Pay Per Click is now the most common Internet-based advertising. Some regard it as the best way to get your site the exposure it needs in order to generate the traffic and sales your business needs to succeed. PPC is popular with advertisers because of the hands-on control it gives them over their ad campaign. It can generate traffic to your site right away. It has the speed to market edge over radio TV and newspaper campaigns. Within 15 minutes of signing up into the program you will see your ads running. Pay per click (PPC) is similar to paid link advertising. However PPC advertising gives you greater control and flexibility than paid link advertising. You can start and stop your campaign(s) whenever you want. PPC also gives your ads much more exposure. Your ads appear on more than just one or two websites. Your ads appear on one or more search engine search results and are fed to websites running content related to your keywords for as long as you want to keep your ads going.
Unlike paid link advertising, you don't pay for the placement of your ads. You pay instead for the words that appear in your ad - keywords. When someone clicks on your ad, you pay the search engine the amount you bid for that keyword/search term, hence the name "pay per click". Keywords, also known as "search terms", are the very substance of PPC advertising.
As a PPC advertiser you bid on keywords related to the product or service you are advertising. The higher the bid you offer the higher up in the ad unit your ad will appear to the right of or above the search results In other words the higher your bid the better positioned your ad is when people go to a search engine looking for something and use search terms related to the product/service you offer to find it. You can expect to pay anywhere from a nickel to a dollar or more for a click depending on the intensity of the bidding.
PPC is like a two for one deal in a way. Even if you don't get a click, you still get exposure. People see your ad even if they don't click on it. It may not be the best exposure but every little bit helps on the net..
Another good thing about PPC is that you can experiment and do so without betting the farm. You can afford to make "mistakes". Invest a small amount initially. Test the waters see what works in a little test campaign to get a feel for the whole thing. Consider it an investment in your long term goals, a form of tuition. It'll be worth it if you learn the right lessons.
You can see PPC advertising in action every time you type in a search term in a search engine which PPC advertisers have bid on.
Take a look at this example. I have punched in the search term or keyword "tennis racquets" in Google MSN and Yahoo! - the biggest PPC search engines.
Click on Google, Yahoo! and/or MSN below. On each search results page you will see PPC ads to the right of and above the search results:
If you take a look at the left hand column on this page you will see another example of PPC advertising - AdSense. I have selected the 160x600 ad units which display 5 PPC advertisers text links. You can take a look at the ads displayed in these ad units on this page and elsewhere around my site and around the net to get an idea of how your ad(s) will look.
If there's a trick to PPC advertising it's coming up with catchy but brief phrases or short sentences which are effective enough to deliver a high click through rate (CTR). You might not be in a position to pay the highest bid for certain keywords. Well done ad text can make up for a less than ideal placement in an ad unit.
You want to design ad text that accurately describe your product/service so that when your ad appears in an ad unit alongside search results, users will be interested enough in what you have to offer to click on your ad instead of any other ad in the ad unit.
By the way I should point out that you don't always have to spend lots of money trying to get the most popular search terms. A little resourcefulness can compensate for unsuccessful or untendered bids. Counter quality with quantity. Why not spend less on the less popular keywords and snatch them all up? The most popular search terms are not the only search terms. I liken it to having a $100 bill versus having twenty $5 dollar bills. In the end you've still got the same amount - $100.00, if you know what I mean. It's also a very good way to avoid bidding wars which you may well regret winning when the click bills start coming in. Remember, you pay for every click.
Additionally you can look for keyword "niches" where the top bid is ten or twenty cents. Think of synonyms for the most popular keywords. Use a search engine like Ask.com that automatically suggests more precise keyword phrases.
If you are thinking about a PPC campaign you should first set about turning yourself into a keyword expert. First, try to think like a buyer, not a seller. Imagine you are the one looking for tennis racquets. Imagine an ad that you would click on. Once you think you've got a good ad possibility, ask a friend or associate whether they think it's "clickable".
Use search engines to help you come up with new keywords keyword ideas and keyword groups. I mentioned Ask.com above, but you should also try
- Google Suggest which acts like a brainstormer for you and returns possible keywords and phrases as you type your search term
- the same with Clusty a search engine that automatically suggests major related topics for any given keyword or keyword phrase plus news and history of the keyword or phrase.
- Definitely go to Amazon.com or another big bookstore and see what books it returns to your keyword(s) search. You'll find plenty of inspiration there I'm sure.
- It goes without saying, of course, that you will get yourself a darn good thesaurus to help you come up with keywords and their synonyms.
- And finally, take a look at other PPC ads for inspiration and ideas as to how to draft your own PPC ads.
