Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing
Pay-per-click marketing is an Internet-based advertising model in which the advertiser places an ad on the host’s website and only pays for the ad each time a visitor clicks on the ad. The advertiser is charged a fixed fee payable to the search engine when someone clicks on the advertiser and goes to the advertiser’s website. The advertiser typically bids on a keyword and then sets a fee that will be paid to the search engine. When you do a search for that keyword or phrase (or a related term) in the search engine, two types of results appear; organic results that are not paid for, but appear by virtue of the amount of optimization that has been put in for them. Sponsored ads also appear on the right hand side of the results page and are actually the ads paid for by the advertiser. This Internet-based advertising model features Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter as the three largest providers.
Although Google is the provider most associated with PPC, the initial concept was provided by Jeffrey Brewer in February 1998, while real credit for the PPC model generally goes to Bill Gross, founder of Idealab and Goto.com. Google’s search engine advertising model, AdWords, was introduced in October 2000, while PPC became fully operational in 2002.
As mentioned above, there is a fee that the advertiser must pay to the search engine. This amount is known as cost per click. CPC can be flat rate or bid-based. The former involves determining a fixed amount that the advertiser will pay, while the latter is determined through a bid for the keyword based on its value.
Pay-per-click advertising is quite technical, although it’s easy to understand the basics and work with. However, there are what can be considered best practices in PPC. These will help you get the best out of your PPC efforts.
Yo. Identification – The crux of any PPC campaign is keywords that are meant to drive traffic. You need to identify those keywords that drive traffic, as well as determine potential sources of traffic.
ii. Creation: After identifying your specific keywords and sources, you should create groups of keywords that are closely related to the ones you’ve selected.
iii. Designation: There are some keywords that should not be associated with the product or service you are promoting. You must designate those keywords so that your products/services will not appear when a search is performed based on those keywords.
IV. Creation: You must create the ad text and then the landing pages that are related and relevant to the keywords in your ad group.
v. Constant evaluation: Daily monitoring and repetition of some of these steps are necessary for the success of your PPC campaign.
The result of taking these steps is an increase in the click-through rate (CTR) of your ad, lower costs related to your offers or fixed rates, as well as a better quality of traffic to your site.