Pay Per Click Advertising Can Pay Off For Small and Medium Size Businesses
Pay per click, or PPC advertising, is a cost effective, measurable way to drive sales leads, build your brand and augment the power of your website, especially if you are a small to medium size business.
Most likely you've heard of PPC advertising. But it's also likely that you're not aware of what goes into creating, measuring and tweaking your PPC ads so that you get the most out of your advertising spend. We'll cover that below, but first, let's define PPC advertising and talk about its advantages.
PPC ads are simple in nature: you create and place an ad for a product, service, a special offer. The most common PPC ads are text ads that appear on the first few pages of search engine results.
When someone clicks on your ad, called a click through, you are charged a fee. You do not pay for "impressions", meaning, for all of the viewers who are exposed to the ad (although there are programs for that too.) The fee is partially based on what you have bid for the ad and partially on what similar ads are bidding and paying. You can set a maximum pay per click bid. A cost per click can range from pennies to dollars.
There are many advantages of PPC advertising. You can establish a maximum daily budget, whether a low budget such as a few dollars, or a much higher budget. You can change your budget or suspend your ads at any time. You can create a variety of ads with different headlines, subheads or offers and see which ads perform best. There's more...
You can set up different campaigns and ad groups that each target a different set of keywords. You can advertise locally, regionally or nationally. You can drive people to a landing page specially created for that ad or offer. And you can measure your advertising results within hours. You can even track whether your ads result in a "conversion" by placing a code snippet on your website.
For those who are in the process of optimizing their website, pay per click advertising can augment the SEO (search engine optimization) process. Since getting your SEO up to speed can take several months, PPC ads can drive traffic to your site and garner sales leads until your SEO program starts to deliver organic, or non-paid, results.
We mentioned above that measurement of your PPC ads can take place instantly. This is valuable because you can tweak your ads in real time until you get optimum results. By creating a variety of ads with different headlines and messaging, you can see which ones perform best, then drop the low-performing ads. You can watch how each ad performs in terms of its click-throughs and the cost per click. You can even see what specific keywords drive the most traffic to your ads.
The smartest PPC advertisers carry their campaigns a couple steps further. They create a landing page on their website for each ad group they create. This way, those who click through never have to navigate a website to learn more about what was offered in the ad; they get straight to a page that's 100% relevant to the ad copy. The other thing smart PPC advertisers do is to set up conversion tracking. This way they can measure not only visits to the landing page but whether the visitor "converted." A conversion can be whatever you want it to be: a form completed, a download, a request for a sales rep to call them.
Ideally, PPC ad campaigns are part of your larger marketing effort and your overall marketing strategy. It may pay off for you to discuss your broad or specific marketing needs with a qualified marketing agency.
So, pay per click advertising is simple in principle. But as you've probably surmised by the above overview and options for PPC, it can get somewhat involved in its execution. So your PPC campaigns should be set up by someone who knows what they're doing. Then your campaign should be monitored closely (as in weekly) so you can see how it's performing, then tweaked constantly until you have the right formula.
It's best to rely on an experienced agency or contractor to set up and manage your PPC advertising. Whoever you choose should also know about website optimization, or SEO, and be able to deliver compelling ad copy that gets results.
Most likely you've heard of PPC advertising. But it's also likely that you're not aware of what goes into creating, measuring and tweaking your PPC ads so that you get the most out of your advertising spend. We'll cover that below, but first, let's define PPC advertising and talk about its advantages.
PPC ads are simple in nature: you create and place an ad for a product, service, a special offer. The most common PPC ads are text ads that appear on the first few pages of search engine results.
When someone clicks on your ad, called a click through, you are charged a fee. You do not pay for "impressions", meaning, for all of the viewers who are exposed to the ad (although there are programs for that too.) The fee is partially based on what you have bid for the ad and partially on what similar ads are bidding and paying. You can set a maximum pay per click bid. A cost per click can range from pennies to dollars.
There are many advantages of PPC advertising. You can establish a maximum daily budget, whether a low budget such as a few dollars, or a much higher budget. You can change your budget or suspend your ads at any time. You can create a variety of ads with different headlines, subheads or offers and see which ads perform best. There's more...
You can set up different campaigns and ad groups that each target a different set of keywords. You can advertise locally, regionally or nationally. You can drive people to a landing page specially created for that ad or offer. And you can measure your advertising results within hours. You can even track whether your ads result in a "conversion" by placing a code snippet on your website.
For those who are in the process of optimizing their website, pay per click advertising can augment the SEO (search engine optimization) process. Since getting your SEO up to speed can take several months, PPC ads can drive traffic to your site and garner sales leads until your SEO program starts to deliver organic, or non-paid, results.
We mentioned above that measurement of your PPC ads can take place instantly. This is valuable because you can tweak your ads in real time until you get optimum results. By creating a variety of ads with different headlines and messaging, you can see which ones perform best, then drop the low-performing ads. You can watch how each ad performs in terms of its click-throughs and the cost per click. You can even see what specific keywords drive the most traffic to your ads.
The smartest PPC advertisers carry their campaigns a couple steps further. They create a landing page on their website for each ad group they create. This way, those who click through never have to navigate a website to learn more about what was offered in the ad; they get straight to a page that's 100% relevant to the ad copy. The other thing smart PPC advertisers do is to set up conversion tracking. This way they can measure not only visits to the landing page but whether the visitor "converted." A conversion can be whatever you want it to be: a form completed, a download, a request for a sales rep to call them.
Ideally, PPC ad campaigns are part of your larger marketing effort and your overall marketing strategy. It may pay off for you to discuss your broad or specific marketing needs with a qualified marketing agency.
So, pay per click advertising is simple in principle. But as you've probably surmised by the above overview and options for PPC, it can get somewhat involved in its execution. So your PPC campaigns should be set up by someone who knows what they're doing. Then your campaign should be monitored closely (as in weekly) so you can see how it's performing, then tweaked constantly until you have the right formula.
It's best to rely on an experienced agency or contractor to set up and manage your PPC advertising. Whoever you choose should also know about website optimization, or SEO, and be able to deliver compelling ad copy that gets results.
B2B Inc. is a St. Paul, Minnesota-based marketing-advertising agency.
B2B Inc. offers several helpful, objective white papers and other information to help marketers craft better marketing programs. Visit B2B Inc. today at http://www.b2bmn.com for more information.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joseph_A_Hendershot B2B Inc. offers several helpful, objective white papers and other information to help marketers craft better marketing programs. Visit B2B Inc. today at http://www.b2bmn.com for more information.
No comments:
Post a Comment