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Continued...
Done right, pay-per-click
advertising can be very profitable. However, if you're
not careful, you can lose a lot of money with your PPC
advertising. Here are some tips to help you ensure your
campaigns are profitable:
Avoid keywords that are
too general. More general keywords will attract a lot of
traffic, driving up the cost of your PPC campaign and
converting few visitors to sales because general search
terms aren't specific enough to attract the right
audience.
- Ensure that the sales
process on your site is converting visitors to
buyers before you launch a full-scale PPC campaign.
You don't want to be spending money on getting the
traffic if your site can't produce sales.
- Make sure you
calculate how much you can afford to bid on keywords
to guarantee you still turn a profit. To determine
how much you can afford to bid, you'll need to
understand the value of each visitor to your site.
You can do this by determining the number of sales
you'll get, the profit you'll earn per sale, and the
number of unique visitors your site will receive
during a set period of time. It's generally easiest
to calculate these numbers on a monthly basis.
Here are three easy steps
that will help you determine the value of each
individual visitor to your site:
1. To determine your
visitor conversion rate (that is, the percentage of
visitors who buy from you), calculate:
Number of unique
visitors ÷ number of sales = visitor conversion rate
2. To calculate your net
profit per sale, calculate:
(Gross revenue - total
expenses) ÷ number of sales = net profit per sale
3. To determine the value
of each of visitor to your site, calculate:
Net profit per sale ÷
visitor conversion rate = individual visitor value
Once you understand the
value of your visitors, you'll be able to set your
maximum bid for keywords. For example, you may determine
that each individual visitor to your site is worth 50
cents in pure profit. This means you can afford to bid a
maximum of 49 cents per click to guarantee that you'll
generate profits.
The value of your
visitors may also help you determine which PPC search
engines you'll use, as the minimum bid on keywords in
some search engines may be higher than in others.
Choosing
the Right PPC Search Engine to Use
Overture.com is the largest
and most far-reaching PPC search engine, but its
popularity has driven up the cost of advertising with
the company. The beauty of bidding on keywords in
Overture is that your site will be listed not only on
Overture, but also at Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, CNN.com
and InfoSpace, provided your bid is in the top three for
a particular keyword.
Other good, cheap PPC
search engines worth exploring include Findwhat,
7Search, and Kanoodle. Google Adwords is also an
excellent option, though technically, it's not really a
PPC search engine. Instead, it's a "pay per
position" ad model that's the only way to get
listed on the first page of Google without fighting your
way through the free listings. Google Adwords listings
show up in colored boxes on the right-hand side of
Google's free search results, giving you tons of great
exposure.
With Google Adwords, you
bid on keywords for placement; however, Google Adwords
also lists ads by popularity (how many clicks they get).
So you may be paying for placement, but unless your link
receives more click-throughs than your competition's
links, your listing may not appear in the top spots of
the search results.
How do you go about
finding the keywords your market is searching for? Start
by checking your web logs to see what keywords your
visitors searched for to arrive at your site (check with
your web host if you don't have access to these
statistics). These will provide a good indication of
what kinds of terms your potential customers think of
when they're looking for a product or service like
yours.
You may also want to
consider using a service such as WordTracker, which
allows you to easily see which keywords are frequently
searched by your target market in the major search
engines—but aren't being used by your competition. All
you have to do is enter your keyword, and WordTracker
will check its database to see how often people are
looking for that term, how many competing sites are
using that particular keyword, and how much they are
bidding in the PPC search engines.
A tool like this will
help you choose excellent keywords to bid on. It will
also allow you to view the bid price of each keyword in
separate PPC search engines, which will help you decide
whether the cost of bidding on the keyword is in your
ballpark or not.
About The Author:
Internet marketing expert Corey Rudl has gained
popularity because what he teaches is not theoretical
approaches to online marketing but real examples of what
works when it comes to having a successful business on
the Internet. He's also the author of the recently
updated bestselling how-to guide, Insider Secrets to
Marketing Your Business on the Internet - Version 2004.
For more information on his new advertising technology,
go to www.marketingtips.com/hoverad
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Using
PPC Search Engines To Promote Your Website
