What exactly is pay per click advertising?
Pay per click advertising is a way of advertising on the Internet, without having to pay a fixed amount to have an ad placed on a web page. With pay per click advertising, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad and is taken to a specified page on their website.
From a searcher's point of view it is the same as a normal search engine, except that the results are business and product related. In fact, very few people would visit a pay per click search engine to search at all. Most pay per click search engines have large distribution networks, so that their results are seen on a number of different sites.
From an advertiser's point of view it is an excellent way to get cheap targeted traffic.
A pay per click search engine allows you to open an account and deposit some money as a starting balance. With this, you enter your site's URL, title and description and bid on relevant keywords. A site selling widgets would bid on keywords such as, "widgets," "small widgets," "blue widgets" etc.
When someone searches for "widgets" the details of your site appear, in the form of a search result with the URL, title and description you entered. If they then click on your listing, your account is debited the amount you have bid on that keyword.
What makes it so good is that someone who has searched for your product is already qualified when they come to your site, which is selling the product they're looking for.
What are the best products or services to promote via pay per click search engines? Is there a product that you wouldn't put on a pay per click search engine?
The only products you wouldn't promote through a pay per click search engine would be ones that you couldn't make a profit on.
Charities and non-profit organizations are some of the sites that might miss out, unless they have some of their budget set aside for advertising purposes.
I have never used a pay per click search engines before and am very nervous about losing lots of money either by making little or no sales. Do you have any advice on how to avoid this mistake?
Make sure your keywords are relevant and link to the page that contains the information which a person is looking for when searching for that keyword. Don't necessarily begin by trying to maintain top rankings for your keywords. Research indicates that sites within the top 5 rankings are likely to achieve reasonable amounts of traffic and conversions, so it's not always necessary to be ranked #1 in order to achieve your goals.
Spend your advertising dollars wisely. Set yourself a budget and don't go over it. Think about using some of the less popular (and hence less expensive) keywords. If your spread your money between more keywords there's a good chance that you'll make more than you would if you just concentrated on the top one or two keywords in your field.
The key to running an effective pay per click campaign is to monitor your campaign closely. You need to keep an eye on how your ads are performing and be prepared to tweak and change things in order to increase your ROI (return on investment).
This can be a very time-consuming process and there are some good managment tools to help make managing your campaigns a lot easier.
What tips could you give me for making good bids on words and phrases?
Well, obviously you can't bid more than your profit margin. A simple way to work out how high you can bid is to take your conversion rate for the product you're selling, let's say 1%, and take your profit margin, let's say $10.
A conversion rate of 1% means you're going to be paying for 100 visitors to get one sale of $10. Divide the profit by the number of visitors per sale and you get 10 cents.
So, with that, you can bid 5 cents on keywords pertaining to this product and still be making a profit.
What happens when someone keeps clicking on my link over and over again?
Unfortunately, this tends to indicate the all too common problem of click fraud. Unscruplous competitors can try and cost your business money by forcing you to pay for click throughs when there is no intention of buying your products. Sophisticated fraudsters, who may be affiliates of the pay per click company, will try and make money for themselves by generating thousands of clicks on your ad.
There are things you can do to combat click fraud. Firstly, you must take a proactive approach. Check your logs for suspicious activity. Contact the pay per click search engine concerned with as much documented evidence as you can collect. Most of the reputable companies are willing to take notice of your concerns and provide refunds where it is clear that you have been the victim of fraudsters.
There's lots of information available about click fraud on this web site. Check it out and see what solutions some people have come up with to try and attack the problem. This article on Conlict Resolution in Click Fraud is a good starting point.
Can we really compete with businesses who have much bigger advertising budgets than we do?
You shouldn't even think about what others are doing. All you need to do is find out what you can bid or, if you have the room to, choose an appropriate position that is converting well, and you're set.
