Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

Simple Pay Per Click / Cost Per Click Strategy

In a Nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is a search engine marketing technique which is used by search engines and advertising networks to generate clicks. In this, advertiser uses potential key phrases and bid for their position in the sponsored links section to generate leads to their website. The major service providers in the area are Google Ad words, Yahoo – Overture program, MSN Ad center. Apart from these BIG 3, there are many smaller programs which comprises the PPC universe. Setting up PPC sounds simple, but it requires certain practices and constant monitoring as improper biddings can make an advertiser bankrupt overnight.

Below are the simple strategies, which can make your PPC campaign more result oriented.

• Keywords research: Always do good keywords research and come up with as many keywords / key phrases as possible, related to your product / Service. Come up with more and more secondary keywords which are relevant to the service / product offered by you. A secondary keyword may not have good search volumes but can certainly improve your conversion rates.
• Create proper landing page: A landing page is the page on a website where the traffic generated through PPC program lands. Always make good. Attractive landing pages. A home page can not be a landing page as it is the identity of your website. Home page is used to present corporate identity, its more on “Who you are” whereas a landing page should focus on “what service / product you offer” and “why customer should buy from you”.
• Write Relevant Ad Copy: The ad copy should clearly mention the product / service on offer for a particular campaign and the pricing for it. Any deviation from this will make you lose the space. An ad copy with pricing catches attraction of the visitor, thus making CTR (Click Through Ratio) value high.
• Conversions: Incorporate conversion tracking code. Without this, you will not be able to know the exact ROI. One must measure the leads coming through PPC programs, this helps in utilizing the budget effectively.
• Bidding: Test the ROI, conversion for various places in the sponsored link category by varying the bids for 2-3 weeks. This will give you the optimal position where you can safely bid and get desired CPA (Cost per acquisition) and can stick to your allocated monthly budget without much hassle. One you do this, you will understand that bidding for top positions is not good always.
• Check competition: Look at the ad copy used by your competitors, analyze them and if required, make changes in your ad copy. Use promotional “HOOKS” (offers) to increase CTR.
• Branding: Do not let your affiliate to use your brand name for making their ad copy. This may affect your branding.
• Monitoring: Constantly monitor your campaigns, there is nothing like AUTO PILOT in PPC campaigns. The competition is cut throat and you will need to adjust your bid in order to optimize your ROI.
• REALISTIC expectations: Have realistic expectations with your campaigns. You can not increase your business 10 folds overnight using PPC campaigns. It’s a market where you are selling goods and services. You can get the leads but if your website is not up to the mark or your pricing does not suit visitor, you will not get final CONVERSION. So ideally first step before setting up PPC programs is to do proper home work. Make your website up to the mark, create good landing pages, provide information in great detail so that the visitors get a complete idea about your services, products, pricing etc.
• Last but not least, do monthly tweaking in bids, ad copy, remove non performing ads from your campaigns. This is life weeding, removing unnecessary items from your campaigns.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Smart Tips for Managing PPC Programs

Pay per click programs are highly effective way to get instant traffic on your website. This is a good tool to attract quality and highly targeted traffic. The bids normally start from .05 cents which is quite good as you can get a good number of visitors by spending a little amount. Even if bid is .10 cents, you can get 10 visitors by paying $1

Smart Tips for Managing PPC programs

• Identify the set of keywords which clearly defines the services / products you offer. This clearly means that you need to remove unnecessary keywords which might be related to your category but can not generate quality traffic to your website.
  
• Focus on product/service which you wish to sell. Remember, its selling service and you have to be specific in PPC approach. You can not have your whole catalogue on your single campaign.
  
• Take bottom up approach for bid management. Start with a certain minimum value and the scale up the campaigns on a day to day basis till you arrive at an optimum level where your goals are met. ( an optimal combination of your budget / CPA / Bid / position)
  
• Come up with a precise ad copy. Include text in the campaign which clearly states about the service / product you are promoting in the ad campaign. If possible, try to include pricing in the ad copy if you are selling any product. This will increase the CTR if your pricing is competitive.
  
• Setup the campaign and bid on maximum relevant keywords possible. This will increase the possibility of clicks.
  
• Track you campaign: This is the most important step. You need to place tracking to track the ROI. You need to restrict your CPA (cost per acquisition). Big programs like adwords/overture can generate huge volumes and your money can vanish in a day. So you need to track your returns, and this is the only way by which you can know whether its working out for you or not.
  
• Keep tweaking the campaigns in terms if bids and ad copy by looking at the reports. An attractive ad copy can increase the chances of getting clicks.
  
• Do not rush for position #1. Settle for positions 4/5/6 as bids will be lower and visibility will also be OK. This will lower your CPA and increase ROI.
  

If you try the above points, you can expect improvements in your ROI and in the long run, constant bid management can get you sustained success in managing PPC programs.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Organic SEO Vs PPC

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

• ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
• Organic SEO pays good in long run
• The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
• The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
• The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
• Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
• There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
• There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO
  

PPC

• PPC gives you instant traffic
• PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
• Results can be measured in PPC programs
• Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
  available over a period of time
• PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
• ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
• PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
• PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
• There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

What is a CTR (Click Through Ratio)?

What is a CTR

CTR refers to Click Through Ratio. It is a widely used term in Search Engine Marketing.

Click through Ratio (CTR) is the ratio of the number of times the Pay Per Click (PPC) AD appears (number of impressions) to the number of times it is CLICKED by the visitors.

For Example, if your ads are shown 100 times and 2 persons have clicked on them during this then your CTR would be 2/100 => 2%

More the CTR is, more relevant your ad copy is. This means that person who has typed something in the search box will look for the most relevant AD in the results. If your ad copy shows him/her the information he is looking, more likely he/she will click on the AD. However CTR also depends on the competition, position you are bidding and whether the ad is thrown up in content or direct search.

CTR is important while you set and manage CPC campaigns. Especially Google gives certain weight age to healthy CTR. CTR can be improved by:

• Writing effective ad copy
• Making keyword appear in the Ad copy
• Creating multiple Ads within a Ad Group

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp