PPC Advertising Strategies - Is PPC An Effective Way To Market Products Online?

By Shakil Zaman

Pay per click is a very popular method of getting the word out about your products or services on the internet. The question is whether or not it is worth using ppc advertising and how good is the return on investment. The truth is that this type of advertising can be very effective as long as you know what you are doing. The advantage to this method of promotion is that you only pay when people click on your ads so the traffic can be very targeted.

The Google AdWords program is the largest pay per click service on the internet simply because Google receives the most search engine traffic. It is important to learn how to advertise within the system of AdWords in order to take advantage of the colossal amount of exposure your ads can receive. Brand building can be one of the best advantages to ppc advertising as you can get your brand name out to millions of visitors at an extremely low cost since you do not pay for impressions but only for clicks.

The AdWords program uses a system called quality score to determine the amount to charge for ads and the positioning of the ads for each account. Getting off to a good start with your account is important in order to maximize your return on investment. While the exact measures used to determine quality score are not revealed there are a few things you can do in order to develop an account with a high quality score.

The most important aspect to getting a good quality score may be the click through rate(ctr) of your ads. Having a high ctr is an indication that you are showing relevant ads for the keywords you select which is exactly what Google wants in order to give their users the best possible experience. Never create ads that are deceptive or misleading so always display accurate descriptions because the amount of time a visitor spends on your landing pages may also be a factor for a good quality score.

So if a visitor clicks on your ads and then hits the back button quickly because they do not like what they see since the content was not accurately reflecting the ad descriptions then this low visitor duration on your landing pages may adversely affect the quality score of your ads. Thus make sure your landing pages are highly relevant and also consider adding some of the main keywords you are targeting into your landing pages and be sure to add them in as naturally as possible.

Tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns is very important also in order to maximize your return on investment. All successful businesses track their advertising efforts closely so be sure to take advantage of the conversion tracking features offered in your AdWords account. Tracking is also offered on most other major ppc services like Yahoo search marketing and MSN adcenter. The tracking process is quite simple and requires the addition of a small piece of code into the thank you pages of your campaigns so you can track which keywords and ads are converting best.

If you have ads that are performing well and converting into sales then you will want to increase your bids for those keywords and get as much traffic as possible since these keywords are your money makers. Conversely keywords that perform poorly and do not convert you will want to either delete or reduce the bids until they are profitable. Use PPC advertising as a powerful way to inexpensively increase the awareness and profitability of your business on the internet.