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 What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click Advertising is an online advertising format
that enables you to place your advertisements at or near
the top of search engines for your keywords based on the
amount you bid. Imagine that you have built a great
website with relevant keywords, excellent keyword density,
perfect anchor text, and good links back to your site. You
now look on the search engines for your keywords and your
site doesn't show up? What do you do?
Your best bet is to advertise. You could advertise on
television, on the radio, and in news papers but that
could be beyond your budget and it might not be cost
effective. An alternative could be Pay Per Click
Advertising.
How to Use Pay Per Click Advertising
You must follow the guidelines for each of the PPC search
engines to format your ads correctly. That is not
difficult to do but it does limit how many words and what
kind of words you may use. It requires you to make your ad
well written with short headlines and limited ad content.
Here are recommendations for making good PPC ads:
Use relevant keywords in your title. You only get a second
or two to catch the searchers attention.
Write your ad specifically for the target audience. They
are the people you want to click through and take some
kind of action. You do not want people clicking your ad
that have no interest in what you are "selling",
because they will just cost you money with no hope of
return on your investment.
Point the ad to a specific page on your site where the
information is relevant to the searcher. Otherwise they
will hit the back key and move on to another site. Many
PPC advertisers just send their viewers to their home page
and wonder why they get poor results. You want the page
they land on to get them to take some kind of action. That
may be to buy something, sign up for your newsletter, or
make a yes or no decision.
Do not use all capitalization or use exclamation points
in your title. The search engines specifically state not
to do this. They use human editors and your ad can be
rejected.
Try to get somewhere in the top five positions so your ad
will show up on the first page of the buyers' search.
Often times there is a great difference in the cost
between the first position and the second position and
between the second position and third position.
After you have gained experience with PPC ads, start
experimenting with changes to your ads and test them to
see if you can get a better return. The big PPC advertisers
split test their ads by rotating them to see
if small changes in the wording affect the click throughs.
Where to advertise
The two top places to advertise are Google Adwords and
Yahoo's Overture. MSN appears to be gearing up for a PPC
system similar to Google and Yahoo. Right now they get
their ads from Yahoo.
The Dark Side of PPC
There is, unfortunately, a problem going on with the Pay
Per Click search engines. It is called PPC fraud. PPC
fraud can break your bank account.
PPC fraud is when someone or some group decides to click
on your ad multiple times with no intention except to cost
you money. These can be in the hundreds or thousands of
clicks. They typically use click bots that mimic human
click throughs from various IP Addresses making it hard
for the search engines to recognize what is happening.
Who would do this? It could be a competitor trying to
bankrupt you. It could be an individual or groups trying
to make money from systems similar to Google Adsense. It
could be internet vandals just doing it for kicks.
It doesn't matter who is doing it. It matters that you can
find yourself in a heap of financial trouble.
What you should do is monitor your ads. You should do that
anyway to determine how your campaign is going i.e. are
you getting the return on investment you need, and you
should do it for ad testing. If you sense that click fraud
is happening, immediately suspend your campaign and
contact your PPC engine and let them know about it. You
may be able to get your PPC engine to refund the
fraudulent amounts.
Google has stated in their annual report that they may
have to refund PPC fraud and they don't know how much it
will cost them.
This is not meant to scare you away from using PPC. It is
meant to make you aware that it is happening so that you
can approach it prudently.
Conclusion
Pay Per Click when done right can be an effective and low
cost means to draw live paying customers to your web pages
and be a strong tool in your arsenal for making money on
the internet.
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