PPC - Pay Per Click Advertising

You've done all the behind-the-scenes work on your e-commerce business. You've researched your products and pricing. You've chosen a domain name and found a dependable hosting company along with developing a very well designed, customer friendly website. You're all ready to start making sales. Time to sit back & count the money as it rolls in, right? Well, not quite yet. You need customers. (Oh yeah! Customers!)

So now you submit your website to all the popular search engines and directories, fully expecting a fair amount of traffic to start showing up on your webstep. NOW it's time to sit back and start counting your money, right? Not really. You now realize that virtually no one (except maybe your mother) is visiting your website. How are you going to make sales if you have no real visitors? It can take weeks, months or even longer to get a new website pushed up in the rankings in the better search engines.

This is the point where many webmasters turn to pay-per-click (PPC) programs. But just is a PPC? PPC advertising means having your ads placed on different search engines and/or directories, then paying a set amount of money each time a visitor clicks on your ad. Hence the name "pay-per-click." (Ingenious, huh? Shame I didn't invent it.)

So now that you know what PPC is, where do you start with choosing a program? If you type in "pay-per-click advertising" in a Google search, you will most likely see over five million results. Not all of the results will be PPC companies, as many will be articles, tutorials, etc., but it can be mind numbing just trying to gather a little information--to say the least.

Here's a very short list that I've put together of some of the top PPC advertising companies along with a few "pros and cons" for each one. This is by no means meant to be an all-encompassing guide to pay-per-click advertising. Consider it just enough to give you a little background on the PPC "biggies".

GOOGLE ADWORDS:

Pros: Not only is Google one of the most-used searches on the web, their PPC ads are also placed on other networks, including AOL, Ask Jeeves, Earthlink and others. Quick sign up and no monthly minimum spending or monthly fees. Very good support and their CTR (click-thru-rate) can help lower your cost per click.

Cons: There aren't many. There is a five dollar set up fee and they do have a $.05 minimum bid per click.

YAHOO/OVERTURE:

Pros: They offer a large amount of traffic. If your ad ranks in the top ten, they place your ad on other high traffic engines/directories. They were the original PPC company. Very helpful keyword selector tools.

Cons: High cost-per-click rates. Slow customer service (compared to others). Minimum $0.10 bid requirement and they also have a minimum spend-per-month.

FIND WHAT/MIVA:

Pros: Normally lower cost-per-click rates than Overture. They offer an easy-to-use website with user-friendly tools. Delivers traffic at much lower cost than many other PPC companiess.

Cons: May have a wait of up to three days for keyword approval. Seems to be getting better though.

SEARCHFEED:

Pros: Bids start at $.01 with no minimum spend or monthly fees. Mass keyword submission available. Dependable and helpful customer service. Use-friendly tools help with keyword selection.

Cons: Lower traffic than Google, Yahoo and others, especially on lesser-used keywords. Typically you can expect a couple of days of waiting time for program approval.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Choices abound, but please do some more research before spending anything. You'll be glad you did. Pay-per-click can be a great tool for your business, but it can also be very expensive. Do yourself a favor and read up on each program before jumping in. It can be a costly learning experience if you act in haste.

IN CONCLUSION:

PPC companies & services vary widely, but can give you a good return for the money spent. Used properly, pay-per-click programs can give your website a tremendous boost, helping to get it in front of the people looking for exactly what you have to offer. It can also be a great way to give your business a "jump start" during slow times. Hopefully I've given you some good PPC starting points & you're site will soon be meeting or exceeding your traffic expectations. Copyright 2006 Craig Binkley

The "paid placement" search results model introduced by Overture.com has become an accepted method of advertising online and should be considered a very viable and attractive option in your small business marketing budget. Get out your roadmap to Overture!

TUNE UP YOUR SEARCH TERMS

Wordspot.com offers a great tool to help determine valuable search terms to bid on by showing the number of searches in the previous month for any word or phrase you enter in the search box.

Try it yourself and see. Let's assume you are in auto insurance.

http://wordspot.com

I went there and found that "auto insurance quote" was searched 9853 times.

CHECK OCCUPANCY RATES AND BOOK YOUR TRIP

Now visit the Overture.com front page and type in the same search term "auto insurance quote" and the results page will show how much money each click-through costs the top bidding advertiser. In this case it was $1.78 by "Netquote.com" I went there to see and they seem to be a company that sells to agents and brokers, and thus are not even aimed at the consumer.

By the way, my just clicking on that link to visit NetQuote cost them $1.78 and I had no interest in them myself. The first page of results lists the top 40 advertisers and if you go to the last of them you see #40 advertiser bid is .05 cents. That is quite a range for the front page of results! You can appear on the front page of the "auto insurance quote" results for just .06 cents!

