Pay Per Click (PPC)

Paying for traffic to your website

A pay per click campaign is designed to send traffic to your website. Companies (websites) offering pay per click advertising include search engines such as Google and comparison shopping websites such as Shopzilla.

The cost you pay per click is based upon the popularity of the keyword you are bidding on. The highest bidders are usually placed first or displayed predominantely on a page. A single click can cost $.15 or $5.00 (or more) depending on the word or phrase.

There is usually no guarantee that a visitor accessing your website from a PPC link will convert or become a customer. Your website should be setup to work with your PPC campaign and direct potential customers to the information or items they were interested in, quickly and easily.

You are often limited to a few lines of information with your PPC links and descriptions should be brief, if relevent a call to action may increase click through rates. A general call to action used by many advertisers is "hurry, offer expires soon".

It is not good to trick or fool potential clients. As a best practice you should carefully create your ad to target a specific an audience as possible to reduce the amount of random click throughs and increase the probablilty that the visitor clicking through to your website is genuinely interested in what it is you are offering.

PPC for search engines

Programs such as Google Adwords provdes management tools to set limits on your bids and set budgets limits per day. You can also set the time that you would like the campaign to run to avoid costs from being incurred during inappropriate times.

With Google and other search engine PPC programs your ad will be listed within the pages displayed to web users that searched for the keyword(s) or phrase you have bid on.

You ad may also be included in content related pages of websites that have embedded advertising as a way of monetizing their websites. An example would be your ad for beauty products appearing on a blog about beauty tips and techniques.

You may also share in profits by placing ads on your website, to learn more about monetizing your website visit Google's Adsense. Google's adsense program is one of many but possibly the most widely used and a easy to setup, and therefore a great place to start.

Many search engines provide pay per click advertising, however, Google's Adwords is currently the most used.

PPC for comparison shopping websites

Comparison shopping websites are more for selling products than services. Many, such as shopzilla, make it possible to upload an entire shopping cart list of items with brief descriptions and product images. Your product descriptions and images will be placed next to other matching products from other companies so that visitors can compare prices.

Visitors can then click through to the website offering the product they are interested in and for the price they are willing to pay. There is no guarantee that a visitor will actually purchase your products and you will have to pay for the click, regardless of what they do after visiting your website.

While somewhat effective PPC campaigns can prove costly. An alternative is to setup an affiliate program in which you do not pay unless the visitor makes a purchase or performs a particular action, such as signing up for a newsletter or product trial. Affiliate programs often require tracking systems in order to manage commissions.