Pay-per-Click Campaign Management

In a perfect world, you would never have to pay for clicks to your Web site. You'd simply build a great site, tell the search engines about it, then wait for the traffic to roll in when people conducted searches that took them to your site.

Regrettably, this is not how the world works.

Think of the Internet as a worldwide "Yellow Pages" that doesn't charge anyone for its advertisements. Now think how many people there are on the whole planet who are in your business. Probably quite a few. With all of that competition, how can someone ever hope to get search engine traffic for their Web site? After all, there are probably millions of Web pages out there with similar content.

Of course, we work very hard to capture that free search engine traffic (what some call "organic" or "natural" search) by using search engine marketing and search engine optimization, but sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes it becomes necessary to pay for search engine traffic by buying paid advertisements that will come up when relevant search engine terms are searched. When someone "clicks" your paid advertisement, you "pay" for that click, hence the term "pay-per-click."

The beauty of pay-per-click (or "PPC") is that you can be assured that an advertisement for your Web site will appear when someone conducts a search using keywords that are important for your business. It doesn't matter if you compete against a million other Web sites; you can get yourself top position among the paid results with a PPC campaign.

The negative of PPC is that it can be very, very expensive, particularly among competitive keywords. There are keywords out there that advertisers are willing to pay $20, $30, $40, even $50 per click. Per CLICK. Of course, hopefully these advertisers have determined that these clicks are still a good value for them. After all, even if you paid $50,000 for 1,000 clicks at $50 each, you'd be very happy if you closed a deal that net you $100,000.

This is an extreme example, of course. However, even in everyday lines of business, there are clicks that cost $5 to $15, and in some cases it can make perfect sense to pay this.

The "art" of PPC is to find certain search terms that can be bought less expensively than some of the more popular (and expensive) keywords.

For example, if you had $1,000 to spend on a PPC campaign, you might pay for 100 clicks that cost you $10 each. But what if you could find 200 high-quality clicks for less common keywords for the same $1,000? Assuming that the quality of the clicks was the same, you're better off getting 200 clicks instead of 100, correct?

The thing is that it takes a little research and work to determine what keywords you should be going after in order to maximize the return from your PPC dollars. In addition, it's an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. You have to look at the metrics of your PPC campaign regularly to determine what's working, what's not, and what changes should be tested.

Pay-per-click campaigns can be a great way to kickstart your Web marketing effort, but you don't want to rush into anything. Call Paul Broni on (770) 265-8316 to learn more, or use the QuickConnect form to get a return phone call or email within moments.