There are many benefits to Pay Per Click advertising, making it an effective way of promoting a business ‘online’. Some of them are listed below:

·           Get launched immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly – they can go ‘online’ within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.

·           Obtain specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic. PPC provides you with a quality or a well-targeted traffic. Visitors are narrowed down into ‘qualified’ people who are actually looking for specific products and/or services that you offer – those who are more likely to become a ‘lead’ (a convert) and complete a transaction (either by buying your product or subscribing to the service that you are offering.

·           Widen your reach. PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from the natural or “organic” search engines.

·           Track your investment. PPC advertising makes use of a tracking system that will determine exactly who comes to the website and what they do once they arrive – the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who are converted into customers or leads).

PC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:

 
1. Setting up an account and/or deposit funds.

2. Creating a keyword list.

3. Choosing (and setting up) an account with a PPC search engine.

4. Bidding on the ad placement, including the search result words or phrases.

5. Writing out an ad copy.

6. Setting up the ‘landing pages’ for your ads. You might want to have multiple landing pages to precisely match the terms you have bid on.

7. Placing the advertisement in the search engine. The search engine will expect your ad to be well-written and will show it or not based on their criteria and your bid.

PPC stands for Pay Per Click – a popular advertising technique on the Internet. It is found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines. You pay when a prospective customer clicks on the link.

 PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to organic search results. So a computer user types in a keyword or phrase, like Xbox repair manual, and can get both the results ranked as the top sites by the search engine, according to their own criteria, and the ads which are relevant to that topic. The advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the advertiser’s web page.

In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading positions on search engine results and listings. Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services.

 The higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will see the ad (and possibly click on it) to go to their websites (this is why some people call it “keyword auctioning”).

 Advertisers then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through the website. 

Each search engine positions their ads differently, but generally they are on the top or the side. Many people wish to be the top ad in the list, but that can result in automatic clicking, or confusion as to whether or not the result is an ad or an organic site.

 
Prices can range from pennies, to hundred of dollars for clicks.

 
PPC advertising is also known under the following names/variations:

 
·           Pay per placement

·           Pay per performance

·           Pay per ranking

·           Pay per position

·           Cost per click (CPC)

PPC BASICS 5

6. Write effective ads. A good PPC ad is that which can persuade and move a searcher. There are several approaches to this:

· Discount offers

· Testimonials

· Celebrity/famous endorsers

· Money-back guarantees

· Free trials or sample offers

· Freebies

· Reverse psychology

· Major benefits (“Lose weight”)

· Direct instructions (“Click here”)

7. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. The website should be simple – designed in such a way that it will be easy for visitors to navigate and load. Include contact details to create a good impression among potential customers.

Done properly, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool that will maximize the return on your investment.

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