Tuesday, June 3, 2008

What are the Basic Steps Involved in a PPC Campaign?

Paid search marketing is ruling the online marketplace nowadays. Most web businesses opt for this service because of its immediacy and convenience of implementation. Known as the inorganic form of SEM, it helps businesses in driving targeted traffic to their website and generate good revenues by maximising conversion rates. A pay per click campaign involves the following basic steps:

Keyword Research

Keywords are invariably the soul of such campaigns. This is one area that demands constant monitoring and alterations. Before placing your bids, undertake market research on the keywords used by most businesses in your industry. You can also study your competitors' campaigns and pick keywords that are doing well for them. The basic criteria here is relevance – the words and phrases you target have to be related to your product/service or business at large.

Campaign Development

Once you have selected your keywords, you have to develop your advertising campaign. This means working on creation of ad groups and ad copies. Each of your PPC advert has to have four parts – title, description, display URL and destination URL. All these elements should be incorporated with important keywords. The title and description should be catchy and written in accordance with search engine guidelines. Write in a crispy and appealing manner so as to attract visitors' attention. Categorise the ad copies in such a way that they fetch you good CTR and conversion rates.

Landing Page Identification

Landing pages can make or break an ad campaign. Therefore, businesses should use their best web pages as the landing pages for their adverts. If you manage to retain users' attention through these pages, you will have a great chance of making a conversion. But, make sure your landing pages support all claims made in your ads. Also, they should be completely in accordance with the keywords of the advertisement they correspond to.

Result Tracking

As a marketer, you ought to track the results of your PPC campaign. Constantly monitor results and formulate strategies that cater to latest search engine guidelines. By tracing your efforts, you will be able to segregate the performing ads from the non-performing ones.

Since this happens to be a paid advertising service on search engines, you have to ensure that your ROI is well-balanced. Dedicate a daily or monthly budget to your campaign and make alterations as and when necessary.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Has the Downfall of PPC Begun?

Is your business dependent on Pay per Click advertising? Did Pay per Click, clique with your marketing objectives? If yes, then here is what a new data claims: According to this data, the number of consumers clicking on search ads on Google is declining.

Did you just skip a heart beat? Wait till you read this – According to Google, the decline is comes from its attempt to improve the quality of the advertising leads, which makes it difficult for advertisers to click on the links accidentally.

Meanwhile, this data has made a lot of people grow anxious as a slowing economy can affect the rapidly growing market of Internet advertising in a negative way. This compels many organizations to think of more ways to advertise than just PPC.

While some organizations are counting on viral marketing for promotion purposes, especially through the various social media sites, some more are looking forward to more advanced form of online marketing like banner advertising and affiliate marketing.

Will PPC services now start a downward journey? Will this affect its popularity? Give me your views.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Keywords – The Lifeline of a PPC Campaign

The whole game of search engine marketing revolves around the use of appropriate keywords while marketing through search engines. Businesses that are wise enough to comprehend the web users' mind lunge forward faster than their competitors. However, treading the path of success, especially when it comes to Pay per Click management, is not an easy task.

In simple terms, keywords are words or phrases used by an average web user to find information about a product or service that interests him/her. It is on the basis of these words that a search engine crawls, indexes and ranks millions of web pages in their result listings.

For an online business, identification of keywords is a very crucial task. It is on the basis of these words that a PPC campaign is formulated. If your ad has the right keywords and shows up on the most appropriate corresponding pages, you are sure to get unique visitors to your site.

As an advertiser practising inorganic search engine marketing, you have to place bids on keywords to get your ads positioned on SERPs. The higher your bid, the better your positioning in the 'sponsored links/listings' section. However, one must not forget that the rates of keywords keep fluctuating almost daily. Therefore, do not keep bidding an unreasonably high amount for a simple keyword that can be effective at a lesser bid also.

The only way you can avoid committing these mistakes is by keeping a track of the effectiveness of your keywords and the conversion rates they generate. Incorporate niche keywords into your campaign even if they might seem too general.

The next step is to determine the kind of 'match' you would like to have for your ads to pop up on search queries. You can choose from exact, phrase, broad and other advanced match options. You can always change your selection once the Pay per Click campaign is well-settled.

In between all this, you also need to monitor the Cost per Action (CPA) and Click-Through Rate (CTR) of your ads. To maximise your Returns on Investment, try and keep the CPA as low as possible. Make use of various tools available on the Web to improvise on your work and you are sure to achieve success with your online marketing campaign.

Friday, March 21, 2008

PPC Advertising: Are they more powerful than Brand building?

I am watching Internet advertising growing day by day and most probably you too. Most of the internet advertising tools like PPC, banner ads, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing etc. are doing a great job. And now industry watchers are discussing and comparing PPC traffic with natural search traffic.

The result of the study of PPC traffic vs. natural search traffic is quite encouraging for the Internet marketing professionals. If you have not read any such study here is the brief of a report in the New York Times.

A recent study by Engine Ready, an Internet marketing company, analyzed 18.7 million visits over two years to Websites run by 27 of the company’s almost 500 clients. The study reveals that paid listings are doing better job than organic or unpaid, search results. Visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something, and they spent about 18 percent more on each order.

