What is PPC Search Engine Advertising?
PPC Search Engine Advertising ( Pay Per Click ), is where you pay a search engine, bidding on certain keywords and phrases. The highest bidder shows up first, and many times only pays if their site gets clicked on. This is important so I'll repeat it: ONLY PAYS IF CLICKED ON.
For free traffic, you want everyone you can get to click on your advertisement. For example if you pay $6 for an aol classified ad, you want to get hundreds of thousands of visitors because the cost is only $6 no matter if you get 1 or 100,000 visitors. Pay per click search engines work differently.
In a PPC search engine, you may pay as low as 1 cent all the way up to 1.00 per click. Obviously you want to make sure that the clicks you get are super qualified, and that they will buy a product, not just look at your products.
In google adwords program you can also target specific regions, like your hometown or state!
How the PPC Search Engines Make Their Money
Almost all of the tutorials that you will find from the PPC search engines will tell you to get high click through ratios and use wide terms. Of course this makes them the most money. But it is also extremly costly for you! The better way is to bid low on many, very precise terms. Here is a list of Bad Keywords for a site that sells pet supplies:
- collar
- Dog Food
- Cat
- Brush
- Bowl
These terms are so general that you'll get people searching for many "dog" related or "cat" related terms that have no interest in your product.
Here is a list of better terms for the "dog" section of your pet supply website:
- dog collar
- dog brush
- dog chew toys
These are better because they really narrow down what kind of traffic we are going to get. Here is an even better list:
- velcro dog collar
- rhinestone dog collar
- dog shock collar
- dog training collar
This, is of course, assuming you sell these EXACT products. By using precise terms like this you are pretty sure that the people that click on your keyword bids will be very qualified and interested in what you have to offer.
How Many Words Should I Bid on?
If you have an infinite ad budget, then it's ok to use root words like "dog" and "collar", most people do not have much money to throw away on untargeted traffic. The methods above show you how to make PPC search engine advertising profitable.
You should have hundreds of words or even thousands, bidding very low on all ofthem so that you'll get good traffic, and it won't cost you much.
How Much Should I Bid, Is First Place Important?
In general, you should bid as low as possible to appear on the first page, but not the first position.
First position can cost as much as 10x the lowest first page spot. You may not get as much raw traffic, but you'll pay much less for the traffic that you actually do get.
Also, make sure you place a daily spending limit on your bidding. A good one for ALL of your terms is $1 to $5 per day. If you are bidding only 5 cents per click, that is 20 to 100 visitors per day, which should be a sale once a week to once per day on most products. Read the statistics tutorial to know what to expect. In general it takes 100 to 200 visitors to make one sale. You can safely estimate that using this method will cost you $5 to $10 per sale as long as your site is easy, prices are good and everything is working. This can be greatly increased by following up and offering gimmicks and sales, but 1 of 100 is an easily obtainable goal.
Where should You Link to on Your Pages?
This is important and often overlooked! Make sure that you link to the exact product you are selling. You don't want to bring your targeted search for "rhinestone collar" to your "pet supply" homepage. You want your visitor to click your PPC advertisment, then click your shopping cart in as few as steps as possible. If they have to look around, they can get distracted and leave your site. Sometimes this means additional setup work in the PPC search engines, but it is worth it.
What are the Main Points to Remember?
- Bid very little on many precise words
- Set a Daily Spending limit of $1 to $5
- It will take 200 to 100 visitors to make 1 sale
- Target the search results to lead to the exact page of the item
- Target Regions if Necessary
How do I Setup Google Adwords Pay Per Click?
Google adwords are excellent, instant, and cheap. You should start by using google and then as you are comfortable move on to the other programs ( like overture ). To setup Google Adwords do the following:
- click https://adwords.google.com/select/
- setup an account and login
- create an ad campaign, usually 1 per website
- create an ad group, usually 1 per product or service on each website
Google has a few guidelines about how their ads should be labeled and written. You should review all of their rules here:
But in their own words, here is the summary:
- Clearly and accurately describe your site.
- Emphasize the unique benefits of your product or service
How do we Write the Google Adwords Ad?
One of the products for sale on my website are angels. Angels are extremely popular, having a search count of over 600,000 per month so I'm pretty sure this will be a hot seller.
Here is the final ad as it will appear in google. I will only bid 5 cents on this ad. I set it to appear in the English United States searches only at a maximum rate ( for the entire campaign ) of $1 per day.
