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Home::Newsletters
Will Pay-Per-Click advertising help your site?
Author : Zaak OConan
Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both
extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several
ways to go about attracting traffic to your website;
Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along
with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign.
Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website
placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible.
One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a
pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most
search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer.
It requires a bid for a "per-click" basis, which translates to
your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine
directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that
when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site
often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and
disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your
pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One
of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your
web pages to change your position in search engine results, as
you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in
a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click
process. You just bid and you're up and running. It doesn't
demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you
know about search engines and keywords, the easier - and more
effective - the process will be.
The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war.
A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search
engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid
to regain your position - which can obviously become quite
expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form
of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to
figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can
compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your
website over a given period of time by the total number of
visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site
made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor
would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is
profits divided by visitors.
The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your
business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit,
not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a
figure less than 50 cents per click.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably
more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid
less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each
individual hit.
The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can
about search engine keyword research. The good news is there
isn't a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid
because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This
translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no
need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.
Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others
are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up
your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search
engines that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides
an online tool that will give you the data on how often
particular keywords are entered into their search engine. They
also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a
description of your site.
In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must
understand that the object of your description is not to
generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so
that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or
product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to
guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to
attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description
is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.
Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that
you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you
bear in mind that the results of the top search engines
providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and
Adwords Select, usually appear on other popular search engines.
Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and
very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too
high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.
If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that
particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay
too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing
the bidding war.
Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to
closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable
to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.
Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of
visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer
motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer
analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will
also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.
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