicates that the search marketer is not optimizing their paid campaigns. Paid campaigns also have several other advantages for yielding higher conversion rates that can’t be achieved through organic marketing without great effort.
- Product Specificity: Paid search engine marketing exposes visitors to only the products and services you want to promote. You can match keywords to product offerings to capture visitor’s looking for something specific.
- Pays for Itself: Often times paid campaigns generate enough revenue that they pay for themselves. Compare a paid campaign with all the man-hours required to rank keywords in organic results, and you’ll see that you’ll spend just as much time in labor as you will in dollars for paid results.
- Content Changes: With an organic search campaign you have limited leeway to change much of the content surrounding your product without changing your SEO targeting and search results. Also, you don’t necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in query results.
- Targeting Behavioral Cues: With paid search campaigns, you’re granted ability to target specific behavioral cues by using multiple keyword matches, negative match keywords, and advance query performance reporting.
Finally, visitors coming from organic search results usually have a specific intention. First time organic visits usually don’t convert. It’s only until after several repeat visits, and even then only with excellent content, that visitors are converted. By targeting a searcher’s specific needs with paid search results, you can experience a tremendous growth in conversion rates.
