What Is A Price Per Click Search Engine Advertising
PPC Advertising Explained
PPC (price per click) search engines are a paid search engine. You place bids for keywords you would like to have you listing on. If you don't want to hire a professional to optimize your site for you, you can always submit your site to a PPC search engine that sells the top positions instead of selecting them with a complex algorithm. Overture and AdWords are a good example of a PPC (pay-per-click) engine. Their system is relatively simple. You select a keyword and decide how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results. The more money you can cough up, the higher you will rank on the result list. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on.
Making The Most Out Of Your Money
The cost of the top position depends greatly upon the keyword you are bidding for.
Example –
The #1 ranking for the keyword ecommerce at Overture currently costs around $3 per click. At the same time, you could get the #1 position for the keyword certified ecommerce consultant for a mere 5 cents per click. The keyword certified ecommerce consultant won’t generate as much traffic as the keyword ecommerce, but if you can bid on many keywords like certified ecommerce consultant the combined traffic from them will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword - but at a fraction of the cost. Biding On Less Popular Terms There are two additional benefits in bidding for the less popular terms. One, the traffic you will receive is targeted and should result in a better clicks-per-sale rate. Two, Overture has many partners that display the top three results from Overture in their search results. It is hard to grab one of the top three places in popular keywords and still be able to make a profit, but with slightly less competitive keywords, you can get into the top three with a reasonable price and thus have your site displayed on all of the Overture partner sites as well. To find these keywords, I would recommend that you use Overture's own tool for finding keywords. Google AdWords also displays their top 3 results in AOL. So there is an advantage to getting the top 3 results.
Should I Forget About Keywords That People Are Already Biding On?
Absolutely not. You should bid on every keyword relevant to your site, but at the same time, you have to make sure that you will be making a profit after paying for the traffic. I recommend that you start out slowly. Investigate how much an average visitor is worth to you and then bid accordingly. The key is not to get carried away.
It is better to rank 38th, get a few visitors each day and make a small profit than to rank 1st, get masses of traffic and lose money!
If you feel that you aren't getting enough traffic, try to correct the situation by bidding on more keywords, not by increasing your bids so much that you won't be able to turn a profit.
Don't Pay Any More Than You Have To When It Comes To PPC Advertising
When dealing with Overture, Adwords, and any other PPC engine it’s Important to remember that bids are constantly changing. You should check your bids once a day. Changing your bids once a day to suit the current situation can save you a lot of money. This can really make a difference if you’re biding for a search heavy term. For example, I often see situations where the top bid is $1.20 and the second highest bid is $0.75. The guy that is bidding $1.20 in such a situation must be loaded with money, since he could achieve the same ranking with a mere $0.76 per click. I know, 44 cents isn't a lot of money, but if dozens or even hundreds of people click on the listing each day, it adds up pretty fast.
Overture & AdWords
Overture has a minimum monthly spend of $20. AdWords does not. If you purchase click-throughs on Overture for less than $20 on a given month, your account will be charged $20 for that month. Make sure that you're bidding on enough keywords to produce at least $20 in click-throughs per month in order to avoid paying for nothing.
Getting Great Results Using PPC Advertising
It’s best not to bid on broad keywords. If I had a website about cat products I wouldn’t want to bid on pets. It would be better to bid on cat. As using pet might get people looking for a dog or snake. Even better to bid on cat products. If your site was about cat food even cat products is broad. It would be better to use the keyword cat food.
Don’t bid on keywords that have nothing to do with your site. This will only cost you money and get you broke fast. Even broad words will get you traffic but no sales. Lots of traffic is bad in PPC, what your really looking for is a good click per sale ratio.
A couple of good keywords is better than 800 keywords. It’s about the right keywords not about how many.
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