So have you made up your mind to give pay-per-click marketing a try?

PPC is one of the most affordable advertising options available to small and large businesses. But like most advertising, you need to have a good strategy to get your money’s worth.

Normally, a lot of people running their first PPC campaign make mistakes that can quickly turn expensive.

This article will offer some basic advice about bidding and choosing keywords to help you run a smart PPC campaign.

The most important thing to know before starting your PPC campaign is how much you can afford to bid for a keyword. High traffic keywords on Google – the leading PPC providers - can cost $8.00 per click for a top ranking.

Can you afford that?

Consider this: the typical e-commerce site converts about 3% of its visitors. That means you need to bring 50 visitors to your site before you make a sale. At $8.00 per click, you’ll spend $400 dollars to generate one sale.

Also keep in mind that you usually want one of the top 3 listings for a keyword. So you’re caught in a catch-22: you want a high PPC ranking to get traffic, but the top rankings for popular words are too expensive.

The solution is to cast your net on a large scale, targeting a large number of less popular keywords. These words are usually less expensive and, taken as a group, can give you a considerable volume of traffic.

It’s common for PPC advertisers to target thousands of keywords. I’ve managed PPC campaigns for clients using over 1500 words.

The downside is that it can be difficult to manage a large number of keywords. You’ll want to track your ads, making sure your rankings haven’t dropped. Plus, you’ll want to know which keywords are sending you traffic and converting visitors into actual clients.

Many companies also outsource the management of their PPC campaigns. Most SEOs now offer PPC management services. These options cost money, but they usually pay and justify for themselves by running your campaigns very efficiently.

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Conversion 1-Per-Click Or Many-Per-Click?

We know different campaign goals often require different success metrics. If you want to drive online purchases, you probably look at the total number of sales, so if one person buys three items from your web site, you’d want to count three sales. But if you’re measuring leads, you may care more about unique leads, so if the same person fills out a lead form three times on your site, you’d want to count them only once.

Today, I will be clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad.

Here’s an example to explain the difference: Let’s say you’re selling plumbing supplies online and you’ve set up conversion tracking on your “Thank You For Your Purchase” and your “Newsletter Subscription Confirmed” pages.

If a customer clicks on your ad, buys a plumbing device, then subscribes to your newsletter, you’ll see two many-per-click conversions, but just a single 1-per-click conversion in your account. If the same customer returns to your site a few days later and buys another tool (but doesn’t click on one of your AdWords ads to get there), you’ll now see three many-per-click conversions, but your 1-per-click conversions will still remain at one.

By focusing on many-per-click conversions, you may be able to more easily compare AdWords campaign performance with the performance of your other online advertising campaigns, since a lot of online ad serving and search campaign management tools use many-per-click conversions as the default conversion metric.

I hope these reporting changes to conversion tracking will make it simpler for you to manage your campaigns with a wide variety of advertising goals.

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Online Advertising Trends to Watch in 2010

Markets begin the New Year refreshed after a strong rebound, leaving many advertisers wonder what trends they can expect to see in 2010. Here is what we can expect to see this year:

1. Re-targeting: Retargeting is the procedure of promoting your website to people who have visited your website in the past. This is usually done through banner ads displayed on the users’ favorite sites as they surf the internet. While there are quite a few companies that already concentrate on this service, 2010 will most likely be the year when the most important search engines will introduce this service in their paid search programs.
2. Display advertising. While paid search has been focused more on text ads in the past, we’ve seen major growth this year in the display ad market. In 2009, we saw the search engines introduce some great tools to help in creating display ads. With these new tools in place and more websites jumping on the content network bandwagon, we should see an even greater focus on display ads in 2010.
3. Contextual advertising. The search engines have made huge strides to improve the quality of their content networks over the last several years. As a result, more and more companies have seen positive ROI from contextual advertising. In 2010, we will continue to see these networks grow as more companies realize their value and see new marketing opportunities arise.
4. Mobile advertising. With the rise of 3G phones in the last year, we’ve already seen huge growth in the mobile advertising market. As new phones come on the market and cell phone carriers improve their 3G services, we should continue to see drastic growth in the mobile advertising space. To prepare, advertisers should optimize landing pages now to provide an enhanced user experience to mobile Web users.

