Selling services and products on the Internet can be a lucrative endeavor, but for someone just starting out, it can be a tough road to navigate. Trying to understand the ins and outs can take some time, but one of the first things to figure out is how to get traffic to your website. There are several methods for generating the traffic, two of which are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. This article discusses why you might want to use Pay-Per-Click in your next campaign.
When advertising online, your goal is to advertise your products as close as possible to the top of the search engine results. Pay-Per-Click and SEO can both be used to achieve this, but a basic difference between the two is that it can take minutes to get your pay-per-click results to the top while it may take weeks or months to get your SEO campaign to just as high of a position.
Most of the popular search engines offer some type of pay-per-click advertising. To use it, you write an ad and bid on keywords that correspond to it. If your ad is shown on the search engine and the viewer decides to click on it, you are charged your bid price and the searcher is sent to your website. Although the mechanics of pay-per-click are simple, the intricacies of how to get the clicks for the lowest price gets more complicated.
Using pay-per-click rather than some of the other methods to generate traffic to your website has many advantages to it. The largest advantage is that you can generate immediate traffic to your website just by placing an ad. If you wish to move up the positioning in the ad, you can simply increase your bid (there are also other ways to do this) until you are in the position you want to be. To move up in the rankings when using SEO, you would have to change your page and wait to see if the changes move you up in the rankings.
Pay-per-click advertising's biggest downside is that if you aren't careful about how you manage your ads, you might have your keywords bid up. Since the quickest way to move up in the ranking is to raise your bid, it also the most dengerous. A larger bid directly hits your bottom line. Luckily, raising your bid is not the only way to improve your rankings using PPC.
To determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some basic calculations to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. This value is computed 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 $600 in profits and there were 1,000 vistors, each hit would be theoretically worth $0.60. This basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of $0.60 per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to make a profit and not merely cover your costs. Therefore, you would certainly want to be paying less than $0.60 per click given our example.
Certain keywords that are highly in demand can have a much higher cost than $0.60 (from our example). Fortunately, the placement of the ad is also dependent on how well the ad is written and how closely it corresponds to the keyword and website. So, if you find the keyword is too epensive, you may have other alternatives than just turning the keyword off. Also, if you do your keyword research properly, you may be able to find less expensive alternatives.
As menioned earlier, PPC seems easy to understand, until you realize all of the simultaneously moving parts. The better your ad copy (how well it matches the keyword and your website), the less you pay for each click. Getting a firm understanding of these details will determine whether you will turn a profit or not.
When advertising online, your goal is to advertise your products as close as possible to the top of the search engine results. Pay-Per-Click and SEO can both be used to achieve this, but a basic difference between the two is that it can take minutes to get your pay-per-click results to the top while it may take weeks or months to get your SEO campaign to just as high of a position.
Most of the popular search engines offer some type of pay-per-click advertising. To use it, you write an ad and bid on keywords that correspond to it. If your ad is shown on the search engine and the viewer decides to click on it, you are charged your bid price and the searcher is sent to your website. Although the mechanics of pay-per-click are simple, the intricacies of how to get the clicks for the lowest price gets more complicated.
Using pay-per-click rather than some of the other methods to generate traffic to your website has many advantages to it. The largest advantage is that you can generate immediate traffic to your website just by placing an ad. If you wish to move up the positioning in the ad, you can simply increase your bid (there are also other ways to do this) until you are in the position you want to be. To move up in the rankings when using SEO, you would have to change your page and wait to see if the changes move you up in the rankings.
Pay-per-click advertising's biggest downside is that if you aren't careful about how you manage your ads, you might have your keywords bid up. Since the quickest way to move up in the ranking is to raise your bid, it also the most dengerous. A larger bid directly hits your bottom line. Luckily, raising your bid is not the only way to improve your rankings using PPC.
To determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some basic calculations to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. This value is computed 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 $600 in profits and there were 1,000 vistors, each hit would be theoretically worth $0.60. This basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of $0.60 per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to make a profit and not merely cover your costs. Therefore, you would certainly want to be paying less than $0.60 per click given our example.
Certain keywords that are highly in demand can have a much higher cost than $0.60 (from our example). Fortunately, the placement of the ad is also dependent on how well the ad is written and how closely it corresponds to the keyword and website. So, if you find the keyword is too epensive, you may have other alternatives than just turning the keyword off. Also, if you do your keyword research properly, you may be able to find less expensive alternatives.
As menioned earlier, PPC seems easy to understand, until you realize all of the simultaneously moving parts. The better your ad copy (how well it matches the keyword and your website), the less you pay for each click. Getting a firm understanding of these details will determine whether you will turn a profit or not.
About the Author:
prior to using pay-per-click advertising to sell your products and services, make sure to read Rick Davison's comments on PPC Classroom 2.0 and receive 337 page free report for getting your online marketing career started.
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