A Complete Guide To Pay Per Click For Small Businesses

Have you been looking for a way to quickly increase brand awareness, traffic and profits for your website?

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines can give you instant traffic and allow you to test new business models in real time. PPC advertising has so many benefits for your business. It gives any business owner who knows how to use it properly to have the ability to get their business, products, and services in front of hundreds of potential customers every single day.

When it comes to using PPC advertising as a marketing strategy it can be an extremely effective tool. In fact, it has the potential to bring in a steady flow of traffic and new leads for your business at a very affordable cost…much less than more traditional forms of advertising.

However, the pay-per-click market is competitive. It is worth spending an extensive period of time learning how to write and target ads, tracking your competitors, and doing deep keyword research before jumping in. However, the simple fact is, most people don’t fully understand its benefits or how to take full advantage of everything that PPC advertising has to offer their business!

This “PPC Advertising For Beginners” article is specifically designed to show even absolute beginners how PPC advertising can be used to increase awareness, attract more leads and increase profits for any business.

Even if you have never thought about using PPC advertising as a part of your marketing plan before, at the end of the article you will quickly understand why and how you can use it to your advantage and increase your profits!

A Brief Overview of PPC Advertising

First, let’s start with a brief overview of PPC advertising so that you can become familiar with how it works.

The Internet has fast become a significant medium for product and service advertising.  But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of web browsers, how can you make sure that your target consumers actually see your ad?

The ultimate goal of any online advertising campaign is to get your advertisement on the websites frequented by your target consumers. Before doing this, you need to define who your target customers will be. You can then create a plan for getting your ad on sites that they like to visit. This will in increase the possibility that your ad will get attention and will be clicked on by your target customers.

By definition, PPC is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”

While PPC advertising might seem complicated at first, it’s actually a very affordable way to get targeted traffic to your website and targeted traffic is really the only kind of traffic you want. Simply put, you set up a campaign and then you pay each time someone clicks through your ad to your website.

There are many PPC search engines available including Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and Bing Ads, which are three of the most popular places to start. Each one of these programs operates on the same basic premise. They display your ads on relevant websites and you pay them every time someone clicks on your ad. While they are all similar, they each have their own guidelines to follow.

It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the rules and regulations before you begin your advertising campaign. The all provide extensive help files and tutorials that you can use to help further your education.

You can check them out by visiting the links below.

Google Adwords:

https://www.google.com/adwords

Yahoo Search:

https://advertising.yahoo.com

Bing Ads:

http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/sign-up

To understand how pay per click works, let’s imagine that you have a website about collectible coins. You’ve written a great guide all about collectible coins and you sell it from your website. Maybe you also sell some rare pieces.

You want targeted traffic to come to your website. In this case, it would be people who have searched for collectible coins online. They are already interested in the topic of your website. That’s makes them targeted traffic.

The best keyword to use for your pay per click campaign would be collectible coins. But there’s a pretty good chance that other people might want that same keyword. So you would have to bid on it, and the highest bidder gets to use it.

If your website was especially designed for people who want to learn to make money with collectible coins, your phrase could be more specific aimed just at them. This keyword might bring you better-targeted traffic and have less competition.

Once you have your keywords and you decide how much you want to spend per day on your PPC campaign, then the company will display an ad that links to your website. If you won the keyword collectible coins, then when someone searches on that phrase your ad will be displayed on the search page.

Also, if there are websites dealing with collectibles, coins, and other related keywords that have joined the network, your ad may display on those sites so that their visitors might click through.

Your ad will be displayed until the purchased number of clicks have occurred, then it won’t display again until the next day. If you’re getting 100 clicks for $5, and you’ve set your budget for $5 per day, then even if you get 100 clicks in 20 minutes the ad won’t display again until the next day.

Because you can plan your campaign like this, based on a budget per day, PPC is an excellent way to market your business, products or services. It’s best to start out slow with a small budget. Let it run for few days. If at the end of that time you’re not making sales out of all those clicks, then you know you need to adjust your ad copy.

It might be that your ad copy needs changed, or your landing page needs tweaked or it could just be that the keyword you chose isn’t hitting the right market. All of these things can be adjusted through careful testing, tracking and campaign management, which we will be talking more about soon.

Now that you have a brief understanding of how PPC works let’s show you how to use PPC for your own business.

Organic Traffic vs Pay Per Click

The primary difference that exists between PPC traffic and ordinary organic traffic is the cost. When it comes to generating traffic through PPC advertising, as the advertiser you have make a small payment each time a user clicks on one of your ads. On the other hand, all of the leads and the clicks that are generated by organic traffic are completely free.

PPC advertising can generate a lot of traffic very quickly. It can also add up fast and can become very expensive if not managed correctly.

When it comes to generating traffic from your PPC campaign there are three things that you should keep in mind:

1. PPC is an excellent method for marketing that can create a large amount of buzz around a particular product or service very quickly.
2. It tends to be relatively inexpensive, especially in comparison to other methods of traditional advertising and marketing.
3. You can run short term or long term campaigns depending on what your needs are.