FILL UP YOUR TANK AND LOAD YOUR BELONGINGS

The way to determine what type of campaign to run with Overture is to determine how much you want to spend and find out who your competition is by doing this type of research. If I were to do this for the client, I'd charge by the hour, ($75 hourly) since it is not cut and dry stuff, but requires analysis and careful targeting of terms. Sometimes you can offer the client the tools and let them spend the time researching. Some of my smaller clients take me up on this pay per click advertising model.

Overture also offers a service at $99 where they will find and set your bids on twenty search terms and credit you with $50 in click-throughs, so they are charging you $49 for a not-very precise "we'll-do-it-for-you" kind of PPC pay-per-click campaign.

Generally though you'll get good reports from Overture and can substantiate where the money goes to determine your return on investment for the pay-per-click campaign.

Note that the second bid for "auto insurance quote" at $1.76 is from "insweb.com" and they are one of the big dogs of online consumer insurance quotes.

BUDGET YOUR YOUR TRIP

Overture claims that a number one listing gets three times the click-through rate of the number two listing and offers stats for ranking purposes to help you decide where to bid and what your budget can afford. You can beat them all for $1.79 per click-through so if your conversion rate were ten percent of click-throughs converting to paying customers, then customer acquisition on this campaign would cost you $17.90 per new paying customer. If your profit exceeds that amount and you can justify it, then you have a winning campaign!

Statistics show that the average cost to business for new customer acquisition is $30 per customer, so the example given above of less than $20 per new customer would be quite a bargain.

HIT THE ROAD AND ENJOY YOUR TRIP!

What it comes down to is, how well do you want to rank? What can you afford? What is your conversion rate once a searcher clicks through? How much is that new customer worth to you for the life of the business she would bring your company? Finally, what is your return on investment? This can't be determined until you set up a campaign and test it with them.

The value of this type of advertising is the ability to track exactly where the customer came from. If you set up a specific page on your site to receive traffic from your paid search listings, your traffic logs will verify that those new clients came from that paid listing. It is possible to create pages to accept traffic from each of the pay-for-performance resources out there. Consider a few of them and test, test, test!

Overture is not the only vehicle on the road. Road-test these!

http://www.Overture.com/
http://www.sprinks.com/
http://www.rocketlinks.com/
http://www.searchhound.com/
http://www.7search.com/
http://www.ah-ha.com/
http://www.euroseek.com/page?ilang=en
http://findwhat.com/
http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://www.onesearch.com/
http://www.simplesearch.com/
http://www.titansearch.com/

Check your mileage and keep your web vehicle in tune!

Now for those of you who don't know this, I'm going to share the secret that even many Overture advertisers DON'T know. For those of you who have heard this already, take a break. ;-)

Overture provides the top three advertisers links to dozens of search engines and giant web portals as the top three results on every page at each one of those giant portals, including YAHOO! So if you are one of the top three bidders at Overture, you become one of the top three results at MSN, AOL, LYCOS, and dozens more search engine properties. It is the fastest and easiest way to rank in the top three results and can cost far less than traditional advertising. Therefore, some categories are intensely competitive and costly to rank #1 at Overture. But if you are in a less competitive area with your web site, you can rank #1 for as little as the minimum 5 cent bid at Overture for your chosen search phrase!

Overture is very strict about editorial control on this since searchers expect relevant results at their partner sites. Don't think you can go bid on the term "Sex" if you sell unrelated products. It just doesn't work that way. Overture requires that the content of the page match the content of the search query.

This technique works for the lazy site owner as well as those of us willing to work to make our site content relevant and valuable to surfers. If you have content on your site that addresses how your product or service solves a problem, then you can bid on search terms relevant to that problem if your product is a solution to that problem.

Take a look at one of my clients who sells OAT based skin care products to see how we created pages about Sunburn as well as about Sensitive Skin to be able to bid on those terms at Overture. to see how this can work. Once you have created content that satisfies Overture for a particular search term, you will also do well with the crawler based search engines if you've followed the additional eight essential guidelines offered in your valuable member site here.

So you want to make money by inserting Google Adsense into your website? I don't blame you, who doesn't want residual income! This article will show you how we can help you optimize Google Adsense to make more money from your web site(s).

Before we get into it, learn more about Google Adsense here:

http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/

First and Foremost Is: Positioning

Where you position your Adsense link boxes and banner ads is extremely important. Trying to make money from the bottom of your pages within your website just won't cut it. You need to add your Adsense links right in the heart of your template or right in the heart of your content. I would personally suggest both actually.

