Set up effective pay-per-click advertising campaigns

Pay-per-click advertising in search engines

PPC advertising is a form of online marketing that allows you to display your advertisement within search engine results and you pay for every visit that comes to your site. This form of advertising is extremely popular for large and small businesses for various reasons:

• Targeted traffic: Customize your traffic by allowing viewers searching for a specific set of keywords to see your ad. In addition, you have the option to specify localized traffic. For example, a real estate agent servicing the Los Angeles area can exclude all cities outside of this city.
  
  
• Low, upfront costs: Set a daily and/or monthly spending limit from $5 to $25,000 or more. Most PPC programs offer suggested budget tools that provide information on the estimated amount of traffic you can receive and the amount.
  
  
• Fast and easy: Unlike search engine optimization (SEO), which may take months or even years to obtain targeted traffic, PPC advertising can drive traffic to your site within a day or two after you’ve set up your campaign.
  
  

Who is right for a PPC advertising campaign?

A lot of businesses wonder whether they should do a PPC advertising campaign or whether they should stick with trying to improve their natural, unpaid search rankings (SEO, or Search Engine Optimization). After all, improving your unpaid search rankings is free. Also, Google search data shows that more people click on unpaid links than they do on paid links. So, here are some things to consider:

• What is your current natural (unpaid) search rankings? When you search for keywords related to your business, do you show up on the first page? If not, then PPC advertising can be an effective way to get on that first page of search results. Once you are able to improve your natural (unpaid) search rankings, then you can pull back on your PPC advertising spending.
  
  
• Is your industry savvy with SEO techniques? If you are in an industry where most businesses have websites and most businesses know how to optimize their websites for natural search rankings, then PPC advertising is a good option because it will be hard to compete in the natural search results with all of the other businesses who are doing what you do. 
  
  
• How expensive will PPC advertising be to you? PPC advertising costs vary greatly depending on the competitiveness for the search keywords that you use in your campaign. Take a look at one of the PPC advertising programs below and find out how expensive it will be. If it’s really cheap, then it might be worth doing the campaign, even if the points above don’t apply to you.

Running an effective PPC campaign

One thing to keep in mind is that there is work involved in maintaining a PPC campaign. To save money and have an optimized campaign, it is a good idea to test your copy and monitor the performance of your campaign by keyword. Here are a few other things to consider.

• Start with a low position (which costs less) and increase your position to the optimal level of return on your investment. The #1 position is usually not the most cost-effective placement.
  
  
•   When choosing your keywords, try longer phrases instead of one-word keywords. They will be more targeted and will generally cost less. 
  
  
•  A great cost saver is adding common misspellings of your industry or product name. Although there may not be a large amount of traffic, the visits you will receive will be heavily discounted.
  
  
•  Use your search keywords in the title of your ads. This will bold the keywords within your ad, allowing your ad to stand out more than others who didn’t take the time to do so.
  
  
• Monitor the traffic of your site with Google Analytics. This free web analytics tool will provide you with robust reporting, providing you with all the information you’ll need to run a high performing online marketing campaign.

Popular PPC programs

The three most popular pay per click advertising programs available are:

Google AdWords

Yahoo Search Marketing

MSN adCenter

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By Amie Nguyen, with additions from Laura Messerschmitt. Article from www.jump.com: JumpUp is a free website and community from Intuit that helps new businesses get up and running successfully.