There are several different key elements that must be considers when it comes to the initial setup of your campaign, and these are:

• Ad creativity, because it is vital that your ad be well written, focused and creative.
• Landing page, because having a landing page that is well thought out before you set your pay per click traffic campaign up is absolutely essential. Your landing page should have content that relates to your advertisement online. A good landing page can mean all the difference when it comes to generating a high number of conversions.
• Call to action, as a call to action is a prominent and necessary element of your page that should be located “above the fold” rather than requiring that a visitor to your website scroll down before a call to action is offered.
• Testing, because you should always test your website, new ads, your landing page’s capabilities, call to action locations and how these different elements affect your conversion rates when it comes to generating pay per click traffic.

The difference between a successful PPC campaign and one that is unsuccessful often has to do with whether or not you are testing new options.  Such as ads and calls to action because these details really do make all the difference when it comes to creating an ad campaign for PPC that is going to generate results.

Converting Clicks into Sales

Pay per click advertising is one of the most affordable forms of online advertising. At its core, it’s all about generating leads and potential customers that will hopefully turn into buyers once they find out you have the product or service they need.

However, it doesn’t end there. It’s important to understand that while PPC advertising generates leads, there has to be a follow up system in place. It is important for users to find relevant information at the website they are directed to after they click on your ad.

This step is often neglected and while you may get lots of clicks on your ads you won’t see very many conversions if consumers don’t find the information they are looking for when they get to your website. Keep in mind that users are more likely to purchase products or services from a company that provided them with the information they want right away.

Qualifying Traffic

As we mentioned earlier a big benefit of using PPC advertising is that it provides qualified traffic to your website. When users click on an ad, they are in search of a particular product or service. The more focused your campaign is the better because it helps eliminate unnecessary clicks from non-prospective buyers.

A bidding process is used to establish the price of a specific keyword. In general, the budget for PPC advertising varies depending on the number of keywords used. These prices can skyrocket in just minutes as more and more sites bid for the same keyword thus causing the prices to jack up.

PPC ads are placed alongside search engine results that they are relevant to. The highest bids for a specific keyword or phrase gets top billing on the search engine results page. Getting top placement provides greater odds for an ad to get clicked on by a qualified searcher.

Campaign management

Proper management of PPC campaign can result in big profits, without it you can end up wasting a fortune on ads that don’t produce results. Managing your campaign involves three basic components; constant monitoring, response analysis and refinement. It is essential to track and test every aspect of your campaign to monitor the productivity of each PPC ad you place. This gives you the ability to modify or turn off any PPC ads that aren’t performing well.

The cost of PPC advertising is dictated by the clicks made on a particular ad. The number of clicks made on an ad is subtracted from the initial amount paid by you to a search engine company. To minimize cost and maximize your return on investment (ROI), you must monitor your campaign carefully.

Now that you understand PPC better you will know doubt want to get started on your PPC campaign but just before you do we there are just a couple more points you need to know before you dive in and start placing ads.

Do Your Research Before you Dive in

When it comes to using PPC advertising for your business there are many websites, books and videos available can teach you how to make the most return on your investment (ROI). These guides are a resource that can be invaluable to your business. They can save you a great deal of time. (We are also available to give you the advice and guidance that you need to set up a successful campaign so please feel free to contact us.)

Once you know what you are doing, you will want to research the available PPC programs to find the best one to advertise with, like Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are also smaller engines that are worth looking into as well. They have less influence. However, many people choose to use them because they are able to get effective traffic for much lower prices. Most often, this can be a few cents per click.

If you are not careful and don’t do the appropriate research, you could find yourself spending entirely too much money and not getting the traffic and sales in return. It pays to educate yourself especially when it comes to paid advertising.

While reputable PPC programs have built in tracking and analytics, you may also want to look into outside ad tracking services as your campaigns grow. They give you very specific statistics on clicks that are generated by your campaigns. There are many available so be sure to do your research before you invest. However the most popular and effective one is actually free.

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics

When it comes to running an effective campaign there are several things that should be tracked. For instance, you can use exact keyword tracking to see exactly which keywords are doing well and which ones are performing badly. This knowledge can mean a big difference when it comes to seeing a profit.

Proper tracking can provide a clear picture of all your ad campaigns including custom income and expense tracking. You will be able to track clicks and landing page conversions.  With proper conversion tracking in place, you will be able to track your sales and calculate your ROI.

By using website tracking tools and their reports, you can accurately track which ads and keywords result in sales. This will help you to determine and eliminate poorly performing advertising campaigns. It also tells which ad campaigns you should focus your energy and resources on to further perfect their performance.

As we mentioned earlier it’s a good idea to start out with a small investment until you learn the process and are comfortable tracking your campaign.

Can we help you?

Do you still find PPC daunting? If you want to see how effective PPC can be for your business but you don’t feel confident enough to do so, why not contact us and we can share our expertise or even run the campaign for you.