Before You Hire a Pay per Click Company…

Sep 28, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas

The fastest way to get visitors to your website is by buying ads on a search engine but you don’t have to hire a Pay Per Click company to do so. Pay per click (PPC) is an online advertising solution in which you buy the space but you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site.

PPC is the ultimate form of direct marketing because you can set up a campaign and see results immediately. For this reason, PPC is often called ‘marketing on steroids’ and it has always been my favorite form of testing new products and concepts. I’m a big fan of testing and using PPC to drive traffic to a new site is a way to do so without spending a fortune or waiting for traffic to build naturally. Unfortunately, PPC advertising is not very easy to understand. It is easy to set up a campaign but it isn’t easy to set it up properly. If you’re not careful, you can set up a campaign and rack up credit card charges of thousands of dollars overnight. This happens all the time. It isn’t because people are stupid but rather because the search engines do not make the rules very clear. This doesn’t mean that you need to hire a pay per click company however.

Let’s review why search engines are in business. First and foremost they want to turn a profit. They do so by charging advertisers for space on their sites. Advertisers are willing to pay for space on their sites because they have millions and millions of visitors starting their searches on sites like Google. In order to keep these millions and millions of visitors returning to Google to begin their searches, Google must consistently provide relevant search results. If they didn’t, searches wouldn’t find what they wanted and they wouldn’t come back to Google.

So Google has been better than any other search engine at providing relevant search results. They have built the algorythms that most closely determine which sites and pages would be most interesting to human visitors. By providing the best end results to visitors, they have created a huge and lucrative market in which they can sell space to advertisers interested in reaching Google searchers. Their solution is called pay per click advertising and it has revolutionized how marketers are able to reach their target audience.

Still using Google as an example, the PPC ads appear on the top of the results page as well as the far right of the same page. The nice thing about PPC advertising is that you only pay when your ad is clicked on. The down side is that you never really know exactly how much you’re going to pay per click before you start a campaign. However, you can set a limit on how much you’re willing to pay per click and per day.

Obviously, the more you’re willing to pay per click (or visitor to your site) the higher up on the page your ad will appear and the greater number of visitors you can expect to receive. However, PPC reallyt is a science and you should never follow the suggestions that Google or Yahoo offer when you’re setting up your account. These suggestions always benefit the search engine and are very rarely in your best interest.

Here are some suggestions that will save you a lot of money on PPC and allow you to generate higher quality leads through this method of advertising:

Use PPC to test a new site. Depending on your market, stop after a certain number of visitors and review the results. I normally use 200 visitors as a test. If these numbers continue would your site be profitable? If yes, continue. If no, change various components of your site.
Always use Google’s A/B testing feature. This allows you to test one ad against another to see which performs better. When one wins, replace the loser and test it against the winner. This way the conversion of your ads will always be improving and your cost per click will go down.
Never choose the top spot. If you can afford it, get placed somewhere around the sixth to eighth spot. This will still put you on the first page but will dramatically decrease your cost per click.
Test small, then roll out. Meticulous testing at the beginning is a nuisance but it will ensure success of a PPC campaign over the long term.
The more content that you add to your site, the lower your PPC charges will be. For whatever reason, Google wants to see more content on websites and penalizes sales letter-type sites by charging higher PPC fees. This isn’t official but I know from my own experience that it is happening.

There you have it. PPC is a great way to get traffic and sales leads through your site fast but you have to be careful. Always set a reasonable daily limit to what you want to spend or you could wake up to find that thousands of dollars have been billed to your Visa card. Also, be sure to monitor and improve your campaigns as much as you can. Google changes the rules and new competitors enter your market so even when a campaign is performing well, it is a good idea to keep an eye on it. If the results start to taper off it is time for a little more tweaking.

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If you’re looking for ways to generate free sales leads without cold-calling, I offer the Crash Course in Modern Sales Prospecting. It is completely free.

Eric Haaranen

www.modernsalesprospecting.com

www.nicepeoplecansell.com

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