Adding Adsense InThe Heart Of Your Template:

Link Units:

Since the introduction of Google Adsense 'link units', we can now add what looks like a 'menu system' to compliment our menu system within our website. This is HUGE. Have you ever just clicked on a website and kept clicking on the menu links? I know we all have. By adding a 'Google link units' to your menu, you will get more clicks than you thought possible. Try adding the link units near the top for better performance and try creating your link units to match the color of your menu system in place. Once in a while I find myself clicking on a menu link unit without even realizing it which in turn gives more money to the website owner.

Leaderboards & Skyscrapers:

These may very well be your 'bread & butter'. I only say this because of the sheer size of these ads units. The best place to add these ad units is obvious; Straight across the very top of your website (leaderboards), and straight down the side of your template (skyscrapers). Anywhere else may not look proper within your template and may look unprofessional.

Square & Rectangle Ad Units:

These are great to compliment the mass amount of content within your website and also within your recommended resources. You want to compliment your content, you don't want Adsense to BE your content because this will look poor on your part. Adsense is very popular with webmasters; who doesn't want to make some extra money. However, don't forget that many of your visitors are also used to seeing Adsense within a website, and need a good reason to click on them.

Square and rectangular units are great to use within articles posted on your website or within your link resources. Try adding your Adsense boxes above your resource links within a page to give your Adsense account that added extra exposure.

Just remember that Google allows up to 3 ad units per page. Using these 3 strategies will help to better optimize Adsense for positioning! Let's now go onto targeting...

Optimizing Adsense: Taking Out Non-Related Ads!

Do you ever wonder how ads like 'business card specials' ever get displayed on to your website when your company content is all about baby clothing? Since the introduction of 'Adwords Site Targeting', we now have to keep an eye on the ads being displayed on our website(s). Companies may now specifically target your website for more exposure. There is no restriction whether the website is content related or not, just more marketing exposure for the advertiser.

Filtering Adsense Advertisers:

Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the 'Competition Filter' which allows us to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. This is going to be an on-going optimization task in the future. Without filtering the ads being displayed within your website, you might find yourself with ads unrelated to your industry and possibly some ads that have a negative effect within your site.

If you don't remove all the unwanted ads being displayed on your website, you might end up hurting your Adsense performance online. The more targeted you can get your Google Adsense ads to display on each page, the better your chances at being able to make more money. Try to take a moment every week to study the ads being displayed on your website.

Open up a note pad, or word document and record all the websites you don't want to be displayed anymore. Add these sites to your 'filter list' within your Adsense account.

Remember to add the website (within your filter list) like so: smartads.info - without the www. Adding anything after or before the url will only prevent the company from displaying one of their many ads. This way you stop anything from the entire website from showing up within your Adsense campaign online. The more you optimize your Adsense filter, the better your performance will pick up and the less non-related ads will be displayed on your website.

OneConstant That Holds True With Adsense:

The more pages you have with your Adsense campaign being displayed, the more you WILL make. People who have online networks immediately can profit from Google Adwords because they have the power to add their Adsense boxes & banners onto multiple websites, possibly 1000's of pages.

Should You Add Adsense To Your Website?

If you own a small company that has a brochure type website that gets maybe 50-100 visitors a day, I recommend NOT adding Adsense to your site. It will never make enough money with that kind of traffic. Remember: Your Adsense campaign needs to make over $100 to get paid out.

If your company receives around 500-1000+ visitors a day, you can now start considering to make money through Google. Adsense is all about numbers. Play the numbers to make more money. In fact, try making goals for yourself to make X amount of dollars through your Adsense account by a certain time. Doing this will only increase your business and make your company more powerful online by increasing the amount of traffic it receives.

For Multiple Websites, Channels Are Important:

Google allows you to track the performance of multiple websites all in one account which ultimately gives you the ability to track how many visitors you're getting for each website. It also allows you to work harder on those sites that aren't up to par.

I consistently look at each individual website channel to work harder at promoting the ones that aren't performing well. By doing this, we increase the amount of promotion going into the websites that under perform, and in turn eventually increase the business for those websites as well. The more you promote your website, the more the exposure you will ultimately deliver for your Adsense campaign and your company.

Google Search With Adsense:

To top all that off, you can add Google search within your site to give visitors a search function for your content and to allow people to also click on your Adsense program. Please note that for Google search to work, your website and all of its content pages must already be indexed by Google. Adding the Google search bar to your site right away won't help your visitors at all.

For more Google Adsense optimization tips, go here:

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

Don't forget to read the Google Adsense Policies & Procedures:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies