PPC in Your Business's Online Marketing Effort PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is a powerful internet marketing tool

that allow s you to instantly place your products and services in front of a multitude of p otential buyers. The effect of a properly managed PPC campaign can be immediate and long lasting. Commercial keyword phrases can be identified and tapped into i mmediately on launch of your campaigns, allowing searchers online to find your p roducts quickly. PPC results are often displayed in the first 3 positions of the search engine results pages. Which are directly in the line of sight of the mar ket you are targeting. In order to run an effective PPC campaign, you must become familiar with searc h engine marketing (SEM) platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Ads. The adverti sing platforms are similar to one another and the key similarity is that you onl y pay for the ads when searchers click the link to your ad. There are several im portant considerations when creating and optimizing a PPC ad campaign, common to both systems.. Creating a PPC Campaign Of course the first step in creating effective PPC campaigns will be to complete your keyword research, to ensure that you target commercially viable search que ries. Then you will create accounts in Google Adwords and Bing Ads. Of the prima ry PPC platforms, Google is by far the most popular due to the domination of the search engines it possesses. However Bing Ads are a common choice due to the re lative affordability of their CPC advertising (cost per click). Finally Facebook has a highly targeted PPC platform that you may consider. Once you have set up your accounts it is a fairly straightforward process to cre ate your campaigns, step one is to set your daily budget. You can spend as littl e as $10/day, or as much as several thousand dollars a day, depending on your av ailable funding. Once you have decided what your budget will be you have to decide whether you wi ll bid on text based or visual ads, and create an image or headline relevant to your topic. Next you will decide your maximum bid, or the amount you wish to pa y for each click at maximum. for the keywords you decided to target in step one.

You will select keywords based on your target market. I like to examine the adve rtising that is displaying in the dominant positions for ideas on how to design my ads. I also examine display ads when I select an images for display advertis ing. If you are a dentist seeking new clientele, you might use a phrase like free teeth cleaning or $10 tooth Whitening as an incentive to click to your page. The suc of your campaign is based on the perceived value of your offer. Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns There are many techniques available to the experienced Adwords campaign manager to optimize PPC campaign results. The first and most important aspect of a succe ssful Adwords campaign is to ensure the relevancy of your ad to your landing pag es. Google assigns a relevancy score from 0 10 to any advertisement, and the highe r the relevancy score you attain, the cheaper your clicks will be and the greate r likelihood of attaining good click through rates (CTR). Once you have mastered the process of optimization you can maximize your campaig ns through replication, using the Adwords Reader and similar tools. Other techni ques include the use of negative keywords. A negative keyword is selected to pre vent the display of the ad when these keywords are selected in the query. For a chiropractor, in example, you may choose not to display your ad when the term pain

medication is chosen, as searchers seeking advice in that category may click on you r ad, but are not likely to engage your services. Another example might be a fl ooring contractor selecting DIY as a negative keyword. Laser Target your PPC Campaign You can not only optimize your adwords campaigns for relevancy, but you can targ et your campaigns to specific geographic locations. You can target your ad campa igns to a specific distance from your city. If you are a brick and mortar based business in Milwaukee, you may not want to display your ad campaign in Chicago. If you use Facebook for PPC you can micro target to Gender and age categories as well as geographic and interest targeting. PPC Analysis Once you have your ad campaigns up and running, you are going to want to track t he results of your efforts. Thankfully, the advertising platforms have made the process of tracking your campaigns very simple, you can use the default campaign reporting, or design custom tracking reports from the dashboard of the ad platf orms. The purpose of data analysis is to help you improve your overall campaign effectiveness. Both of the most popular Search engine platforms, Google and Bing provide detail ed analytics for your ad campaigns. And Facebook provides detailed reporting fun ctions as well. It does take some time to learn the science of ad campaign analy sis, and you may be fully employed in the operation of your business. In this ca se it may be a good idea to select an experienced Internet Marketing Advisory ag ency, rather than spending a lot of time learning to create and manage your PPC campaigns. That way you can concentrate on your ROI, instead of the technical pr ocess of PPC management. You have to create relevant, high quality campaigns to properly use Google Adwo rds and similar PPC ad platforms. To achieve your objectives you will have to ta rget your campaigns to individuals who have a commercial interest in your goods and services, and who display intent to purchase. The key to a successful PPC c ampaign is to ensure that the keyword phrases are commensurate with this objecti ve. When you target and optimize correctly, you will send highly targeted traffi c to your landing pages, and realize a solid ROI on your campaigns. If you fail to properly optimize your campaigns, you may end up spending a lot of money, yie lding limited results.