Pay per click advertising, PPC search engine articles

If have an AdWords account, you know that increasing your click-through rate (CTR) will lower your overall cost per click. So, why on earth would anyone want to decrease CTR? If you have a problem with people clicking on your ads but then not following through with a purchase or other desired action, you do want to lower your CTR–at least as it pertains to non-qualified leads!

How do you ensure that the right people are clicking on your ads? Quality ad copy! You've only got a limited number of words to play with, so make them count by selecting them carefully to pre-qualify your PPC-generated leads.

Carefully crafted ad copy will weed out unwanted clicks but also has the unwanted side effect of lowering your CTR, which can in turn cause your cost per click to go up and your ad positioning to go down. AdSense uses a formula that is based on high CTR equating relevance, but this trusty algo fails to take conversions into account. I suspect that Google will continue to tweak the technology behind AdSense to overcome this limitation, but until then it will be up to savvy marketers to strike a balance between maximizing the performance of CTR and conversions while also attaining a profitable ROI.

It's easy to get caught up in the rising costs of PPC marketing. Unfortunately, it's something we'll just have to get used to as recent reports indicate that PPC will only get more expensive as more players enter the field and the competition gets stiffer. Don't despair just yet, because there is something you can do: combine cost per click smarts with intelligent metrics analysis to increase your returns.

Cost per click (CPC) is the amount you pay a PPC engine for a single click to your website, and is measured differently engine to engine. With Google AdWords, CPC is lowered by a high clickthrough rate (CTR): the more relevant your ad is, the more clicks you'll get, and the lower your CPC will be. Over at Yahoo! Search Marketing, CPC is calculated by simply paying 1 cent more than an advertiser positioned below you.

In the right circumstance, lowering your CPC can actually increase your CTR for the same budget! The key is optimizing the relevance of your ads. Always choose targeted keywords for your ad copy, and conduct bid management at the keyword level. Well-written ads can outperform poorly written ads even if top positioning is not attained.

Sometimes, paying more per click is necessary if you are going after an ad position for a specific reason, such as increasing brand awareness. The big picture comes into focus here: it's not just about lowering your CPC, but increasing your customer acquisition. Afterall, what good is a heap of paid clicks if users aren't following through on your website and becoming customers? Truly, it's your conversion rate that is the most important number, not your CPC, and metrics analysis can play a huge part in tweaking your ad copy and landing pages to increase this number.

As the PPC industry matures–and gets more expensive–it's imperative for marketers to arm themselves with techniques that lower their paid search costs while increasing returns. Knowing how to effectively manipulate your CPC and analyze campaign metrics can help keep you on top of the game.

John Alexander has a new article published over at searchengineguide.com, Easy Tips for Adding some Zest to your Click Through Ratios. While the focus on the article is the optimization of title tags for organic search engine optimization, the same principles can be applied very effectively for writing PPC ad copy.

All pay-per-click engines have guides as to the style of your ads and the relevancy which determine what words you can bid on for your website.

You should use correct English grammar and a normal writing style, as you would in an essay or letter. Avoid excessive capitalization, exclamation marks, or superlatives (don't use "CHEAP", "Buy Right NOW!", or "We’re the BEST!")—the editors will change or reject ads that attempt to squeeze these through the style guidelines.

Relevancy rules are based on the idea of providing a positive and relevant search experience for the consumer. To decide if a keyword is relevant to your business, imagine that you are a consumer who knows nothing about your business—would you be surprised to see your ad display for that keyword (because it doesn’t seem relevant to the search)? Would you be able to understand why it is relevant by clicking through to your website? If the answer is "no" to either, then it seems likely the keyword is not relevant, and even if you are allowed to bid on it, it will likely produce poor results. PPC can be very expensive and even wasteful if you simply bid on any term that comes out of the top of your head. People do not necessarily think the way you do, and may use other search queries to find what you offer.