How to Click With Online Advertising

by Mark Vandorone

Published on this site: February 24th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

For a small business competing in a niche market it is becoming ever harder to achieve high rankings in the free search engines. Pay-per-click ("PPC") advertising can be a great alternative.

Learn the secrets of PPC search engines and success on the internet could be yours. Be warned, however, a lack of understanding could put your business on the road to insolvency. I can't emphasize this strongly enough. An understanding of PPC can be a great advantage to your business.

If you've ever attended an auction to bid for a piece of furniture or artwork you'll have some idea of how to advertise on the PPC search engines. In this case you're bidding for high ranked spots on the keywords you've identified for your business. Visitors will arrive at your site by clicking on your search engine advert, and each time that happens you'll pay the search engine the value of your bid. A bid can be as low as 5 cents, but some highly competitive keywords can cost several dollars.

Now I'd like to discuss some advantages and disadvantages of advertising with PPC search engines. Advantages first :-

1. Only when someone clicks on you advert are you required to pay.
   
   
2. Can be an inexpensive method of attracting targeted traffic to your site.
   
   
3. Outbid the competition and that top advertising spot can be yours, no matter how small your business.
   
   
4. Some PPC search engines enable a campaign to be up and away in minutes. Not very long after you could be taking orders.
   
   
5. If your advert is not successful you can cancel or amend your listing with immediate effect.
   
   
6. You can test your advert, making amendments quickly and simply.

However, be aware of the disadvantages :-

1. Not everyone who clicks on your advert is a potential customer. You will have to pay for these junk clicks though.
   
   
2. The cost per click can escalate if you and and your competition become involved in a bidding war over that top spot.
   
   
3. Your advert may be subject to a strict review prior to approval. This can delay the start of the campaign considerably, and you may not like the final advert they approve.
   
   
4. A poorly worded or, even worse, misleading advert could generate traffic but not make sales. Unless you've placed a restriction on your advertising budget, your business could quickly be on the road to insolvency.

So how do you tip your toe in the water with PPC advertising? Before you do anything else research the keywords that your target market are searching on. You wouldn't want to bid for traffic on an irrelevant keyword would you? The methods for carrying out this research are a fully fledged topic in their own right, which I'll cover in a future article.

Another essential piece of knowledge you require before entering the bidding fray, is the monetary worth of a visitor to your website. By this i mean the average revenue generated by each visitor. This will be your guide to how far you can push it in the bidding process.

If you want to use PPC advertising to test your sales copy on a new site with no visitor knowledge, then monitor your costs versus sales closely. A daily budget is advisable at the outset. Limit your spending to something you can afford to lose if the worst occurs and you don't make any sales. Raise this as appropriate once you can see the sales conversion rate.

You're almost ready to get going. What I've provided here is an overview of PPC advertising. Use this as the first building block in your quest to master the PPC search engines.

Wishing you every success with your online advertising.

Mark Vandorone offers specialized online advertising campaigns at http://www.fivemarketing.com. Not happy with your results from the Pay-Per-Click search engines? Pay Mark a visit at: http://www.fivemarketing.com or contact him by e-mail at: [email protected]