Pay Per Click advertising

Quite like search engine optimization, PPC advertising is a lot about getting the basics right. If you have solid foundations, your campaigns will invariably be a success. Let's go through the core elements of any PPC campaign. PPC advertising allows you to bring traffic to your website in just minutes . PPC pays for itself AND your other SEM expenses (like link-building) while leaving you a decent profit margin . Keyword Research When compiling your keyword list, consider using a professional tool such as WordTracker or NicheBot instead of coming up with all the keywords yourself. Why? Because quite frankly, no one has the time to manually compile a list of several hundred keywords. Also, these tools will tell you exactly what people are searching for AND give you a lot more options that you may never have even thought of. Using either WordTracker or NicheBot, you can easily compile a keyword list of even a thousand keywords in under an hour.Another tool that I highly recommend is a program called Keyword Locator. You can have a look at that program below. It does a heck of a lot more than WordTracker and Nichebot.Once you have your keyword list ready, break it down into sub-lists. Essentially, instead of lumping together all the keywords, you can use the main keywords as “headers” build your list around them. These headers will be the keywords receiving the most traffic. To give you an example, take an online soccer store. Possible headers would include adsense pay rate , Google AdSense , adsense pay per click text ads, pay per click, Yahoo AdSense, pay per click advertising and even overture pay per click. All these terms have hundreds of related keywords . What's the advantage of creating sub-lists? For one, it helps you focus your campaign even further – you can send visitors clicking on your “Google AdSense” ads to an internal page on your store that is dedicated to Google AdSense, and so on. Second, your campaign becomes more manageable – if one theme of keywords is not working well, you can improve it without affecting the rest of the lists. However, the most important reason to using sub-lists is that you can create ads that are customized towards your header keywords. An ad for overture pay per click will not be as effective as an ad for pay per click if they both appeared next to search results for the term Yahoo AdSense. Customized ads will give you higher click-through rates , and a high ad CTR can help lower overall costs . Ad Copy Your ad copy will make or break your pay per click campaign, so it is important to get it just right. There are two sections of your ad, the title (or the heading), and the ad description . Apart from adhering to the basics (place your sub-list “header” once in the title, and once in the description), there is a lot to learn about writing winning ad copy. Think of PPC ads as intensely summarized version of a regular sales letter – approach ad copy with that view will help you write better. The ad copy has two key components – a riveting title/header, and a compelling description. Taking Google's example, you have space to write 25 characters in the title, and two lines of 35 characters each in the description. Eventually, writing winning ad copy boils down to convincing the skeptical searcher into clicking on your ad (amongst several others) in a maximum of 95 characters. Put each ad that you write through a stricter test than you would put your sales letter. The title is the key to attracting the searcher's attention – if it contains the keywords that are being searched for, the keywords will show up in bold and help make the ad more visible. The description, on the other hand, has just two short lines to convince the searcher to click on the ad. Focus on the user and the benefits your website / product will provide. If it helps, you can make a bulleted list of key terms that highlight your business and spread them throughout your ads. Use the title to grab the searcher's attention , and then reel them in with your ad description. If you follow the principles you have used to write your sales letter, you'd be at an advantage compared to most of your competition. Ad Optimization Setting up the ad campaign is, believe it or not, the easy part. Managing it is tricky (though your work is reduced if you get the basics right). There are two main challenges facing a PPC campaign: You don't know how well your ads will work You don't know which keywords will convert into sales The result is that managing a PPC campaign is a continuing process of tweaking your ads based on results – it ultimately involves regular improvements in your ad copy, to keyword lists and maybe even in your website. The main aim of managing a PPC campaign is to constantly try to increase your CTR . While the quick and dirty way to do this is to pay high enough to rank on the top of the ads list, this can easily break your budget. A better option is to regularly review your ads, weed out the ones that don't work and improve on the ones that do work. Like sales letters, this involves reusing the working elements (titles and descriptions) and modifying them slightly to test if the CTR improves.