Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to advertise. For a very reasonable amount of money you can get a world-wide audience to know more about your business. This post is going to talk about what is PPC advertising and why it’s important.
Many websites offer pay-per click (PPC) advertising on them, but not all of them are necessarily a good investment. It’s hard to know where is the best place to advertise on the web, but starting with Google is never a bad thing. The next thing I’d do is look at what other websites appear near the top in searches for your targeted key phrases and then see if they offer advertising on them.
How Does PPC Work?
When you search on Google, for example, the PPC advertisements are the listings that show at the very top and also on the right side of the page. Research shows that the top left, followed by the top right is where most people’s eyes start out on a search result page, so placement is critical.Of those ads, when you set up an advertisement to trigger when a person searches for a particular phrase, you are competing in an auction against anyone else who also set up an ad to trigger for that same phrase. So the logical conclusion is the more broad the phrase, the more people competing for it and the more it will cost per click. This is why it’s critical to be as specific as possible when coming up with your key phrases. Ideally, your ads should link to a specific page on your website that talks about the same thing that the person searched for, so pointing to your home page is not always best.For example, if you own a shoe store and one of your key phrases is "Nike 330K Running Shoe" then you ought to link to your product page for that specific shoe. That improves your quality score in Google and keeps the user from having to search for the specific thing they want all over once they get to your site.
So what is "Quality Score" in Google? Google wants advertisements to be as relevant to the search term as possible. This results in a better experience for the user. If someone searches for "Roses in Raleigh, NC" and lands on an auto parts store, that would tell the person that Google advertisements don’t deliver. And Google doesn’t want that, since that is how they make their billions of dollars. So they rate all key phrases with what they call a "Quality Score" in order to encourage more relevant advertisements. You make an advertisement relevant my making sure that your key phrases match wording in the ads for those phrases and point to a page on your site which also contain those same key phrases. In order to do this, you may need to break your key phrases in Adwords into several groups and get specific with the ad for that group and the landing page that the ad points to.
One of the best parts of PPC advertising is you don’t have to concentrate so much on search engine optimization and link building and you get much faster results. And sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get a page to rank well for some phrases, but because you know it’s a killer phrase, you’d be willing to pay to show up for it.
Another advantage to PPC advertising is you can get TONS of analytical data on how many clicks you get, how many times your ad appears to people, how long does someone stay on your website when they search for a particular phrase, what country they are coming from, etc. Unlike traditional advertising, you have a lot of numbers to work with. Unfortunately, with all those numbers comes the complexity of analyzing those numbers to interpret trends that work in your favor. That is where an expert in search marketing comes in handy.