It may take some practice, so start out slowly, but if you’re ready to take your PPC efforts to a new and lucrative level, try these in available options in the year 2010!

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Keyword Traffic Estimator

I wanted to make you all familiar with one of the PPC tools, using this blog. Use the Traffic Estimator tool to find out how the keywords you are suggesting, going to perform. This tool helps to estimate the Max CPC of the keywords we select, the estimated ad position for those particular keywords, estimated clicks & cost per day. The estimates are based on the bid amounts and geographical targeting selections. We can also download the file in a .csv format and share it with the clients. It is an external tool and easily available when you search for it on Google.

I am attaching a screenshot of the tool for your convenience. I have used the keyword ‘fresh flower’ as an example. You can change the keywords and try. Please let me know if you have any questions about the tool or it’s usage.

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Your PPC campaign - Why is it more lucrative in the hands of professionals?

So many times, we come across people who are in a dilemma of whether they should handle a PPC campaign on their own or should they outsource it to some internet marketing agency and leave the job to the professionals. If you ask this question to me, I would say - Unless you are not an ‘Adwords Qualified Professional’, it’s better to outsource it to a specialized agency because of its sheer time and complexity factor. In a PPC campaign, stakes are high and you have to be really spontaneous and have to constantly track your ads to see what’s working and what’s not. PPC is not only about driving traffic to your website, but its about driving ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. Following are more reasons, why it’s advisable to count on professionals:

1. Click fraud: Even though Google, Yahoo! & MSN are doing a reasonably good job to detect click frauds so far, but unfortunately fraudulent clicks still effect almost all PPC campaigns. An online marketing agency can work with dedicated PPC professionals equipped with customized PPC tools and third party PPC solutions like click tracks to detect, report and get refunded for any kind of click fraud.
2. Qualiy Score: Quality Score is the basis for search engines to measure the quality and relevance of your ads. Quality score also determines your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. Quality score is proportional to your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your Google ad, keyword, and yes, landing page too. Quality score directly effects your keywords minimum cost per click and its position in the search results. So if you are just an average internet marketer, you can have a hard time achieving and maintaining good quality score.
3. Keyword research is the main stay of any PPC campaign. Guess work can hurt you a lot. Only an online marketing firm with an in-depth understanding of SEO/SEM will find you the most profitable keywords which will bring you qualified traffic. It’s imoportant to differentiate between keywords that bring ‘only traffic’ and the keywords that bring ‘sales convertible traffic‘.
4. Experience: It’s not easy for a non-professional to understand and profitably implement the concepts of SEO, landing page relevancy and quality score to his PPC campaign. SEO/SEM companies do this every day and can quickly identify problem areas and take corrective measures instantly. And moreover, Google and Yahoo! update their protocols regularly. One has to stay updated all the time.
5. Time: PPC is not a one time implementation but rather an ongoing profitability process. Time is money, and PPC management can be a real time consuming task. Hiring professionals for your PPC requirements will definitely save your time and you will be able to concentrate more on other high ROI activities of your business.
6. PPC ideas tend to cross pollinate within (and sometimes even outside) an industry genre. If one thing works well in case of one company, there is a high probability that it will also work for the other related companies as well. So why not leverage on someone’s experience?

It is quite obvious that PPC is not an alternative to SEO; for real profitability both must go hand in hand. Running a PPC campaign requires a deep knowledge about Search Engines and as I mentioned above - time is money. You should outsource PPC to safer hands and utilize your time in other aspects of your online business.
PS: Please don’t take this blog post as a sales call, infact it is some thing that every smart entrepreneur should do if he understands the difference between traffic and qualified traffic. Generating qualified traffic requires real Internet expertise.

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