1. Paid Traffic | 2 of 2 - Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing:
Increase Web Site Traffic with Pay Per Click Advertising

This page explains the 5th way to buy website traffic. If you came directly into this page and want to read about the first 4 paid traffic strategies, go to Paid Web Traffic Part 1.

  5.    Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC Ads)

The most popular paid way to increase web site traffic is to advertise using PPC ads, in what is known as PPC search engine internet marketing.

That's because these ads mostly appear on websites, or on the results pages of search engines, when a surfer searches on a word or phrase that matches the keywords specified for the ads. They are contextual ads.

How it works is that you bid on keywords or phrases for your ads that you deem as relevant to what you offer. Relevant keywords drive targeted traffic, so you won't waste money on traffic that is not interested in your product.

You only pay when someone clicks on your ad to go to your site. You also bid on how much you're prepared to pay for each click. The higher you bid, the more likely that your ad gets to appear, and the higher up on the page it will show, which also means the more web site traffic you'll get. (That's the rough idea, but of course, there's a lot more to it than that.)

There're a number of pay per click advertising server vendors, but Google (together with its partners like AOL and ASK.com) has the biggest share of the ad viewer market, several times that of its nearest rivals, Yahoo and MSN.

Its pay per click advertising system for advertisers, Google Adwords, is by far the most popular.

Example:


Fig 1. PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing


It makes sense to use PPC ads if your sale amount exceeds your cost of bringing in buyers. Let's say you can make $45 from a sale. If it costs $1 each time a visitor clicks on the ad, and if out of every 20 visitors, one buys (5% conversion rate), you would have paid $20 for each $45 sale, giving you a $25 profit.

But if the conversion rate is lower, ex. out of every 50 visitors only one buys (2% conversion rate), you would lose money.

It can cost anything from $0.10 to well over $10 per click, depending on competition (which is determined by the keywords you select), the CTR (Click-Thru-Rate, which is the percentage of viewers of your ad who actually click on it), the way you write your landing pages (pages that your ads link to), and so on.

You also specify the maximum you want to spend each day. For some people, that's $10 a day; for others it could be $100 or $500 or more. Once your budget is reached, your ads stop appearing till the next day.

You can probably tell, therefore, that the key to making money with this method, is to a) Pay as little as possible per click; b) Increase conversion rate, i.e. the percentage of viewers landing on your site who buy.

You can make a lot of money using pay per click advertising. You can also lose a lot. The difference lies in knowing what you should do, and more importantly what you should NOT do.

This is especially because the Google Adwords market has become very competitive in recent years, as more and more people, and even big companies, discover how lucrative pay per click advertising can be.

So read up and understand this area well before you venture into it. I cannot emphasize this enough. There is more to Google Adwords than meets the eye, and you could easily lose money. But if you understand it well, then you have a good chance of making money more quickly with this method than any other.

One resource is Google's Learning Center, which explains how Adwords work, and is open to everybody free. This however, just teaches you the basics.

You should also equip yourself with more advanced information that is not open to everybody. One book to read is the guide by the acknowledged expert on Google Adwords, Perry Marshall. His Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords explains step by step how to set up a pay per click program, how to word your ads to increase web site traffic, what to do to get cheap clicks, and other ways to minimize costs and maximize returns from ads.

A book that users have found very useful, and easy to understand and apply, is Howie Jacobson's Adwords for Dummies . You can see the customer reviews and feedback on the Amazon page for it.

You will also need a keyword research tool for doing Pay Per Click marketing. One that was developed specifically for figuring out the most cost effective keywords to bid for, is Underground Keywords .

A common use of pay per click advertising is to bring visitors to one-page sales letters which typically come with very long and persuasive sales copy, selling a particular product.

That's because, having paid for visitors to come, the sales copy must be able to get them to buy. So to increase conversion rate, i.e. percentage of visitors who buy, learn copywriting. It will serve you well if you can master it. See the How to Write Sales Letter page for more on this.

Be careful of one type of paid traffic: offers of bulk traffic costing a flat rate for so many thousands. Many of these are scams. There're actually schemes that pay people who are not really interested, to click on ads. Sure, it does increase web site traffic, but it's not buying traffic.

Stick with the better known ad networks such as Google's Adwords, or Yahoo's, if you're not sure. The reputable ones do not allow any such chicanery.

Paid traffic strategies for getting web site traffic can be used for most types of websites. You can use it to sell a product via a salesletter landing page, or to get people to opt into a mailing list.

But if you do not have much of a budget for advertising, then you should look at getting free web traffic as well.

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