Pay Per Click – The First Steps to Getting it Right

By Pete Hollier

Without a doubt Pay Per Click advertising is an effective method to immediately bring targeted traffic to your web site. However, extreme caution must be used in Pay Per Click advertising due to click fraud and questionable ethics of some Pay Per Click providers. It is possible to develop your own Pay Per Click strategies however, it is advisable to contract a Pay Per Click Consultant to assist you in setting up your PPC campaign. Once your program is up and running someone within the company should be able to manage the daily PPC advertising management tasks.

Is Pay Per Click Right For You?

Regular readers of my blogs may have gotten the impression that I am not totally in favor of Pay Per Click Advertising. This is true I do not believe PPC should be the foundation of an SEO program. Long term Organic Search Engine Optimization should be the foundation of all your Search Engine Marketing Initiatives.

However, there are always exceptions to the rule and Pay Per Click is no different. In some cases I feel PPC is the ideal solution to providing targeted traffic to your web site.

These reasons include:

• Increase traffic to site while Organic SEO becomes effective
• Testing the effectiveness of Organic SEO keywords and phrases
• Used for very competitive keywords and phrases where Organic SEO may not be successful
• A short term marketing campaign with specific goals
• Targeting Keyword Phrases difficult to integrate into Organic Optimized Content

Pay Per Click Strategies - Determine Customer Value

Determining the value of each customer is imperative to the success of your PPC advertising campaign For example if you are operating a E-commerce web site if your Pay Per Click costs are $50.00 to sell a $45.00 item then an assessment of the campaign is necessary.

Calculating the value of a customer is simple for E-commerce web site selling items, but more difficult to determine if you’re a content site or offering some type of service. For an E-commerce site the formulae to discover customer value would be for monthly period $ value of sale profits / total web site visitors. Determining value of customer for other web site types is not as straight forward but uses the same principle.

Note: The answer represents the amount you can Pay Per Click to break even. Other criteria has to be assessed such as determining if paying more for a keyword has the potential to increase profits

The answer to the formulae represents the break even point, pay more for conversion and your losing money, pay less per customer and this is what we are in business for, to make a profit.

Determining PPC Advertising Goals

Regardless of the marketing media all advertising require definite goals to be successful. Be specific and realistic in your advertising campaign goals. An example of goals would be to sell enough products to increase profits by $3000 for the month, or to generate 100 leads per week for the sales team.

Now that the goal has been set we must initiate processes to monitor results. In the case this is easily done with an Analytics program such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics is easy to use and set up for goal monitoring. The actual instillation is simple as well but does require access to the pages which require monitoring to copy the code required to allow Google to monitor and report on your web site traffic.

Where to From Here

This is just the tip of the iceberg in the Pay Per Click process. I will continue next time to delve into the intricacies of keyword research, keyword bidding and the development of PPC specific ad copy and landing pages.

Part 2 of Pay Per Click - Keywords – The Foundation of all Things SEO

Written By: Pay Per Click Consultant at www.seowizardry.ca