Note that I show the link of:
but the actual target is:
This is done so that they go directly to my angels section and are ready to buy. Google won't allow me to display a long link, but I can display a short link and then put the code in for an exact link, just like I did on the actual ad.
In your headline you should summarize what all of your "angel" gifts are, and in the description try to qualify your clicks by giving the details of what they will find.
You want to be specific and match exactly what you sell here. Google forbids false advertising here, and it will cost you money too!
What Words Should You Bid On?
Google has a built in suggestion tool ( click edit keywords and then keyword tool ), which is very useful. I like to also start with Overture's Suggestion tool as well.
Both of these tools will recommend the most popular searches for you and provide you with ideas of what to target.
Overture shows me that "concrete angels" are extremly popular, so I will want to make sure I bid on that keyword and include it in my keywords in the html of my page, as well as the titles too.
How do you change your Max Bid Price?
Click on "Edit Keywords" and then type in your Max CPC ( Cost Per Click ). Make sure you save your changes too.
Google started my bids at $4.01 max CPC! WOW! OUCH! Make sure you edit your max CPC
Can I bid Different Amounts for Each Word?
Click on the "edit keywords" link and you'll be brought to the options where you can edit the exact max bid for each term. You can aslo do nifty rules like disqualify certain words and give exact links for each item.
As an example, I wanted to show up a little bit higher on "angel music boxes" so I bid 8 cents max instead of 5. I also wanted to be hidden from any search of baseball, paintings and posters so I used the minus sign to exclude those words.
You are not required to go so in depth, but you have the option of setting this up however you want.
How Many Ad Groups Should You Have?
You should put one ad group for each main keyword or service that you provide. I will now repeat this entire process for about 40 other main keywords, bidding just a little on many exact matches. The whole thing will generate my 20 to 100 visits a day and they will all be very targeted visitors!
Overture Pay Per Click Advertising
Overture is excellent as well. It is slightly more exspensive than google, but it has a different search base too. Google is specifically for google searchers, but overture hits MSN, Yahoo, Amazon and many other search engines. Aditionally, these appear as links to google. So google will give you link popularity because of this! This is the main reason why I recommend overture.
Follow the same principals for google and you'll do fine. I suggest a $1 a day limit, although many of the settings will be much different, the principals are exactly the same.
The link to Overture's PPC is:
Other PPC Search Engine Programs
There are several other PPC search engines, none of which I've used, but all of which are regarded as effective both in cost and results. You are free to experiment with them, but set your limit to $1 a day max and see how the results work.
It is very important that you watch ALL PPC services like a hawk, and make sure that you are being profitable from your searches. Refine your searches, becoming as precise as possible until you are profitable.
- Goclick - 1 cent per visitor, $10 minimum bid startup. AWESOME!
- Search123
- bids start at 5 cents, low opening balance, decent exposure.
- Kanoodle - Useful, but minimum bid is 20 cents. They have a content related search function and a PPC search engine. Minimum starting balance is $50.
- Bidvertiser - Not quite as big as the others, but still a good source for PPC traffic. Very precise targeting of placement.
There are literally hundreds of other PPC search engines, but start with these and tweak them until you are sure that you are making money for every dollar you put out. Remember to use a spam email address because you will likely get bombarded by their marketing material when you sign up. The services are all good though!
How do I Track my Ads?
Ad tracking is amazingly simple! When you provide the links you can supply all the info you need to track. Take this link for example from the previous google example:
- gift-ideas.digitalcrunch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?c=S&D=angel
The break down of all of the peices of this URL is:
- gift-ideas is called a hostname, some sites use them
- digitalcrunch.com is called the domain, also called a URL/URI
- /cgi-bin/ is a directory on the digitalcrunch.com domain
- search.cgi is the program that does the searches
- c=S is a chunk of data that the search.cgi program looks for, it tells it to do a search
- D=Angel tells the search.cgi program to search for "angel" and return the results.
You can modify almost any link to show up in your logs. Most extra data is ignored if it isn't used, but it is still logged.
- gift-ideas.digitalcrunch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?c=S&D=angel&src=goo&term=angel+gift
Later, you could look through your logs and see exactly how many times that page was hit, knowing that ONLY google adwords has that link.
You could also do something like this if you don't have a search program:
- gift-ideas.digitalcrunch.com?&src=aolclass&term=angel+gift
You can then look through your logs and count how many times "aolclass" appeared. It's EASY!
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