Remember, the most important component of your ad text is relevance. Google was built on the very concept and it will pay dividends for you now in the long run if you work to refine your ads for the greatest relevance to the search terms on which you bid.
You will get some help creating your text from the PPC search engines themselves. Most will make useful data available to you such as the precise number of times a particular search term and its variants was used in the last 4-6 weeks
Some additional points to keep in mind:
- Make sure you've got the right search engine(s) picked out for your campaign. Query them about the kind of traffic, the kind of customers they attract. Search engines keep those kind of stats and data. Find out who uses the search engine and determine whether their customers is a demographic you want to target.
- Make sure your landing page, and your site for that matter, is clear, precise and easy to navigate. Decide whether you want your visitors to land on your home page so they can look around or whether you want them to land on a page featuring a specific product or service, although you probably made that decision when you first wrote your ad.
- Most importantly, make sure your landing page matches the product or service advertised in your PPC ads. If you advertise tap dancing penguins in your PPC ads, then make darn sure your landing page is all about tap dancing penguins and not tips for tuning your balalaika
- Support is important. Don't go with a search engine that doesn't offer 24/7/365 telephone support. You don't want to be in the middle of revising or creating your ads and have the interface crash on you and have no one to call to rescue your situation.
You should also be aware of the downside to PPC.
There is a perverse logic to PPC.
You can actually succumb to your own success. It can cost a fortune and force you to retire your campaign. I know it sounds odd, but your ads can generate more traffic than you can afford. Remember, you're paying for every click whether they buy or not. If you have set a budget of say $5,000 for your PPC campaign, you're going to be in trouble if you get more traffic than the $5,000 allows. The problem is exacerbated if the traffic you are getting is not buying anything. So pay attention to your stats.
The biggest problem PPC advertisers face is click fraud. Click fraud is simply clicking on a link fraudulently, that is with no intention to buy from, or honestly peruse the site. The clicks are pure mischief, They get you nothing.
Click fraud takes a number of forms. One is the webmaster of the site, who gets paid for each click generated from ads on his site, clicks on ads trying to increase his click revenue. This is now almost impossible to pull off. You don't have to worry about this one.
Another click fraud scheme on the webmaster side is the webmaster conspires with a few associates to have them click repeatedly on ads generating a lot of illicit revenue for him and his buddies. That one is harder to detect, let alone stop.
The most prevalent click fraud scheme, however, is the fraud perpetrated by your competitors, or by, I suppose, people who wish you ill and know about your PPC campaign. In this scheme your competitors click all day on your ads driving up your campaign costs to the point where you are almost bankrupted. Originally you could track this kind of click fraud just tracing the IP address and a lot of click frauders got busted and the advertiser recovered his losses. But now the click fraud crowd are much more sophisticated. They develope software that disguises or hides the origins of clicks and is also programmed to click hundreds of times on PPC ads in all manner of duplicitous ways. At one point there was a scheme perpetrated in India whereby a bunch of people were paid working in shifts to sit in huge call center like facilities or "click farms" and click 24/7 on PPC ads . The Times of India exposed this fraud and it seems to have gone away for now. But the practice has spread to China
There was one scheme which sought to take advantage of the fact that Google and Yahoo! eliminate under performing ads (they make money from PPC too!). Companies attacked rival ads by continuously loading and reloading pages on which their rivals ads appeared without clicking on the ads to make it look as though the ads were not making any money.
One of the hardest to combat, most and pernicious kinds of click fraud is the network zombie fraud a scheme that sets up an army of clickbots ranging out from networks of dozens if not hundreds of computers with no human operator.
Another problem getting worse every day is the proliferation of clickbot code across the net. Anybody with some basic programming skills or the patience to develop them can write their own clickbots and create a click fraud scheme/operation of their own.
But Google, Yahoo! and MSN maintain they have the click fraud situation under control, that they and are on to these click fraud artists and that they provide a reasonable degree of protection for their advertisers against click fraud. Each of them have teams tasked with detecting and stopping click fraud. When an advertiser complains about potential click fraud, they initiate an investigation immediately and reimburse the advertiser if they find click fraud. They have gotten very good at detecting multiple clicks from one computer and Google even regularly reimburses some companies up to a third of their PPC costs.
Recently Google CEO Eric Schmidt turned heads by saying the solution to click fraud was to let it happen. He argued the price of clicks would go down as advertisers realized they were worth less since a certain irreducible percentage of clicks were always going to be fraudulent. Not everyone has bought into that idea, however, and both Google and Yahoo! have been sued for failing to do enough to prevent click fraud. Incredibly, Yahoo! has even been sued for allegedly participating in a click fraud scam. It gets worse. Both Yahoo! and Google have been sued for colluding! in a click fraud scheme along with a few minor search engines.