Furthermore, The New York Times article reports that type-in traffic was the highest converting and most valuable traffic. Also, type-in traffic and bookmarked traffic performed best with a 3.3 percent conversion rate. On average, their visits are worth $5.69 apiece. So, PPC ads are not only generating traffic but revenue also.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Pep up Affiliate Sales with PPC Advertising

Are you an affiliate working for different kinds of merchants, and wanting to pep up the business prospects for all of them? Unrealisable though it may sound, this is actually possible... with a little help from Pay per Click advertising. Known to be one of the fastest and most effective means of search engine marketing, this service, when put to practice, can actually boomerang the traffic and conversion figures of your merchants' businesses.

As an affiliate, you need to work on your own website in order to divert traffic to an advertiser's site. Getting into paid search marketing will ensure that your site gets high positioning on SERPs. Here, it is imperative that you understand the search engine's functioning and indexing process.

Keyword research is the first step in this direction. Undertake a comprehensive study of your own business, the competition and the industry as a whole. Use various online keyword-generation tools to select the best words and phrases for your Pay per Click campaign.

When picking keywords, do not just stick on to the most popular ones, because they usually come with a high price tag and low CTR. Instead, try and specify search keywords and stick to your niche market. As an affiliate, you are responsible for selling the merchant's product/service. Therefore, choose keywords that can result in clicks, and eventually, sales.

Paid search marketing is a dynamic field, with new dimensions adding on to it on a regular basis. With this dynamism comes perplexity in understanding and implementing latest techniques. Therefore, as a newbie, listen to what the experts have to say about such campaigns. Do not remain fixated on a particular approach just because your keywords are doing well, because you never know when things can go haywire.

The World Wide Web, as an advertising medium, offers reprieve from petty concerns like tracking campaigns and making reports on them. Given its technical supremacy, the Internet competently creates, manages and tracks reports all by itself. Therefore, it is extremely easy to test ads for their effectiveness and make alterations when things go wrong. Constant testing is the biggest success mantra for PPC advertising.

One should never forget that getting thousands of visitors is useless until they buy something from you. Affiliates should start from the scratch, test their efforts at all levels and expand their campaign eventually. By doing so, you can definitely reduce the element of risk associated with this challenging marketing sphere.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Create Ad Performance Report for your Google AdWords Account

Online business owners can rake in huge profits by employing Pay per Click advertising techniques for their website. And, as a marketer, you are most likely to use Google AdWords as your main platform for this form of advertising. This one-of-its-kind program by search engine giant Google is easily comprehensible and simple to use.

When delving into search engine marketing, you have to rely on performance reports to give you an insight into the efficacy of your campaign. For PPC users, Ad Performance Reports are like 'holy books' that have to be preserved for improvisation of your efforts. These reports are compilations of statistics based on search engine functionality. They help you judge text and image ads and their efficiency in bringing in targeted visitors to your site.

In Google AdWords, you can create your own ad performance report in the following simple steps:
  1. After logging in to your AdWords account, click on the 'Reports' tab at the top of the page.
  2. Go to the 'Create Report' section and choose Ad Performance Report as your report type. You can also select different ad types of ad variations like text ads, image ads, video ads, etc.
  3. Next, pick the kind of view you want for your report. You can choose to have data on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. The site provides extensive account-related information to its clients, as per their whims and fancies.
  4. Amongst the settings, you can choose a date range for your report. This range helps you select the time span for your ad performance report. You can click on dates provided in the clickable calendars.
  5. Next, you can pick the ad campaigns and ad groups that you wish to be reported on. You can also check the 'Choose All' option provided in the settings thereon.
  6. There are a number of other columns available in the 'Advanced Settings' section. This will help you customise data that has to be included in your report.
  7. Select a name for your Google AdWords report and save templates for the same. You will be forwarded reports in the same format.
  8. The last step is to provide email addresses to which the reports and other notification are to be sent. You can also choose the preferred format for the file type from amongst the list of options available.
The aforementioned steps will guide you in picking data to be presented in your ad performance reports. This data will eventually determine the course of your future plans and ultimately the success of your campaign.

Advantages of using Google AdWords

Google is one of the biggest names in the domain of search engine marketing. AdWords, its Pay per Click advertising programme, is creating ripples in the online marketplace, luring businesses by millions. Almost every company wants to join this programme because of its profitability, convenience of use and inexpensiveness.

The Google AdWords programme is extremely effective for all kinds of business. It can be altered as per advertisers' requirements, and the best part is, you have complete control and say on the budgeting of your account.

Listed below are some of the main benefits of being associated with this programme:
  1. Based on the PPC advertising model, it involves bidding on keywords on which you want your ads to appear. By doing so, you ensure that your ads turn up only on selective keywords and that you cater to the right kind of audience. Or, in short, you reach out to people looking for your product/service.
  2. Being an Google AdWords account holder, you have full control over your budget. You place bids as per the popularity and competitiveness of ads. You also have the right to control and alter the bid amount as per your budget. The programme offers extensive details on the performance of each keyword so that you can alter their rates. You can even fix up a daily or monthly budget to keep a tab on the money spent and also to balance out the ROI.
  3. As an advertiser, you can create multiple ad campaigns and numerous ad groups thereon. Each group contains a number of ads that can be customised as per convenience. Incorporate your important keywords in these ad texts as well as the Title and Destination URLs so as to double their impact. You also have the option of editing the content of your ads when need be.Through this programme, you can easily keep a tab on your campaign. You can opt for ad performance reports on a daily or monthly basis and then work around your campaign so as to derive maximum benefits. You can also take help from an AdWords Professional to comprehend the nuances of the programme.

More than anything else, this programme is effective, and that too at an extremely faster rate. Success can be guaranteed if you know how to make the right moves in the online marketplace.