Pay per click marketing services (aka paid search advertising) is one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of driving qualified visitor website traffic to your online property. All primary search engines (Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AOL.com, Bing.com and Ask.com) have their own versions of pay per click advertising. Below are some free pay per click help tips and strategies to get you started on the path to increase website traffic.
Pay per click advertising works when a visitor types in a keyword query (search query) into the search tool bar. The results are pulled from the respective search engines in the left column (natural search results) and the right column (paid search results). When you use pay per click advertising you ads will show up on the right side in a small text ad format. Keep in mind you only pay for the ad when a user clicks on your ad.
Two of the most beneficial aspects to pay per click marketing is the ability to target by demographics and location setting. To conserve budgets and razor targeting efforts, you can set each campaign by city, state, zip code or country targets. This can be very useful if you have a local business or would like to test specific locations before a national pay per click launch.
In addition to location settings (aka geo-targeting), most search engine pay per click systems track the results of your campaigns. This means you will have a much better idea of how each ad group or campaign is performing. If you are tracking sales or new lead generation programs, each search engine has a tracking code which can be placed on the "thank you pages" where each successful conversion (lead capture) event takes place.
Pay Per Click Marketing Vs. Search Engine Optimization
Unlike search engine optimization, pay per click advertising can provide your website with fast, track-able, website traffic generation within hours of launching. Pay per click advertising campaigns can have various settings to help with improvement and cost effectiveness. Moreover, pay per click advertising drives traffic much faster than search engine optimization.
Another benefit to paid search advertising is the ability to set and control budgets on a daily or monthly basis. In most of the primary search engines, you can set your advertising budget as 'x amount' per day or month. The search engines do their rest by turning off your pay per click ads once the budget is depleted for the day or for the month. This is an excellent way to control costs and keep a reign on your advertising budgets.
If you plan on generating new website traffic, be sure to design a landing page for your pay per click efforts. A landing page (aka destination page) is the location visitors are taken to from the text ads. Keep in mind when building out your landing page what the goal of the campaign is. That is to say, if your goal is to generate leads for your real estate business, make sure to create solid calls to action (sign up today, contact us now) and use only one or two options for your visitors. Here is a simple formula to keep your pay per click efforts a little more manageable.
Pay Per Click Formula
KEYWORDS + AD COPY + LANDING PAGE = Lower pay per click costs, higher position, and better response rates
Pay per click marketing is based on this Searchology 101 formula; keywords, ad copy (this is a small text based ad you create) and the landing page (destination page). If you have well chosen keywords with well written ad copy and a good landing page, Google and Yahoo will reward you with a good quality score.
A good quality score is rated from 1-5 [5 being the highest]. The better the formula is the less you will pay per click for a higher listing. It is quite possible for other advertisers to pay a higher price per click if they have a poorly crafted formula. Keep this in mind when building out your campaigns.
There is a lot to lean about pay per click advertising and using all the tools available to optimize your paid search efforts. There are new programs in development for pay per click training courses and some pay per click training can be done through Google and Yahoo. I will have more on this subject very soon.
Trial and error is an excellent way to go if you plan on using paid search in-house. Just be sure to use very small budgets. If you plan on doing your own paid search campaigns be sure to start out with small budgets as you get the hang of it. I believe pay per click training is best done hands on and teaching yourself on a limited budget. For additional information you may want to visit SEMPO for online marketing certifications.
Please note that pay per click campaigns have a much higher success rate when partnered with a well ranked website. To achieve higher natural rank for keywords please see search engine optimization. In fact, statistics show a well ranked website (first page results) combined with paid search advertising increase response rates by over 90%.
Pay Per Click Tips
Please feel free to contact us directly with any of your online marketing questions and as always, we will answer your questions ASAP, 100% free web site marketing response. Below are some other items you need to consider when using pay per click to drive traffic to your website.