You're not alone in the fight against PPC fraud, however. The problem has become so widespread that an entire industry has sprung up dedicated to protecting companies against click fraud. There are a number services and software programs out there now to help you minimize the financial costs of click fraud.
- ClickDefense is a well regarded click fraud prevention company.
- Clicktracks
- Click Auditor are both good click fraud prevention software programs.
- VeriClix is not only good but it's also free. In fact, it claims to be the net's only free click fraud prevention software on the net.
Getting a good click fraud prevention software program is a great place to start. You can also take these additional steps:
Taken from
Marketing Experiments Journal
- Watch the daily volume of clicks on your main keywords. If they fall outside the statistical averages, then investigate. A sudden drop in conversion may also indicate a problem.
- Be very conservative with content-targeted ads placed on third-party websites. These website owners are incentivized to click, or may recruit others to click the links on their sites. This is the majority of international fraud that you find, where many companies have set up shop, employing low-cost labor to click on various websites that they own.
- Only target the geographical regions where you do business -- don't waste clicks and impressions on countries you do not serve.
- If you have a select group of keywords that drive most of your traffic, try increasing your keyword base with more specific and relevant terms. The larger your keyword base, the less susceptible you are to click fraud in general.
- Review your server logs, and use applications like KeywordMax, Urchin, Clicktracks, or companies like ClickDefense to assist in monitoring your click fraud levels.
- Click fraud from (non-contextual) search engine traffic is very low, as no one except your competitors have an incentive to click your links. Competitors can only incur one charge in a given period, as search engines do not typically bill for multiple clicks from the same source. (Beware of those who do.) Contextual traffic is the highest risk of click fraud.
- Review IP addresses and IP ranges in your server logs over a given period of time, such as seven days. This will show you if many duplicate IP addresses come up, and you can report this to the search engines for investigation. The more information you give them, the more they can help you.
- If fraudulent or unproductive activity occurs primarily during a certain time of the day, then pause the campaigns for those hours.
- Don't buy PPC traffic on unknown search engines. These will often allow bots and other suspicious activity in without a high level of click fraud filtering. These small companies may be hungry for revenue and more hesitant about eliminating potential fraud.
Spend your money with Yahoo!, Google, AskJeeves, and MSN, until you've really tapped out your search budget. Then go for lower volume, but still high-quality second-tier engines like Looksmart. We're spending well into eight figures this year on search, and we have yet to use another engine other than these, simply because we're still exploring the keyword opportunities on the Big Four.
- KEY POINT: Avoid bidding high for position or branding. Use the tracking codes provided by the search engines or an alternative solution to understand your traffic behavior and conversion data.
Don't simply bid to be number-one, bid for the position at which the ROI is positive. Many times the perception of click fraud is simply a result of marketers assuming that the top position must convert well, when it may produce nothing but unqualified traffic.
Tom Charvet, the Vice President of Technology for Click Forensics<http://www.clickforensics.com/>, offers this additional advice:
- In addition to monitoring paid conversions, you should also monitor your organic conversion rates. A sudden deviation in the ratio between these two conversion rates may indicate click fraud.
- Check your paid traffic for unusual activity in areas outside of your geo-targets. Specifically look for traffic from foreign countries that are unlikely to be interested in your products or services.
- The Click Fraud Network <http://www.clickfraudindex.com/> has identified that China, Egypt, and South Africa have generated the greatest volume of high threat-level traffic.
- High-traffic, expensive keywords are the most obvious targets for those involved in creating fraudulent clicks. Make their job harder by leveraging keywords that aren't so inflated.
If you want to get a rough estimate as to how high your risk of being a victim of click fraud is you can consult this quick and easy Click Fraud Calculator over at Click2Customers
The bottom line of PPC click fraud is yes it's a problem but it is not serious enough to be a deterrent to starting your own PPC campaign. The proof is in the pudding. PPC advertising is the most popular form of site promotion on the net today. Literally thousands of advertisers are running PPC campaigns right now. Just look at the Google ads on this page.
If I were you, I would treat click fraud the same way a shop owner treats shoplifting - you try to stop it, you invest in counter-measures and you expect the police to curb it. In other words see it as a legitimate running expense. Budget for it. Hope it doesn't happen to you. It might not you know. Not every advertiser is victimized by click fraud.
There are lots more resources available to help you put together an effective PPC campaign. There are a few books on the subject.
Of course, the internet is full of sites offering info on PPC advertising. Check out these articles:
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