subject: Pay per Click Management [print this page] Pay per Click Management Pay per Click Management
PPC is a form of advertising that can bring traffic to your website in a very short time. It is a system of sponsored adverts sold by the biggest search engines. These advertisements are labelled sponsored' and occupy prime positions either in the top few positions of the search page [usually tinted a faintly darker colour than the rest of the search results]. They can also be positioned on the upper right of the search page.
What happens is that all websites on the internet have keywords' either in their titles or content [articles, product descriptions, etc] The keywords are what the user normally types into the little box on their browser's front page to begin their search.
The keywords chosen by websites are carefully selected with a keyword tool. Many tools and keyword generators are available online, and Google has a very user-friendly one. You can type the keyword(s) you like in the box they provide, for instance dress designers'. The search will immediately give you all the statistics on this word/phrase as well as for similar keywords. Now you have to weigh up the percentage of websites that are already using these keywords against the number of searches made every month for dress designers' by internet users [your potential customers]. If the ratio seems reasonable to you then you could adopt those keywords into your website content if the adwords' are available.
The search engines, such as Google, sell adwords' either at a flat rate or by auction.
If you go to Google's traffic estimator' and type in your chosen keyword, it will generate a response telling you:
Local monthly searches how many people search for your keywords in the average month
Estimated cost per click if you buy those keywords, how much you can expect to pay Google if someone clicks on your ad.
Estimated ad position how prominently your ad will be displayed
Estimated daily clicks how many daily clicks you can expect on your ad [some people estimate that it takes about 100 clicks to convert to a sale, but this depends very much on your total strategy and varies greatly from product to product and from website to website]
Estimated daily costs how much you can expect those clicks to cost you daily
If this prospect seems promising to you then you go about buying or bidding for an adword. When you have set up your Google [or other search engine] account, you are ready to start up your campaign. This will involve:
choosing the audience you want to reach geographically world wide or one area.
deciding whether you want your ad to be displayed on the search pages alone or Google's partner sites as well [these will all be relevant to your product or services]
setting up your daily budget. There is no minimum, but you can set up the maximum you can spend per day.
putting in your bid. You bid the amount you are prepared to pay for the privilege of using those keywords in your ad. If it is higher than anyone else's bid, you get it. Some keywords are sold' at a flat rate and you get it at that price.
Now all you need is to produce an attractive advertisement and your adword campaign has begun!
