The big advantage of PPC’s is that you don’t have to wait to get indexed and ranked and results are
immediate. You just figure out how much you want to pay for a keyword and buy your position. In addition, you only pay for people who
actually click on your link (for banner ads, you often have to pay when someone sees it (which is called an "impression".) Bids
usually start at around five or 10 cents per click. The top three bids, though, are often promoted across a network of
sites.
In general, this is how most PPC programs work:
1. Create the title, description, and link for your ad (which is very much like a classified
ad) exactly as you want it to appear in the search results.
2. Enter the keywords and keyword phrases that you want your ad to appear under when someone
searches on those keywords and phrases.
3. Enter your keyword maximum bid amount (the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for
each click on your ad).
4. Your keyword bid is compared to that of other bidders for the same keyword. The highest bidder
gets the top ad position, the next highest bidder gets the next highest bid, and so on.
3.8.1 Show me the money!
With PPC’s, the name of the game is profit. You need to be careful not to get carried away
with the ranking so that your promotion doesn’t cut into your revenues.
This is essential! There’s no point in being top if you’re out of business in a month. You
have to figure out what you can afford and keep to it. Base your decision on your visitor-to-sales ratio (the number of visitors on
average that it takes to generate one sale) as well as your net profit per sale.
So for example, if you were getting a sale for every ten visitors that click on your ad
and visit your site and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can’t pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a
loss. In practice, you might make one sale for every 500 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your
market.
It’s absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales ratio.
It’s also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on
relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different to the services you’re offering, you’re just
throwing your money away. They aren’t going to buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up. On the other hand,
because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible.
The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low payments that bring in less
traffic.
You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a
directory, the more your visitor to sale ratio may improve-and that might make it worth improving your bid price.
3.8.2 Submitting to pay-per-clicks
Submitting your site to a PPC is certainly a lot faster than submitting to a search engine or
a directory. You must, however, make sure you consider the following:
The maximum amount you can bid (can’t stress that enough!)
The keywords you wish to bid on.
The titles and descriptions of the site.
That last point is very important for making the most of PPC’s. Just because you don’t have to
worry about putting keywords in your title and descriptions to please a program doesn’t mean relevance isn’t important. On the contrary,
relevance still matters. You need to let the user know that your site is exactly what they’re looking for. That means putting the keyword
in the title and having a catchy, informative description.
