Pay Per Click Advertising - Hot Markets Gobble up Your Ad Budget

2006-05-12 - Paid search is the hottest area of online marketing today and this trend is only going to strengthen. Piper Jaffray forecasts sales in paid search of over 14 Billion US in this year alone and will continue to grow at an astounding rate of 37% each year.

Google leads the way with its increasing share of paid search, primarily from its pay per click service, AdWords. Traditional media is losing its market share as ad dollars move to online marketing, and specifically the paid search arena. With this glut of dollars invading the paid space, unwary advertisers are at risk of making mistakes that can quietly consumer thousands of dollars.

Take a closer look at how you can set up and optimize your PPC campaign.

Simple and Informative

Advertisers enjoy PPC advertising because it is simple, they have greater control over their ad campaign, and they receive better feedback on its performance. The growing importance of online marketing makes PPC an important arena for them to use and master and in fact, it's not uncommon for CEO's to do their own company's PPC campaigns.

If you're not currently using pay per click campaigns, it is increasingly important to understand them and have a strategy to optimize their performance. Large campaigns need to be well planned and managed. It looks simple but it's easy to waste thousands of dollars. The beauty of PPC advertising is the speed at which you can reach your target market and the high quality of sales leads that can be generated. The downside is the price and the need for excellent conversion to sales. At $5.00 to $10.00 USD per click in many cases, you can run through your ad budget quickly.

The pay per click advertising programs with the greatest market reach are offered by Google and Yahoo. Google's program called AdWords delivers targeted pay per click ads via its own search engine Web sites and a host of partner sites.

Yahoo purchased Overture Search in 2003 October and renamed it Yahoo Search Marketing, which has a selection of specialized Pay Per Click advertising programs. These major PPC advertising programs offer an astounding reach to highly targeted consumers. In contrast to organic search engine listings, PPC listings don't require an extensive content development and link building campaign.

Planning and Writing Skill is Needed

The key to effective PPC campaigns is in your keyword strategy and the quality of your visitor analytics. Many companies set up their PPC advertising campaigns without much planning. Campaigns need to be structured so that unproductive keywords can be filtered out and high performers improved upon.

On occasion, an advertiser will find themselves prohibited from bidding on a keyword phrases because their ad's click through rate was so poor. You definitely want to avoid that problem. Popular keywords are associated with particular solutions in consumer's minds. You'll find you're competing with companies that offer a more popular solution, so although your ad shows for that particular search phrase, it isn't really what most people are looking for. This means your click through rate will be low and your ad will stop being shown. Your ad's appearance is not a certainty when you're trying to sell a specialized niche product under a general common search term. A sophisticated keyword and ad copy strategy will be needed.

To maximize your PPC advertising performance, you must bid on the right selected keyword phrases, write persuasive, moving ad copy, and have a well written page to have them click through to. If you know how to attract the prospect and deliver them seamlessly to a solution they need, you'll be rewarded with a good sales rate. The number, style and type of words you can use in your ads is restricted so writing attractive, persuasive text ads is much harder than you'd expect.

Tip: A custom prepared PPC campaign by an SEO Professional is still the best approach to pay per click. A large corporation can save substantial amounts and maximize performance by outsourcing to an SEO Consultant.

Self Managed PPC Campaigns

Are self-managed PPC advertising campaigns a wise decision? With solid promotional writing skills, and understanding of consumer psychology and lots of time, you may save money. In my experience, clients tend not to be strategic enough and they spend far too much and bid on too many unproductive keywords, hoping that some of their ads are generating sales leads. A search engine marketing professional specializing in this area can develop a system to progressively focus in on the best ad copy, bidding price and timing of ad positions.

PPC advertising is all about relevance, particularly with Google AdWords. If your ads don't get clicked on enough, they will be removed.

If your advertising needs are high and you have to find click throughs cheaper than $5.00 USD, it may be wiser to use the services of an SEO consultant. However, if you want to pursue it on your own, this article discusses how the PPC programs work and some of the techniques SEO consultants use.

Pay Per Click Marketing has Matured

The PPC/CPC industry has undergone consolidation with Google and Yahoo's program still standing. Mamma.com is also available but doesn't have the reach of the two PPC giants. MSN is currently testing a new pay per click search engine marketing service. The date for its rollout hasn't been set.