Getting Started with Pay-Per-Click Advertising

We all know how important search engines are to funneling new customers and leads to a website. But getting a good ranking, that is, having your site appear among the top listings on search engine results pages, can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Pay-per-click advertising provides an alternate way to optimize your presence on search engines. Its many benefits include the ability to

• Better control search engine placement
• More accurately target visitors
• Drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to begin appearing among search engine listings

Although it costs you money, pay-per-click advertising is an essential online promotion tool for businesses interested in finding new customers and clients through the Web.

How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?

With pay-per-click keyword advertising, you bid for certain search words or terms and create an advertisement for your business that will appear as part of the results page of a search on one of these terms. Each time someone clicks your advertisement to go to your website, you pay the amount you bid for the search term. You only pay when someone clicks your ad. Bids range from as low as five cents to as high as three dollars or more per "click."

Steps to Get Started with Pay-Per-Click

Once you’ve chosen a pay-per-click vendor, here are the five steps to get started:

1. Choose Your Keywords
2. Determine How Much to Bid
3. Write Your Ad
4. Choose Options for Your Ad
5. Track Results and Make Adjustments

Step 1: Choose Your Keywords

You can choose a single word or a phrase for your pay-per-click keywords. Your ad will only appear when a searcher enters the exact word or phrase you have chosen.

When choosing keywords, the most important thing is to be as specific as possible. General terms are fine for natural search engine optimization, but when you’re paying per click, you want to know that you’re going to give searchers exactly what they’re looking for when they reach your site. General terms will also be the most expensive (that is, require the highest bid).

When considering keywords:

• Think of the specialty services or products you provide, and bid on those terms, rather than a broad description of your profession. For example, if you are a lawyer, rather than bidding on "lawyer," choose keywords such as "will preparation" or "bankruptcy."
• Emphasize what you do or the products you have to offer over who you are. People probably won’t be searching your company name. If they do, they can find you through the natural listings, not pay-per-click advertisements.
• Create keyword combinations that link a service offering with a geographical reference, such as a city or county name. For example, "Boston will preparation."

You can use the following tools to help you decide which keywords will work best for you:

• If you want to test terms, go to www.Yahoo.com and use the Term Suggestion Tool, which lets you enter a search term and see how many searches were made on the term in the previous month. This tool also suggests related terms you might not have considered.
• Find a tool that provides information on the words and phrases that visitors coming from search engines are currently using to find your site. You should strongly consider bidding on the most popular terms.

Step 2: Determine How Much to Bid

Your "bid" is the amount you agree to pay each time someone clicks your ad on a search engine results page. Bids range from as low as five cents to as high as three dollars.

Your bid is important because it determines in large part how prominently and frequently your ad will appear on search engine results pages. Position and frequency are entirely based on high bid in Yahoo!; in Google, position and frequency are based partly on high bid and partly on how many times your ad actually gets clicked.

The amount you are able to bid will depend on your online promotion budget. You should also be thinking of ROI (Return on Investment) as you set you bid. As a general guideline, assume a conversion rate of 2 sales per 100 visitors to your site. Determine how much in profit those 2 sales are worth to you and then multiply by 100 the amount you are considering bidding on a keyword. Is the amount of profit you will receive from the sales sufficient to cover the amount you will pay for the clicks to achieve the sales?

There are many other variables to consider as you calculate ROI. Your conversion rate may be higher or lower than 2% (which is considered low to average).I If you sell many different products on your site, you may need to determine an average online sale per customer. In addition, conversion rates tend to be lower for service businesses, such as accountants, but the amount you gain from each new client will be much higher and may continue over a period of years.

Most pay-per-click vendors provide tools that let you find out what other people are bidding for the same keywords. Unless you’re absolutely certain you have chosen the exact right keyword to drive traffic to your site, it’s best to start with a lower or mid-tier bid, then increase the bid as you gain success.

Most pay-per-click vendors also let you set up a daily or monthly budget, the maximum amount you’re willing to pay within a given time period. This way, you can submit a high bid for a term without worrying about getting in over your head.

Step 3: Write Your Ad

Having your ad appear prominently on search engine results pages is only part of the battle. You still must entice people to click through to your website. And you don’t have much room to do it: In Google, you get 25 characters for the ad title, and 35 characters for description. In Yahoo!, you get a 40-character title and 190-character description.

Here are some general guidelines to bear in mind as you craft your pay-per-click ad:

• Your ad should emphasize benefits, ask a question, or arouse curiosity. Consider incorporating some sort of differentiating tagline to build brand.
• Your ad must also be specific about what you’re offering, so you don’t get a lot of clicks from people who are looking for something different than what you have to offer. (Remember, you’re paying for each click, whether it turns into a sale or not.)
• Be sure to include your keywords in the text of the ad: they will appear in bold, which will be an added encouragement to people to click.

Some experts suggest including a price in your ad, if appropriate, in order to filter out "browsers" (as opposed to buyers) early in the process. Others say what’s most important is getting people to your site, then selling them once they get there. You should decide which strategy is best for your products and services.

Step 4: Choose Options for Your AdM

Different pay-per-click vendors offer different ad options. Here are some common ones:

• You can determine the countries in which your ad will appear. You may want to exclude countries where English is not primary language, or where you don’t intend to sell goods/services, to lessen “bad” clicks that have no potential to turn into sales.
• You can choose to link from your ad to a specific page on your site, which may not always be the home page. For example, if you’re taking out a keyword to sell a specific product, you should send people to the page where they can buy that product.
• Some pay-per-click vendors (for example, Google) let you test different ads for the same keywords. You can see which one gets the best results.

Step 5: Track Results and Make Adjustments

The main way you’ll be able to determine the effectiveness of your keywords and ads is the amount you end up paying for them. Not getting manyclicks? Maybe you have the wrong keywords, or maybe you need to add a little more "sizzle" to your ad.

Click-throughs to your site, however, are only part of the story. You will also want to know what people are doing once they get to your site, especially if you’re finding your conversion rate (the number if visitors who become buyers or clients) is lower than you hoped.

Website statistic packages (like the ones that come with all Web.com website plans) can help. These packages provide such valuable information as which pages people are looking at when they come to your site through pay-per-click ads and how long they are spending on your site.

Do the majority of people who come to your site by way of pay-per-click never get past your home page? Maybe your ad is misleading. On the other hand, if you’re finding one page is particularly popular among visitors who turn into buyers, you should try to find a way to include more pages like it on your site or consider linking directly to the page from your ad.