How To Profit From Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising CampaignsNelson Tan
March 10, 2009
Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely
effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about
attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options
you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine
optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get
your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as
possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a
pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click
is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines,
including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a
"per-click" basis, which translates to your company paying the bid
amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site.
There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website
traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent
search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are
advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor
your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One
of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web
pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do
in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click
campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of
the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you're up and running. It
doesn't demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you
know about search engines and keywords, the easier--and more
effective--the process will be.
The downside is that
pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours
will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you
will have to raise your bid to regain your position--which can
obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a
popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a
cost-effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some
computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth.
You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your
website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for
that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits
and there were 25,000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth
50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The
figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business
breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely
cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50
cents per click.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often
cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this
is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for
each individual hit.
The key (pun intended) to success is to
learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good
news is there isn't a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to
your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This
translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to
optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.
Obviously,
some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will
not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your
pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines that offer
pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online tool that will
give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into
their search engine. They also offer suggestions for keywords after you
enter a description of your site.
In pay-per-click, this written
description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your
description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific
as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your
service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy
to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to
attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is
your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.
Another
essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly
monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the
results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising,
which are Overture and AdWords Select, usually appear on other popular
search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is
intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons
too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.
If this happens,
it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try
another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a
profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.
Since losing
is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the
effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords
on at least a monthly basis.
Not only is careful monitoring
important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable
knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert
monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business
needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a
success.
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