Pay Per Click Advertising

Most people have seen numerous pay-per-click ads. Some pay per click search engines put them at the top of the search engine results pages, and label them something like "sponsored links" or "featured links". Others follow Google's procedure of placing PPC links at the right side of the page. The ads you see in the right margins of many of the pages here at emarketingman.com are PPC ads. Many people do not realize that pay per click advertising can appear on individual web sites, which generates revenues for the webmaster, and gains exposure for advertisers.

In a nutshell, PPC advertising involves opening an account and "bidding" for placement of your ads on the pages relevant to various search terms. Depending on the pay per click program and the search term, these ads can cost anywhere from a few cents per click to several dollars per click. As you might guess, there is a whole art and science to this, and you have to be careful, or you can spend a small fortune in PPC fees, and get little or no return in terms of sales. It will pay you to learn about how to do effective PPC advertising.

Fortunately, a couple of excellent ebooks exist that will teach you how to do effective and inexpensive advertising. These pay per click advertising guides are an invaluable resource (I use them myself, and highly recommend them) that will save you far more than they will cost you. I've learned several methods from these ebooks that have cut my advertising costs by half or more.

Once you have an idea what you're doing, you'll need to investigate which pay per click search engines to advertise with. In the PPC world, there are two there are two eight hundred pound gorillas, and a couple of other smaller, but still hefty gorillas. The rest are much smaller, and less influential, but some people consider them of value simply because you can buy traffic at bargain prices, often a few cents per click.

By the way, if you do this wrong, you can spend a ton of money, and make little or nothing. Not only will it pay you to educate yourself, you should seriously consider investing in a click fraud prevention and ad tracking service. They give you detailed statistics on how many clicks are being generated by your pay-per-click ads, as well as any banner ads or ezine advertising that you do. You might also want to consider having your PPC campaigns professionally managed. The money spent on an expert could easily be less than you would have lost while learning the process yourself.

It is often wise to start with one of the less expensive pay per click programs until you learn what you are doing, and can comfortably move up to the more costly ones. On the other hand, some of the lesser-known PPC programs are alleged to have much higher rates of "click fraud" (clicks you pay for, even though they were not generated by a human searcher) than do the majors.

Your goal is to make money, and you need to control costs. Many people make a nice living bidding on offbeat search terms such as misspellings of popular key words, and long key word phrases that have little competition. The idea is that if you can have a large percentage of the inexpensive clicks on a low-traffic search term, you are often better off than paying high fees for a low percentage of clicks on a costly term.

Many experts advocate that you turn off the "content network", at least when testing your ads, since site visitors are not as highly targeted in what they are looking for as are people who see your ad only on the search engine results pages. Then, once you know something works well on natural search you can experiment with whether your success rate goes up or down when you also run your ads on the content network.

Finally, you need to test whether using only highly targeted "exact match" ads works better in your market, or whether you can also profit with "phrase match" and "broad match" turned on. The bottom line is your return on investment. If your ads produce the kinds of leads that you want, or result in adequate sales, then you are in profit, which is what PPC is all about.

If you're going to invest money in Pay-Per-Click Advertising, I would strongly advise that you invest in a monthly click tracking service, which is also very useful for tracking ezine ads, results from doorway pages, and even the clicks you get from publishing your articles on the web.

This will pay for itself many times over, *guaranteed*. I don't want to admit how much money I wasted on useless PPC ads before I figured out what I was doing! Do not repeat my mistake!

Major Pay Per Click Search Engines

Google Ad Words is now the leader in contextual advertising, and probably the most popular of the PPCs. The ads displayed on the right hand side of a Google search results page are from Ad Words, as are the listings you see on the pages of some sites. The latter are part of the Google Ad Sense program. You as the webmaster share in the PPC revenue when your site visitors click on the ads. You have the choice of being an Ad Words advertiser, an Ad Sense display merchant, or both.

Yahoo Publisher Network (formerly Overture) is also one of the two most popular of the PPC search engines, and an excellent way to get targeted traffic to your web site. They give you some assistance in developing good listings, which must be approved by their editors before they can be displayed. While YPN is improving their algorithm, many people say they are lagging behind Google in their ability to match ads with web site content and search terms accurately

Find What is probably the most popular of the smaller PPC search engines, generally costs less per click than the "majors", and is a great way to get started and learn how to effectively use PPC advertising before you start paying the higher per click costs at Google and Overture. The same is true of Kanoodle, another very popular but relatively small PPC search engine.

By the way, both Find What and my other favorite, Kanoodle offer visitors to EmarketingMan.Com a special introductory offer if you sign up through my links here. You get a similar deal from Overture through my links.

If you want to learn quickly about Pay Per Click e-marketing strategy and tactics, check out these terrific ebooks on advertising strategy with pay per click programs. While they tend to focus on advertising in Google specifically, the strategy for other PPC search engines is all but identical.

Quite a few people make a nice living from Affiliate Programs alone using strategies similar to those described in these ebooks, without even having a website. And don't forget the ad tracking service that will help you to monitor all of your campaigns, and get the most out of your PPC advertising dollars.

As you might guess, successful pay-per-click advertising involves being able to find search phrases that have significant traffic, but a modest number of competing advertisers. Some people concentrate on pages that result from misspelled key words, or complex key word phrases. Wordtracker is an invaluable tool for researching these phrases, and for researching your key words when optimizing your web site for the conventional search engines.

If you can't afford the Wordtracker subscription fee, you might want to check out Ad Word Analyzer, which automates some of the tasks you can accomplish with Wordtracker, but only costs you one time, rather than maintaining an ongoing subscription. I started out using the software, and more recently switched to Wordtracker. I was very happy with both, but like Wordtracker because I can use it for many other tasks, such as generating key words for doorway pages that serve not only as landing pages for my PPC ads, but also rank well in traditional search engines.

I strongly recommend that you concentrate your efforts initially on the PPC search engines mentioned above. As you learn what you're doing, you may want to expand your horizons. When that time comes, check out this very comprehensive listing of pay per click search engines.