History in the making of Pay Per Click search engine marketing

For the past 5+ years Paid Search Advertising also known as Pay Per Click and PPC has gained a immeasurable amount of recognition in the search engine industry. Whilst the traditional search engine optimization still remains the number one online marketing strategy, an immense amount of marketers have now discovered the potential of online advertising campaigns. With properly designed and managed PPC campaigns it will guarantee any business an increase in traffic.

Within the boom in search engine optimization and paid search engine advertising a lot of changes have occurred in search engines. All the common names that we hear today is Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing etc. With the big names to appear the smaller search engines are slowly dying out. To name a couple that no longer exist is “FindWhat”, “kanoodle” and “ePilot”. Furthermore choosing the right search engines is no longer a problem, just look for the big names.

1. Quick Overview

Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines are built like a bidding network, just like auctions. You are bidding against your competitors for specific, related keywords for more traffic i.e. customers. Keywords are one of the most important components in paid search engine advertising.

The concept of PPC bidding is pretty simple, you bid on the keywords that best relate to the product you are selling. The highest bidder either through position bidding (you choose your keywords and the search engine will give you the position according to the maximum cost per click) or the most relevant ad gets placed at the top of the search results, but you only have to pay the amount you bid if someone clicks through to your website.

Compared to organic search engine optimization (or SEO), the biggest advantage with PPC is that it allows you to target to large amount of targeted keywords that SEO is unable to achieve. You can target hundreds thousands or even millions of keywords.

By advertising with PPC search engines it gives you three key advantages:

The fastest and most effective way to gain traffic

By choosing the most relevant keywords that relates to the products or service you are selling, you are already targeting to the right type of customers. You have full control of how much your are willing to bid for the visitor who is going to visit your website. PPC search engines cheaply directs qualified visitors to you, to your business.

Exposure and immediate profits

Search engine optimization usually takes 2-6 weeks or even months to list your website onto a search engine. To see quick profitable results then PPC is the best alternative. Most PPC search engines will set your website live either within a couple of hours or maximum a few days. You will definitely see results and sales practically immediately.

Guaranteed Top Position

If PPC is not for you then the free way to get to the top position is search engine optimization. But it is quite daunting to know if you have chosen the correct keywords and have optimized your website enough so that it will show on search engines. You will either be successful or not successful and it will take a lot of applied hours. Again PPC is the easiest solution to gain high ranking and gain a return on investment. Generally the best way is to bid on the most popular keywords but this will be higher in price. You can either start your bid from 1 cent per click or pay $5.00+ for more competitive keywords.

2. Successful PPC Campaigns

To get started on a successful PPC campaign the logic behind it is “attract and gain as much traffic as possible and keep your bids as low as possible”. You know you are paying for each and every visitor visiting your website, so it is clear you must make sure you maximise the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. Below are some basic guidelines to help optimize your campaign and ensure your return on investment.

Good Campaign Structure

To have a good campaign structure you need to plan what you are selling and apply it to the most efficient keywords. A campaign structure consists of your account which is like your store (website), then you have your campaigns (what you are selling/ categories) and then you have your adgroups (keywords that are distinctive to sell your products).

Focus on highly targeted keywords

As mentioned earlier, PPC Advertising is the most cost effective way to target traffic to your website. To maximise your bidding campaign make sure you choose the right keywords you wish to bid on. The key with choosing the right keywords is to be very specific. For example, instead of bidding on “dog collars” you can consider bidding on “dog flee collars”. Keep in mind you want to target to attract qualified buyers. It will be easier to convert them into paying customers because they have found exactly what they are looking for. And sometimes more specific keywords tend to be less expensive than the general keywords that your competitors are bidding on.

Good Landing Page

A landing page is the first page of your website to appear when you click on your ad. You have be careful you are not leading your visitor to irrelevant information to what they are looking for. The page should have consistent information to the advertisement. Try to minimize the amount of clicks that have to be made to the purchasing page.

Customize your advertisements

To attract more attention from qualified buyers, you need to be able to write your ads specifically for each of the keywords you bid on. Think about the type of visitor that we end up looking at your website. An example is: instead of writing an ad for “pies” you can write “home made meat pies”.

