The Underlying Truths Of Pay Per Click Advertising

Many people believe Pay Per Click Advertising is a waste of money, the truth is, it is!  Unless of course you understand your market, know what your goals are and you stick with it!  Now Let’s break it all down:

• Understand the simple mathematics of Pay Per Click Advertising ROI -  Let’s assume you convert 1% of PPC visitors to an eventual customer (standard conversion rate) and you are paying $3 per click on a keyword. That means, you would need to PROFIT at least $300 (initial sale) to sleep easy.

• Early on, breaking even is good -  The value in doing Pay Per Click Advertising is to test your market, review data and use this information.  Before any SEO, I always suggest doing PPC first.  Don’t spend time/money  on an SEO campaign for keywords you haven’t tested yet.  Afterwards, aim to make your PPC campaign profitable by tweaking your ads and keywords based on early testing.

• Quality Score is CRITICAL – QS is a score out of 10 that Google gives each keyword in your campaign.  Essentially, the higher your score the less you will be paying.  QS is based on a number of factors, the 2 most important are relevancy (next point) and ad performance.  Years back Google didn’t even have a support phone number (man was that frustrating), now days there’s always a rep on the other line, recently I asked them if achieving an INITIAL high QS is important.  They said YES.  The trick is; over-bid (by a lot!) on your keywords for the first day or two this will also improve your CTR (click through rate), then lower the bid afterwards.

• Keep your ads relevant to your keywords.  The best way to do this is to create an ad group for each keyword and then split-test different ads. (I’m shocked that most advertisers DON’T do this)

• Test, Test, Implement and Test…repeat