Pay Per Click

PPC Advertising Basics

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, is a simple but sometimes costly method to advertise your website to potential customers.  The advantage in using PPC advertising for your business is the almost instant visitor traffic to your website.  The advertiser, you, only pays when and if someone clicks on your ad.  This process is vastly different than traditional forms of advertising where visibility of your ad is the only guarantee.  Another tremendous advantage is the ability to track, monitor, and analyze the your ad spend and visitor statistics.  This can be invaluable as it permits almost real time ROI tracking.

Importance

PPC does not discriminate or allow advantage by business size or type.   Any business can easily participate in PPC advertising.  However, business’s with larger budgets can incorporate a larger degree of analytics and monitoring to enable intelligent decision processes.  The larger budget could enabled a business to find higher converting keywords, lower cost for PPC with the use of split and multivariate testing, and a broader range of long tail keywords through use of specialized PPC management software.

Application

PPC, in a basic form, is a real time and full time auction.  The advertisers name the price they are will to pay to be listed.  The higher the bid the better or higher your ad placement. The better your placement the more clicks you will potentially receive.  The price you pay to gain higher listings is determined by a number of factors.  Your website landing page as well as your bidding keywords and ad text can all effect your price and your click through ratio.  A poor ad directed to an irrelevant web page will cost more than a well constructed ad directly to a highly relevant web page.  WordPress is geared toward easily aligning your website or landing page to your PPC campaigns.

Considerations

Google Adwords is easily the most widely used form of PPC advertising.  Bing and Yahoo also offers PPC advertising.  The advertiser should always make wide use of keyword match types.  Google defines these as “Broad”, “Phrase”, and “Exact” match.  Exact match keywords will only show your ad when a searcher type in the exact keyword phrase that you advertise for.  Phrase match will show your ad when the search includes your keyword phrase in the exact order within their search criteria.  Broad match, easily the most dangerous in terms of run-away ad spend, will show your ad when any single word in your keyword phrase is contained in the searchers search criteria.

Benefit

PPC advertising can create immediate visitors, and revenue if those vistors convert to business opportunities.  PPC advertising costs money, so you need to make sure your website or landing page is highly optimized to convert traffic.  There is no limit on your ad spend and traffic obtained.  The advertiser needs to setup well defined metrics to monitor the profitability of each campaign and PPC keyword.