Pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the most cost effective ways to reach consumers on the net. PPC ads are a form of contextual search engine based advertising, meaning that your ads are targeted based on the keywords people use when searching for products and services like the ones your business offers.
Pay Per Click advertising is more focused than traditional forms of advertising. At the click of a button, it affords visitors to a website the opportunity to know more about a product or service they are interested in. PPC is commonly done in conjunction with search engine results so that relevant ads can be presented based on the search terms entered. Advertisers compete for advertising space and bid what they are willing to pay for each click for those keywords. PPC advertising is an advertising solution offered by internet business giants involved in search engine, websites and advertising networks. The PPC advertising is a web marketing tool that contains keywords and phrases in 3 to 4 liner text advertisements.
As a very simple example of how this works, lets say that you own a garden supply shop. You may choose to use a phrase like hydrangeas in your PPC ads. Your ad will only be displayed alongside search results for this term; allowing you to display your ad to those consumers who are already interested in this topic. Since your advertisements are shown only to the people who are your most likely customers, the rate of response is inherently higher with PPC advertising.
The following are a few helpful hints for reaching your target market with PPC campaigns:
Keyword research: If your website is optimized for a certain keyword or keywords use them as the basis for some of your PPC ads. Its also a good idea to find out which relevant keywords are among the most popular with web users. You can use free tools such as the Google AdWords program provides or any number of commercial software packages for this.
PPC ad copy: There is an art to writing this sort of extremely short form copy. You have even less space than you would if you were advertising by text message, so youll have to make every word count. Focus on phrases like buy hydrangeas at (your site here) or low priced hydrangeas and the like. What youre trying to do is to make it obvious that you can purchase the product by clicking the link. This may seem like a no-brainer, but its surprisingly effective; and it helps to weed out people looking for freebies.
Use global negatives: You can define your campaigns to exclude searches based on specific terms. If your keywords lend themselves to showing up in unrelated searches, youll want to try to exclude search terms which tend to bring these irrelevant results up. Many internet marketers dont understand how to use this feature, but you need to ” it allows you to narrowly focus your advertising.
Track and refine your PPC campaigns as you go: One of the biggest advantages of PPC advertising is that it offers a degree of accountability that few if any other advertising strategies can match. If youre using Google PPC ads, youll be able to track your impression statistics, your click through rate as well as your conversion rate.
Geo-targeting: Geo-targeting is useful when your online presence is used to promote an offline business. Local Search is the actual search one does, but with the intentions of doing it in a particular area only. Geo-targeting lets you target your ads to specific locations and languages. For each AdWords campaign, you can select the countries or regions and the language(s) for your ad.
You can make an experiment with different ad copy and keywords for your PPC advertising to find which work best. Drop ads which arent performing well for you and focus on the ones that are. Since you can monitor your response rate and conversions easily, you can adapt your campaigns on the fly ” one of the great strengths of PPC advertising.