Pay Per Click, or PPC can be a great way to expand your online audience, and aggressively drive traffic to your website. Here are some of the basics about what you need to know about PPC.
PPC is the method, popularized by Google, of charging a web-site owner a small-ish fee every time a potential customer clicks on an advertisement and is directed to the web-site owner’s site. These ads can be displayed in search engines (Maybe you have seen those “sponsored links” pages in the yellow box at the top of most google searches). Or as banner advertisements on a website, smart phone, or social media site. Advertisers will typically bid against one another for the order they appear in these “sponsored links” sections – with those that are willing to spend the most for each visitor to their site being shown at the top, and being shown the most often.
PPC is extremely popular, for two reasons:
The first is because instead of paying for a magazine advertisement that is seen by 5,000 people (and probably ignored by 4,999) you only pay for those that are interested in what you are selling. These people will type their search into a search engine, or see a banner ad from an advertising network, and will only click on your advertisement if they want to be sold a product. Advertising to a highly specific, targeted audience is a very potent method of advertising.
The second reason PPC is so popular is because it is so measurable. In the past, with traditional mediums for advertising (TV, radio, newspaper) it was almost impossible to know what types of advertisements worked well, what advertisements did not work as well, and what advertisements hardly worked at all. With PPC, and specifically with analytics software that can be inserted into the source code of your website, you can track down to the penny how much money you had to spend, to get one sale. Then it is a simple matter of math: If I make $10 in gross profit for each product I sell, and I spent $6 on clicks, I am making a gross profit for each transaction. Optimizing your advertisements, your keyword targeting, and the landing pages of your website will increase your profitability over time.
A web site owner can decide and control who sees his PPC ads typically with demographic tools, or most commonly, with keyword tools that are specific to search engines. These tools allow you to see how many people search for a given keyword, and what the competition is willing to spend for prominent ad placement on those searches. By carefully calculating how much you want to spend, your potential profitability, your past conversion rate, and maximum per click price, you can begin to decide what keywords to target with your advertising. Try to limit the people who click on the ads to people who are truly interested by using targeted, and very specific keywords, and having a strong “call to action” in you’re ad copy.
