Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet based advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites, such as blogs or forums, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertisers' website. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When a user types a keyword query matching an advertiser's keyword list, or views a webpage with relevant content, the advertisements may be displayed. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads.
Sponsored search placement/advertising and listing on search engines is becoming increasingly popular and the most preferred way of drawing qualified traffic for websites waiting to do business. It enables businesses to buy top placements on leading search engines. It is commonly called PPC advertising. Minimum prices per click,
often referred to as costs per click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword list—with some CPCs as low as US$0.01. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular search engines like “Flash programmer” which costs more than $1 per click (on Google) because of having high competition and reputation.
Pay per click campaigns can be categorized into two major categories: sponsored match (or keyword) and content match. Sponsored match campaigns involve the display of advertisements on search engine results pages, whereas content match campaigns involve the display of advertisements on publisher websites, newsletters, and e-mails. the search and content networks can help you achieve different goals. Search marketing is highly effective at capturing existing demand. Your ads are delivered to an engaged audience actively searching for keywords relevant to your business. Conversely, the content network helps you create demand by attracting potential customers while they're browsing relevant content on the web. Therefore, you may receive lesser number of clicks on the content network as compared to the search network. If you are running same campaign on search and content network at the same time, you may pick different default bids. Content network usually costs less than search engine campaigns but search engine campaigns always bring the most effective returns. Another important point, CTR (click through rate) and conversion rate is not important for content network. CPC (cost per click) and cost per conversion is important. But CTR (if you don’t have an appealing ad, or your ad is triggered by under unrelated keywords, your click through rate will decrease) created the most important term for search engine campaigns: Quality Score. Your keyword related ad text, your CTR, your landing page and many other factors affects your quality score. And the higher quality score you have, the lower you will pay for that keyword. For this reason, bidding on organic food for Xeltek is not a wise decision because of the high possibility of ending up with a very low quality score. Don’t forget that cultural differences may also impact on CTR. Consider the culture if you are bidding on specific regions.
Notable PPC-based search engines
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Ask.com
Baidu.com
MIVA
Google (Google AdWords)
Vibrant Media
MSN/Live Search (Microsoft adCenter)
Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing)
General Tips for PPC Advertising
Before we deep dive into online advertising, we have to always remember the basic rule of PPC “Advertising isn’t advertising when it is information”. You are putting an effort, you are dedicating a budget and you should never act like a wiki page to land your users on. Always aim the right target and give them something they can buy at the end. Convert clicks into return. Here are the key points for the best practice of such an effort:
1) Focused Keyword Research
2) Compelling Ads
3) Efective landing pages
First thing first, UNDERSTAND YOUR INDUSTRY and relate it with your products! It is all about the keywords. You have to know what keywords are vital for your selling goods to attract customers. That’s why you need to find the right keywords. Forget about the marketing tools floating around the web. Follow your cavemen insticts, make an internal search through your website, determine the important words and in the end define your keywords. Marketing is sum of your efforts; none of those virtual tools can do better than you. The more effort you put, the better result will return.
You have to catch unique selling points. That’s why you need to understand your industry. Dig for the niche! And determine: “Why Xeltek is unique?” or “why i am good at this market?”. Once you know the difference, you are ready to go because you know what to look for. Right after you have a model in your mind about your industry, start digging your website to find the proper keywords. But don’t search it as if you are the owner of the website! This is the biggest mistake of a marketing person can fall into. Search it as if you are a potential customer, or a pointless user who is charmed with the ad. To give you a solid example, 90% of the serious buyers don’t search your website as “free programmer”; or let’s be more specific, most of the universal programmers fans don’t search for the specific programmer term such as “superpro 3000U”. They search for more generic terms like “gang programmer”, “socket adapters”. That’s why you need to define your keywords from the user point of view. There are 4 kinds of keywords:
a. Explicit > directly describe the product (programmer)
b. Condition/problem > describes the conditions the product solves (production programming)
c. Casual/symptoms > describes the problem (fast programming)
d. Product name/part number > (SuperPro 3000U)
Determine which one serves your portfolio better. In our case, we can bid for all types of keywords as long as we received the satisfactory impressions and clicks and return them into a value.
We have created the list of zillions keywords and now we are ready to skip to the next step: Not that easy! We have hundreds of keywords and most of them are highly searched terms. But if you don’t know how to categorize those keywords and group them, you will be only donating your money to Google. This is like order of chain in the army: start creating campaigns such as content campaign or search engine campaign. Then, create ad groups under those campaigns, such as “gang programmers”, “eprom programmers” and start listing related keywords under these ad groups. Gathering related keywords under one ad group is important because of using the same ad text for ten keywords at a time. You can create separate ad text for each keyword but it will be difficult. Let’s demonstrate a sample ad text:
Captivating Headline >> Xeltek vs Needhams
Business Feature >> Needhams is gone! Get SuperPro®
Consumer Benefit >> 46,000+ Devices, Compare it now.
Display URL >> www.Xeltek.com
Recall the PPC pillars: Compelling ads! Be as attractive as possible. Do not forget that PPC is worthwhile when you act like a whole. In other words, finding the best keyword that describe your website, or including the highly traffic keywords are not going to help you to increase the website traffic. They will only give you a temporary buzz. That’s why you also need to have charming ads. Don’t forget, it is always better to have more than 1 ad text for each ad group.
And the last pillar of PPC: Effective Landing Pages! Landing pages are the pages that you direct users to your website followed their click on the ad. Now you got the best list of keywords and the most appealing ad texts, but what if users clicks on your ad and ends up with a crappy website which doesn’t keep users on that page more than 3 seconds. What’s going to happen? Yet another donation to Google! You should send the user to the most relevant page on your website for that keyword. Please do not forget, the most relevant page doesn’t mean being informative; once again, giving only information is not advertising. And if you have a long homepage/landing page, forget about having users scroll it down. Only 23% scrolls down! What they see is there! And only 0.3% scrolls right! And do not have your landing page as PDF. For this reason, optimize your web pages to extract the best performance.
You may try to bid on one market only. By creating geo-targeted campaigns, you can narrow your ads to areas or languages and receive more impacts. And also keep it in mind that November, and December are completely different than the regular times. Do not take those months as reference since online shopping is happening too much during holiday season.Once more, in order to be a good online marketer, you have to put effort. The more effort you put on online marketing, the more money you’ll make in return.
