Pay Per Click Advertising

Accounts are opened with a credit card which is then debited at intervals as your ads are clicked.

When you open your account, you then create an ad and a list of keywords which will trigger your ad. Your keywords text ads will appear on search result pages for the keywords you've bought, and can be targeted to specific language, audience, and region or country.

Your listing will typically show up in about an hour of your creating it.

Keywords
Pricing for keywords is based on the position in which they're shown. In addition, some search engines (MSN in particular) will lower your "relevence" if your ad is not being shown very often, thus hurting your ad campaign. If you notice that this is happening to you, a smart trick is to change your ad text every so often, as this will "reset" your ad campaign - allowing it to be once again shown more frequently.

Price rates are different for different keywords, so you'll want to research carefully as you choose your words. Words with a lot of competition can be expensive, while misspelled words or less common phrasing can be inexpensive.

It is most cost effective to choose 20 or more keywords/phrases related to your site. Be very specific. Before you begin, write down 20 or more very specific and targeted keywords/phrases. PPC sites have great tools that will suggest alternate keywords based upon a keyword you enter. Be sure to check out all the helpful tools at the site!

The most important tactic is to choose very specific keywords that will trigger your ad. If you do this correctly, only very targeted buyers will ever see your ad - thus your conversion ration will be very high. (If you don't choose your keywords with care, you will end up having your ad showing often - but with an unacceptable amount of non-targeted audience clicking on it.) You're better off with less "click-thrus" targeted to your specific audience, rather than a ton of clicks by people looking for something else.

For example, if you are selling hanging crystals, you don't want people clicking on your ad who are looking for "how to grow crystals" or "salt crystals". In this case, you can create negative keywords that will stop your ad from showing to people searching for these terms. Again, the PPC sites have a helpful tool that will generate negative keywords for you.

Luckily, you can set how much you want to spend per day. Log in often and check and re-check your spending on keyword ads against your actual sales. This is vital! You could lose a lot of money on ads that aren't done right unless you carefully monitor them.

Ad Campaigns
PPC sites allows you to create campaigns. A campaign holds its own keywords and adverts. Each campaign has its own statistics that are reported to you. The optimal strategy? Create a separate campaign for each keyword and each advert, rather than put all your ads and keywords into one campaign. That way, you will easily be able to tell which keywords ads are doing well and which ones are not so that you can eliminate those that are wasting your money.

PPC ad campaigns all contain an option to insert code into your site so you can check your logs and see which words/campaigns are working for you. You'll need to be vigilant and don't hesitate to make changes. Delete or change ad text that is not performing well. Delete or change words that aren't drawing customers.


Important: You should also be sure that for each ad you create for a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword or phrase appears in both the title and description on that ad. There are ways (they vary depending upon the site) to make a keyword phrase appear as the title in your ad. Look at each PPC site's help files for this, as it's a great way to improve your hits. Click through rations can be significantly improved when you have the keyword being searched for included in the title and description of the ad.

Monitoring Reports
Once you start advertising on these sites, they will give you helpful customized reports showing how your ads are doing. Be sure to log in and check your reports throughout the life of your campaign - especially in the beginning! In this way you'll get a better feel for how the PPC campaigns work, the tools offered, and most importantly, which words are working and which you should delete.

From the reports, take the average amount of money in dollars you are paying for every 1,000 impressions/displays of your advert (this is called CPM or cost per 1000), which varies depending on the positions your ad gets, and refer to the conversion ratio and gross unit profit figures you calculated earlier for your web site. Now, in that report, you will also be told what click throughs you are getting for your ads, in other words, what percentage of the times your ad is show does someone click on it.

This is how you know when to advertise and when not to advertise: if the reported click through percentage is equal to or higher than: (Your Site's Conversion Ratio x Reported Google CPM) / Your Site's Gross Unit Profit

.. then you are making a gross profit on sales generated by that advertising! PPC advertising can be quite effective when done carefully. With time, your ads should improve and become more profitable as you become more proficient at creating them.