Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) Made Simple

[caption id="attachment_36314" align="alignright" width="1024"] Pay Per Click Advertising is all about calculating your returns on investments (ROI)’s and ensuring what you spend is worthwhile.[/caption]

Pay Per Click advertising is one of the easiest ways to start driving traffic to a website and build online sales. It’s also an easy way to increase interest in your site or blog.

There are plenty of places to buy ads on the Internet, but for the purpose of this walkthrough tutorial, we’ll talk about Facebook and Google Adwords.

What is pay per click advertising?

Pay per click advertising is online advertisements, that you can purchase and pay online for the people who click directly on the ads.

It allows small businesses to be marketed on search engines such as Google, as well as popular social media websites including Facebook.

Most of the time, if you’re the highest bidder on a website, your advertisement appears at the top of the list. Being on the top helps the number of clicks you’ll receive.

When your Google Adwords paid search campaign is live, your advertisement will show up in the search engine results page (SERP). Since you are paying for placement, Google will list your advertisement either as one of the top paid results in the SERP or on the sidebar of the SERP. Again, remember that your ranking will depend on being the highest bidder (and your quality score).

How does paid search work?

In order to run a paid search campaign through Google, you need to create a free Google Adwords account using your email address. Once you are in your Google AdWords account, the process of creating an ad is intuitive, and AdWords will guide you through the process step-by-step.

First, you will need to research keywords that are relevant to your website. For example, if you are a shoe store, you may want to research terms like buy shoes online, online shoe stores, shoe sales, etc.

Once you have researched and selected your keywords (you can use the Google Keyword Planner for help with keyword research), you will then set your bid amount.

Bid amounts vary in price depending on how competitive a keyword is. For example, and for the purpose of this article, I have entered in 6 different keywords with varying levels of competition into the Google Keyword Planner to give you an idea of how much a certain keyword bid will usually cost.

As you can see, works related to shoes are less competitive and will range from 50 cents and up. However, if you are a lawyer interested in a paid search campaign, you can see that the suggested bid price is much higher at $64.45 per click.

Why run a paid search campaign?

[caption id="attachment_36313" align="alignright" width="1024"] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about improving your organic listing in Google and other popular search engines to ensure your listings appear at the top of the results.[/caption]

Paid search advertising is a legitimate and effective way to drive traffic to your website. While it may seem expensive initially, even as you are just paying for clicks, the return on investment is worth it. When you run a paid search campaign, you:

• bring visibility to your website;
• guarantee your placement in the search results;
• increase your website click-through rates;
• increase the probability of conversion;

If paying for traffic is too much for your business to take on at this point, organic traffic, and social media traffic are two excellent, free means to generate traffic for your website.