Pay Per Click Advertising
How To Make A Website > More Website Traffic > Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay Per Click advertising, PPC, is the
practice of paying for traffic to your website. This is accomplished
by setting a bid as to the amount you are willing to pay per click.
In most models the the person bidding the most
per click will achieve a higher ranking. I'll explain this in depth
later.
Pay Per Click advertising is a
great way to start driving immediate traffic to your
website but you'll need to make sure that your website
is developed well and has value to the website visitor
otherwise you're simply throwing your money way.
How Does Pay Per Click Advertising Work?
Pay Per Click advertising, which I'll refer to as
PPC, works by biding for placement on whatever keywords that you'd
like to rank well for. In most models the more you bid the better
you're ranking.The exception to this is
Google Adwords, they've included a relevancy factor into their
rankings. The way that this is works is that you receive a 'bonus'
for relevant ads. For example, if you have a website that sells
purses and you bid on keywords related to purses you receive a
relevancy 'bonus'.
What Google is trying to do is provide the
most relevant ads to their search results. Now say your site is
about purses but you bid on keywords related to shoes. You're
website related to purses is as relevant to shoes so you don't
receive that relevancy 'bonus'.
With that said, you could be bidding more than
the website listed above you because the website may be relevant to
shoes so they perform in the search results better.
How Much Does Pay Per Click Advertising Cost?
This is going to vary based on how competitive
the market is for what you're selling. If you're selling something
extremely competitive like plasma TVs you can plan on paying a lot
more than if you're selling dog tags.If
the market is competitive you can expect that they top ads are
paying quite a bit of money per click so this is something to
consider when you're choosing a market.
With that said, even if you're in a
competitive market you can do keyword research on niche markets that
the 'big guys' are overlooking. This will allow you to keep your PPC
campaigns more affordable.
The last thing I want to say is that the rates
are going to vary among PPC providers. With Google being the most
popular search engine out there you can expect to pay more per click
than if you were bidding for the exact same keyword on Yahoo.
What Are The Best Pay Per Click Providers?
Far and away the most popular PPC provider is
Google Adwords,
. As I mentioned above, Google is the most visited
search engine in the world. You'll also
find that you get the most targeted traffic
and Google has done a pretty good job of reducing
click fraud.
Another option is
Yahoo Search Marketing,
formerly Overture. The ironic thing is that Overture was by far and
away the leader in PPC advertising just a few short years ago but
Google took PPC advertising very seriously and have since passed
them.
Other than that there are a few other options
in the market that provide PPC Advertising but they have taken heat
on the amount of click fraud that you receive from them. A few of
the other providers are
FindWhat.com
and Search123.com.
If you choose an option other than Adwords or
Yahoo you'll find that the cost per click, CPC, is a lot lower than
those on the other two options.
What Is Click Fraud?
There are really two types of click fraud. The
first is simply clicking on a competitors PPC ad so that it costs
him more money. This is done with the hopes that he'll stop
advertising or at least cut down on it.
The other type is to earn revenue. With the ability to place PPC
advertising on your website through Google Adsense or other
providers you can earn a portion of each click. The idea is to click
on an ad that's placed on your own website to earn more revenue.
The good thing is that the major Pay Per Click
providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have taken this practice very
seriously. They have put a lot of different measures in place to
reduce the amount of click fraud but just like anything. The
scammers are always one step ahead.
Just be sure to keep a close on your your PPC
campaigns. You'll start to develop trends and you'll start to
recognize unusual trends. At that point you'll want to contact the
support department to have them look into it further.
Pay Per Click Summary
I just wanted to touch on a couple of topics.
Like I mentioned, PPC advertising is a great way to start getting
immediate traffic to your website because you don't need to rely on
search engine rankings.
The flip side to this is that you really need
to make sure that your website is ready for traffic otherwise you're
just throwing money away. It's important to keep a very close eye on
your PPC campaigns, especially in the beginning because you may find
that you're spending money on clicks and they aren't converting into
sales or other sort of leads.
Once you become a bit more seasoned you'll
know what to look for so be sure that you do your due diligence when
dealing with any PPC provider.
Webmaster ForumI invite you to visit my
webmaster forum,
it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow
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