Pay per click advertising, PPC search engine articles

A landing page is the page that your users arrive at when they click your PPC ads. Obviously, this page needs to convert in order to maximize your PPC ROI. What can you do to make your landing pages the best they can be?

1. Focus: Now that you have the attention of a potential customer, keep the focus and don't lose them! Your landing page should be very focused. Provide just the facts about your product or service, and a highly visible way for users to take action.

2. Customize: Create customized landing pages for your ads. Your landing page should function as an extension of the content in your ad. Make the user feel like they are in the right place by providing them with specific information that relates to the ad they clicked on.

3. Inform: Give users the information they came for! Your landing page needs to convince them that your product or service is best suited for their needs. Provide all the information that you would include in a person-to-person sales pitch.

4. Invite action: Provide a clear path to action, whether that be in the form of an "add to cart" button or an invitation to "call now". Give this path excellent visibility.

5. Provide imagery: Capitalize on the graphic delivery of the medium! This is especially important if you sell a product. In a traditional bricks and mortar store, customers have the advantage of touching products. This is not the case online, so provide excellent quality photos of your products to showcase the quality of your offerings.

6. Test: You might think you know your target audience pretty well, but it's always possible that you haven't thought of everything. For best results, try out a couple of different ideas with your landing pages–your users might surprise you! 

SitePoint have established themselves as a leader in publishing books for web professionals that are fun and easy to read, yet feature in-depth, advanced information about programming, design and marketing. Their latest release, Dan Thies' The Search Engine Marketing Kit, is no exception: The SEM Kit is comprised of more than 250 pages presented in workbook format that contain invaluable knowledge that's suited to search marketing novices and experts alike. Despite the ever-changing nature of this industry, The SEM Kit should remain an excellent and relevant resource for years to come.

While the focus on PPC in the kit is limited to a single chapter (plus references to PPC tools in the appendix), it's a power-packed segment that touches on the basics (intro, major players), intermediate info (third-party management tools, minor players, keyword matching and selection, bid management), and advanced PPC strategies (dayparting, landing pages, testing and CTR boosting).

The best marketers know that a healthy dose of "organic" or natural search marketing strategies paired up with PPC marketing results in the most powerful Internet marketing. In Dan Thies' The Search Engine Marketing Kit, you'll find it all! Plus, for a limited time you also get $150 in clicks from AdWords, Yahoo! and FindWhat. The SEM Kit is highly recommended.

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One of the major reasons cited by companies for not maximizing their PPC efforts is that they don't have time to keep watch of their bids on a constant basis. The administration of a PPC campaign (especially one that is spread over more than one PPC search engine) can be a very time-consuming project. If managing your campaign is keeping you from the daily tasks of running your business, you will want to look into acquiring a PPC management partner, or purchasing one or more of the software tools available that will automatically track your keyword bids and make adjustments without you having to monitor auctions manually. Beware however that left unchecked, some more basic versions of these tools can automatically bid a term into a "desired position" that might be heavily overpriced—remember your budget and ROI calculation model!

Tracking your ads' clicks gives you reliable information about how well your campaign is performing. PPC engines include some detailed tracking information in your advertiser's control panel. To capture a maximum amount of data, it is advisable to also install statistical tracking on your website and record your referring URLs.

Most of the time, you'll notice that the number of clicks tracked by yourself is 15% to 30% more than the clicks the PPC engine reports. This is because reputable PPC engines have installed anti-fraud mechanisms that can catch competitors who are repeatedly clicking on your listings and wasting your bid budget. They will count multiple clicks within a timeframe originating from the same computer as only one click through, while your own log will usually register the multiple clicks.

In addition to competitors who will click away your budget, there are actually businesses set up where workers do nothing all day but click on pay-per-click ads placed by their clients' competitors in order to run out an account's budget as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, click fraud is a reality with current PPC technology, and even though the PPC engines attempt to squash it, advertisers must be vigilant in monitoring their campaigns and reporting suspected fraudulent activity.

Related to ad click tracking, AdWords recently unveiled a ROI tracking mechanism that places a small amount of JavaScript code on your lead completion pages (for example, a "success" page that a user arrives at after completing a request form on your site). When a visitor who clicked one of your ads arrives on your completion page, a notification is sent back to your AdWords control panel allowing you to see which clicks were converted into leads.

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.

Search engines sell "Sponsored Matches" space through third parties known as PPC (or CPC: cost per click, or PFP: pay for performance) search engines. These engines show their results on networks of search engines, ISPs and content sites.

The major pay-per-click search engine in North America is Yahoo! Search Marketing, which delivers paid results to many of the major search engine sites, including its parent company Yahoo! as well as MSN, Alta Vista, Sympatico.ca, CNN, InfoSpace and ESPN.

Yahoo! Search Marketing's main competitor in the North America is Google AdWords. Google is probably the most important search engine these days, and the innovative nature of AdWords has made that service an essential part of any extensive search engine marketing campaign. With AdWords, your ads' position is determined by bid price, click through rate (CTR), daily budget, campaign settings, match type—too many variables to be considered pure bidding. AdWords can therefore seem quite complex. Like Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google has numerous strategic partnerships with other properties, so your results also appear on many search engine sites and throughout their publications network. (Google offers you the option to choose which other properties on which you wish to appear.)

If you want to bid for some of the more popular search queries, both Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords can be very expensive. The smaller PPC engines may also be of use. Admittedly, almost none of them reach any of the major portals, but they do deliver results to a wide array of meta search engines, and so reasonably priced clicks are available.

To get started in the world of PPC marketing, you must decide on your budget and what level of risk you are willing to take, as both will affect which PPC search engine(s) you choose to work with. The “major players” are less risky, since they already have excellent market coverage and tend to offer a lot of assistance to their users, but they also are the most expensive in terms keyword bidding.

Before starting your campaign, develop a ROI calculation model that measures your financial outlay against defined conversion criteria. Throughout your campaign, stick to your budget and avoid keyword bidding wars that are initiated by ignorance and lack of paid search knowledge.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising appears on all the major search engines and ISP websites labeled "Sponsored Links" or similar, and these ads are displayed based upon what the consumer searches for, offering an excellent opportunity for you to drive sales leads to your website. Advertisers bid on keywords, determining their positioning in the search results. The underlying principal behind this form of advertising is matching up searchers with companies that provide what they are looking for.

PPC advertising offers an invaluable way for websites, with big or small budgets, to appear on the first page of search engine results. Websites wishing to appear under "Sponsored Matches" decide which search words they want to appear for and bid on those terms. They only pay when their ad is clicked on and if they want to appear above a competitor, they increase the amount they are willing to pay for each click. Using pay-per-click you can help you target the right consumers' the ones most likely to become paying customers.

Pay-per-click engines will drive targeted traffic to your website. You only pay for the traffic you receive and can easily appear on all the major search engines without a significant waiting time. As signup fees are low compared to search engine optimization, this means that small and medium sized business can advertise their services and products alongside multinationals with much larger budgets. PPC is an extremely attractive publicity option and one that few Internet business owners should completely ignore as a potential marketing technique.