Pay-per-click advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns are the most popular way of advertising on the internet. With a PPC campaign, you can determine how your visitors find your site. With PPC advertising, you only pay for clicks that take a visitor to your site, ensuring your advertising is successfully bringing traffic to your site.
If a potential visitor only sees your link, but does not click through, this is called an impression. In traditional PPC campaigns, you do not pay for impressions, though there are pricing models based on impressions, which generally charge per thousand impressions (CPM). Whether or not the purchase of impressions will work for your campaign depends on your product and target audience.
Proper PPC advertising is based on keyword selection. Well managed PPC advertising campaigns will bring traffic that achieves your goal: publicize an event, promote services, or sell goods.
Quality VS. Quantity
Many advertising options rely on large quantities traffic to a site to provide new customers. In these type of advertising campaigns, it is expected that a significant percentage of the traffic will not purchase a service or product, and compensates for this by driving a very large quantity of traffic to your site. On the other hand, PPC relies on quality traffic. PPC advertising strives only for well-targeted advertising, ensuring that your visitors are considerably more likely to purchase services or goods.
When an advertising campaign is properly targeted, visitors to your site are much more likely to:
- Be looking for what you are advertising
- Enter the site and look around
- Complete a transaction or become a lead (i.e. convert)
- Come from countries and regions that you are interested in
- Return to visit your site again
Quality traffic will bring you a higher percentage of success, in terms of seeing your visitors completing a transaction or subscribing to the service that you provide.
Evaluate PPC Campaigns
To ensure that your advertising campaign is working as efficiently as possible, you can look at the conversion rate, or the percentage of your visitors that are converted from visitors into customers/ leads. High quality traffic will deliver a higher conversion rate. Conversion rate is another way of talking about your return on investment (ROI) and acquisition cost-per-visitor.
This is usually done through a tracking service. A tracking service will allow you to:
- Monitor that clicks are effective and adjust campaigns if needed
- Understand which keywords and search terms bring the most visitors
- Decide which search engine brings the best results at the right price
- Assist you to set a conversion rate and goals
- Find your source of traffic: country, etc
- Accountability through stats like:
- Length of time spent on your page
- Number of pages on your site viewed per visitor
- Average number of page views from each search engine
Properly managing your advertising campaign is the only way to ensure a PPC campaign is successful. You want to ensure that you are regularly updating your keywords, vendors, and bids as often as your budget will allow. This will allow you to maximize results.
Understanding your Tracking Data
As we’ve already noted, more low quality traffic does not provide a good source of new business. A tracking system will tell you if / why your traffic is low quality. Here are some reasons that a marketing campaign may be providing low quality traffic:
- Country of origin
While some campaigns may not be as limited geographically, there is no point in advertising to a market that does not have a form of payment you accept. - Length of visit duration
Visit duration is an important statistic which tells you if people are interested in your site. How many pages do the visitors look at? - Phrase Matching
Are the visitors presented with a link to your site when they search for a related keyword or search term? The worst-case scenario is when your link is presented randomly, or as a pop up.
Buying PPC Advertising Traffic
There are many sources to purchase clicks from. It is usually best to try more than one service, and compare your results. Many sites use search results originating from a small number of search engines. A PPC vendor will offer two types of placement: ‘Sponsored Search’ and ‘Content Match’. A sponsored search will put your ad outside of the results from the search engine, usually on the right, and sometimes at the very top before search results are listed. A content match places as described, placing your ad near articles, email content, forums, etc. You are likely to obtain a higher conversion rate with sponsored searches, but this will also cost more.
The advantage of paying for your traffic is that most campaigns can be implemented immediately, although it will take several hours to set up your first account. Depending on your budget, you can pay for a high ranking and see your advertising online within an hour. The disadvantage is that you have to pay every time a person clicks on your advertisement, even if they do not purchase anything.
To get the most out of your PPC campaigns, ensure the campaign is accompanied by ongoing efforts to improve your pagerank and optimize your site for search engines. These results are free and cannot be directly purchased, although you can hire a company to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on your site.
Starting Your PPC Campaign
The best way to start a PPC campaign is to pick a few PPC accounts and run your campaigns for a set period of time and compare results. The standard setup procedure involves the following steps:
- Setup an account & add funds
- Choose your keywords & text
- Watch your traffic to evaluate your choice of text & keywords
- If needed, make adjustments your bids and/or budget
Most PPC campaigns allow you to bid on your advertising position on a search page. Bidding can be very competitive, with advertisers paying above $5 per click. Consider your price an acquisition cost-per-customer when deciding what you are willing to bid.
Once your visitor arrives, you must ensure that they find what they are looking for. You want to be sure that your visitors either:
- successfully complete an order
- make a reservation
- become a lead
- sign up for a newsletter
Several studies have demonstrated that once a visitor makes a purchase on a site and effectively becomes a customer they are likely to return again. In this way a high acquisition cost can be justified, when ROI is taken into account.
Even though creating your first PPC advertising campaign may seem overwhelming at first, the results are worth the effort. With a little research, you can design your own campaign and reach a larger percentage of your target audience.
