PPC advertising (pay per click advertising), is a form of advertising whereby you pay your service provider (generally, but not always a Search Engine such as Google) only at the point that someone actually clicks on your advertisement.
With PPC advertising you can keep your advertising costs down to a level you are happy with, and you are then more likely to obtain a good return from your advertising investment. Most PPC providers offer the facility to control your own daily budget up to a maximum figure that you decide.
The market for PPC advertising is vast as this type of marketing is one of the quickest ways to get your website known and to reach new clients and customers. It is also one of the most simple and cost-effective methods of advertising your services or products on the internet.
Although you do have to watch your spend quite closely as it is very easy to get carried away and end up spending more on the weekly budget than you can ever hope to re-coup on any sales you might get when a visitor comes to your website.
How To Choose Where To Commence Your PPC Advertising?
There are many companies that offer PPC advertising, and as always you can search online for suitable forums, advertising sites and of course search engines that offer this type of advertising. I would always suggest that if you are just beginning with this type of online advertising that you start any campaign by using the well established Google AdWords.
If your aim is to get more exposure for your website then PPC advertising is really worth serious consideration, as it has been proven over the last few years to be one of the most effecting advertising tools around.
To see the way Google AdWords are presented, do a search on Google for anything that interests you and then pay particular attention to the results that are marked ‘sponsored results’. These will be PPC adverts, with the advertiser only paying a fee to Google when someone actually clicks on their advert – there are other search engines, forums etc where you can use PPC effectively, but I am going to concentrate on Google AdWords as it is so well established and easy to monitor for your first few campaigns.
Why does Pay-Per-Click Advertising work?
PPC advertising works because people are willing to click on adverts that indicate a website will have either the information, or the product they are searching for. People also tend to trust websites that have good solid information, and if your site appears within their search results they will make the assumption that you have what they are looking for, are an informative site and they are therefore quite likely to visit.
If PPC advertising was this simple, surely anyone can do it?
Yes, but with reservations. You do need to know how to do certain things, and how Google AdWords ‘scores’ the advertisers. One particular thing that you do have to watch, and watch carefully is the amount that you are paying for each of the clicks that are made on your online advertisement.
You also really need to do some good keyword research to ensure that you are spending the least possible amount of money for each click you receive. Some popular general keywords can cost upwards of $2 or $3 a click, and in the really competitive markets they can go up to $30 for a single click. As you can imagine with this kind of price per click received, you will soon have a huge advertising cost if you do not keep close tabs on your campaign.
You need to be able to locate less obvious but nevertheless, still searched for keywords. There is a lot of good information available to help you with AdWords and showing you how to successfully use AdWords to promote your business – whether that business is selling your own products/information, or whether you have started a business as an affiliate marketer.
To succeed with an PPC campaign, you will also need to make sure that your adverts are targeted to your particular market, and once again, you must do necessary research to get this right.
So to summarize PPC advertising can and does work if done in the correct way. You may want to do some specific research into how to put together your adverts, how to look for relevant keywords and how to set up your account in the best way – With this information to hand you have a really good chance of entering into the vast PPC advertising market and winning!
