Pay Per Click (PPC) Basics

In just the last few years, PPC advertising has become really HOT and is growing astronomically.  PPC is an advertising system used by many search engines where an advertiser pays for an ad only when a user actually clicks on the ad, which will then take the user to the advertiser's website. 

The price the advertiser pays for the click varies and is generally determined by the advertiser.  The higher the price paid (or bid), the more often and more likely that the ad will appear either on a search engine results page or on a website page.

Google started search engine advertising in December of 1999 and then in October of 2000 they introduced the AdWords system whereby advertisers could create text ads for placement on the search engine results page, but the advertisers were charged per thousand ad displays (CPM).  Then, in 2002, PPC was introduced where advertisers only paid when a user actually clicked on the ad.

In 2007, the most notable PPC search engines were Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) and Microsoft adCenter.  Others include Yandex, LookSmart, Baidu and  Miva. 

Being Successful with Google Adwords

When Google implemented their PPC AdWords system in 2002, for the first time it became possible for one person to write a couple of ads that Google would display for FREE to over 100 million people on the Internet, and then you would pay Google (as little as a few cents) whenever someone clicked on the ad.  And all of this could be set up in about 15 minutes.

This system is a GREAT way to tell the world about your product or website!.
But it's not always as easy as it might sound.  Running a Google Adwords campaign involves much more than just writing good ad copy.   This is an important first step, but you need to understand other things such as:

• Bid management - knowing how much to spend and when to spend it
• Ad optimization - continually improving your ads to get better results
• Ad controls - monitoring your ads
• Maximizing your ad Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Tracking your clicks
• Measuring the clicks that convert into sales (conversions)
• etc.

AdWords has some nuances that can take a some time to get used to.  Most people have a rough time when they first start out and can easily become frustrated.

A guy named Perry Marshall has written one of the best books available that answers all the “how-to” questions concerning Google AdWords AND it also gives you advanced strategies for even turning around “failed” ad campaigns in just a few hours.  The e-book is called Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and it would be well worth your time to get a copy if you are going to work with the Adwords system.  In the Internet Marketing world it is considered the AdWords Bible.

Perry also has written a very helpful Free e-course called "5 days to success with Google AdWords".
Click the on the link to sign up for his FREE e-course.  If you want to succeed at AdWords, it has information you need to know. 5 Days to Success with Google AdWords

If you are going to use PPC advertising, you need to understand the basics, otherwise you won't be able to benefit from it, nor be successful at it.  So let's cover three of the most important basics involved in setting up a successful PPC campaign.

1. Building Effective Keyword Lists

First, you need start with a good keyword list.  This sets your direction so you know where you are going and what you are trying to achieve.  To create a keyword list, consider using a professional tool such like WordTracker or NicheBot or Keyword Elite instead of trying to come up with all your keywords yourself.  Why?  Because quite frankly, it is a real pain to try and manually compile a list of several hundred keywords and it takes a lot of time.  Time you could better spend doing something else, like developing good ad copy.

Also, a keyword tool will tell you exactly what people are searching for on the Internet and gives you many additional phrases that you would never think of yourself.  Using a good tool will allow you to easily compile a keyword list of even a thousand keywords in about an hour.

Once you have a keyword list, you'll need to break it down into sub-lists.  What this means is that instead of lumping all of your keywords together into one giant list, you break your list up into smaller, more targeted lists.

For example, say you have an online store that sells Baseball equipment.  If you start with the main keyword of "Baseball" and build a list that contains many kinds of baseball keywords, like "Baseball Gloves",  "Baseball Bats" and "Baseball Shoes", you wouldn't want them all in these keywords in the same list.  If someone were searching the Internet for "Baseball Shoes" and your ad came up and it was about "Baseball Gloves" you can bet that the person is not going to click on your ad.  Rather, you would want to have a separate ad campaign built around the keywords relating to "Baseball Shoes" and then the person would be much more likely to click on the ad.

So, once you create your first keyword list built around your main keyword, you would then pick out the "most searched for keywords" from this list (this is where a tool will really come in handy because it will tell you this information rather than you having to go find it out).  The "most searched for keywords" will be the keywords that will bring you the most traffic.  These "most searched for keywords" will become the main keywords for your sub-lists.

Thus, under your sub-list having the main keyword of "Baseball Bats", would be keywords like "Aluminum baseball bats", "Wood baseball bats", "Youth baseball bats", "Rawlings baseball bats", etc.

What's the advantage of creating sub-lists?
1.  First of all, it helps you focus your campaigns even further.  You can send visitors who click on your “Baseball Gloves” ad to an internal page on your web store that is dedicated to baseball gloves, the same for "Baseball Bats" and so on. 
2.  Secondly, your campaigns becomes more manageable. If one theme of keywords is not doing well, you can tweak it and improve it without affecting the other lists.

However, the most important reason to use sub-lists is that you can create ads that are tailored towards the  keywords in each sub-list.  As I mentioned before, an ad for “Baseball Gloves” will be much more effective than an ad for “Baseball Bats” if they both appeared next to search results for the term “cheap baseball gloves”.  Customized ads will give you higher Click Through Rates, and higher CTRs will mean lower advertising costs as well as a higher percentage of sales from your visitors because they will be finding what they are searching for.

2. Writing Good Ad Copy

There are two sections to an ad, the title (or the heading) and the text description.  One of the basic things that will help your ad get high impressions and high attention is to place the secondary main keyword once in the title and once in the text description.  Beyond this, there still much to learn about writing winning ad copy. PPC ads are like an intensely summarized version of a regular sales letter.  If you approach writing ad copy with this view, it will help you write better ads.

So in your copy, you want a riveting title/header, and a compelling text description.

Using Google's guidelines, they give you the space to for 25 characters in the title, and two lines of 35 characters each in the text description.  Writing winning ad copy boils down to this: Convincing skeptical web searchers to click on your ad instead of several others that are displayed, and doing this with 95 character or less.

You need to put each ad that you write through a stricter test than you would put a sales letter:

• Use the title to grab the searcher's attention:
  The title is the key to attracting the web searcher's attention.   If it contains the keywords that they are searching for, the keywords will show up as bold text and this will help make the ad stand out.
• Reel them in with your ad description:
  In the description you have just two short lines to convince the web searcher to click on your ad.
  Focus on the user and the benefits your website or product will give them.

If you follow the principles you will have an advantage over most of your competition.

3. Optimizing Your Ads

Setting up your ad campaign is the easy part.  Though managing it can be tricky.
The two main challenges facing a PPC campaign are:

• You don't know how well your ads will perform
• You don't know which keywords will end up converting into sales

Thus, managing a PPC campaign is a continuous process.
It is a process of continually tweaking your ads to see what works better and then use it.  You then tweak some more and see if it improves the ad again.  Then based on your new results you make some more changes. 

Remember, these improvements will make you ad work better, thus reducing your ad cost.  This improvement process actually involves making regular improvements not only to your ad copy, but to your keyword lists and maybe even in your website.

Your ultimate goal is to maximize your CTR.  The quick and easy way to do this is to pay a high enough ad price to rank you at the top of the ads list, but this can easily break your budget in a short time.  A better option is to regularly review your ads, discontinue the ones that are not doing well and improve on the ones that are doing better.  The ad improvements we are talking about do not have to be major ones.  Tweaking is all you need to do.  Substitute one word for another one.  Slightly change a sentence.  Rearrange the words in your sentence.  And keep watching to see if your CTR improves.

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