Quality Score

A Quality Score is where the AdWords system calculates if your keywords are matching to your ad. This has been put in place so that the more relevant ad shows up first in search results. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC). So to get the best result you have to gain a higher Quality Score and then your costs will be lower and your ad position will be better.

Relevant Ads

Your ad is consisted in three parts, the heading, your description and your URL. Make sure your heading is describing what you are targeting to sell, your description relates to the product or service and the URL which doesn’t have to be the same URL as your home page for your website. You may want to target to either a language or a location.

Bidding Strategy

To control over spending you need to have a bidding strategy. Position bidding is one option to look out for. Position bidding means bidding on a specific position on search engines. After choosing your competitive keywords, in order to maintain a certain position you need to keep changing your max CPC (cost per click) because of the competition. The second option is ROI Bidding. There are two categories, ROAS (Return on acquisition spending) and CPA (Cost per acquisition spending). ROAS is suitable for businesses if they want to see direct sales and CPA is used to generate more leads.

Tracking and ROI Measurement

Tracking is where you can monitor your clicks to see if they are converting to sales. Of course you want to see if sales are being generated from your PPC campaign. Tools you can use are Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics. By using either of these tools you will also be able to calculate your ROI (Return on Investment).

3. Managing your PPC Advertising Campaign

Now that you have designed a killer selling ad copy, chosen highly targeted keywords, calculated the maximum you can afford to bid on each of search terms and determined which spot on the search results you wish to secure. We can now concentrate on the tools that will simplify the remaining steps.

The aim is to manage the desired position of your ad and adjust your bids correctly in accordance to the PPC market conditions. It’s like monitoring shares on the share market, to get the best deal you need to constantly watch prices and react immediately to any change. Your competitors are what to watch out for. Keep an eye on the price of bids and your position.

(a) Maintain Target Position

Maintaining your target position is not so much a hassle when it comes to using a automated bid management software. Bid Management software will automatically adjust your maximum CPC (cost per click) and will do its best to maintain your target position so you don’t have to constantly monitor it yourself. Be sure that you can set your upper limit, to give you full control of your bids. An example is you do not want to spend more than $2.00 on a competitive keyword, bid management software will keep adjusting the bids to aim at your target desired position and will not go over your chosen upper limit.

(b) Control your Maximum Cost per Click

As mentioned earlier in this article, the calculation of your maximum bid cost (cost per click) requires you to collect a list of statistics about your website. Based on our assumption, you are willing to pay maximum of $2.00 per click. Therefore you should not pursue any positions where the bids are over your $2.00 limit.

To get the most accurate bidding results without having to baby-sit your advertising campaign, I would recommend relying on one of the automated bid management software available on the market today. In general, those tools constantly check your bids and adjust them accordingly to maintain your desired position so that you don’t have to be alert 24/7.

The more sophisticated tools allow you to set your daily budget to prevent spending more than it is efficient for your business. Below I have listed the main features you should be looking for when choosing the bid management software for your campaign:

- Create new campaigns, adgroups and keywords easily

- The ability to create and identify targeted keywords and phrases that convert leads in sales.

- The ability to set the maximum and minimum amount your want to bid.

- The ability to set your desired position.

- the ability to compile comprehensive reports on your keywords, bidding cost, bid position and current bid for each keywords.

- Easy bulk updating

- Simple campaign conversion, update to Google, Yahoo!, MSN.

- The ability to change keyword match types, find out what you are doing right or wrong with your chosen keywords.

If you would like to download a FREE demo version of bid management software, there is one available at http://www.keywordbidmaximizer.com/bidmaximizer. It will help you understand the whole process of designing and maintaining PPC campaigns so you can always manage your campaigns cost-effectively and allocate your budgets and increase your revenue.

Paid Search Advertising presents an excellent opportunity to immediately address your offers to the proper online audience. Focus on identifying highly targeted keywords that convert for your website. Calculate your bids so your sales justify the cost. This way you will maximize your return on investment and ensure your website’s success with PPC advertising.

Kiky Tse is an Internet Marketing Business Consultant at Apex Pacific. Developing a way into internet marketing solutions is my field to help companies increase sales and profitability online. If you would like to learn more about Paid Search Advertising, please visit Apex Pacific at www.apexpacific.com or email service@apexpacific.com.