Pay Per Click - A Short Guide to Pay per Click Advertising

There’s so much more to advertising today than most people are aware of. If you are a business owner, you already know that advertising can make or break your business. Even if you have the best product or service out there, if people don’t know you’re there, they don’t know where to find you. In our fast-paced world today, it’s never been more important to be savvy when it comes to advertising and how to reach the masses. This article will serve to provide you with an overview of the following topics: deceptive pay per click ads, pay per click management, pay per click advertising: the method of choice, if pay per click marketing is right for you, PPC versus traditional advertising, PPC advertising equates to more profit for your business, and that PPC management is as vital as customer service.

Deceptive Pay Per Click Ads

I could write a book on this topic, but due to space constraints, I’ll sum it up for you briefly. According to MediaPost’s web site, Ben Edelman (an attorney and professor with the Harvard Business School) puts it this way: "Numerous banner advertisers are willing to resort to trickery to draw attention to their offerings." Professor Edelman goes on to estimate that through one of the Internet’s major advertising players, up to 35% of their company’s ads are actually deceptive. One of the ways pay per click ads can mislead is to draw the consumer to something they think they are interested in, but in actuality they are being led to something completely different. Don’t advertise with companies that do this because they aren’t doing you any favors. Make sure you review your ad first in their testing environment and don’t approve its release if it raises any red flags like those I’ve described.

Pay Per Click Management

So you’re all set with your honest advertising provider and your ads are doing their job and bringing visitors to your site. Here’s the drawback: you don’t know how many of these visitors are new or repeats, which type of consumers are being drawn to your site, what ads each type of person is being drawn to, or which group is the most likely to make a purchase. Of those who buy from you, what is the average cost to advertise using this method? These are all valid questions. The only way to find out this information is through pay per click management. You will need to consult the company who is advertising for you and get comprehensive reports on your ad response. When you need to find out more detailed information like profitability on your web site and the shopping habits of your visitors, there are programs that tabulate this information in one easy report. They can filter the exact information you need. Check it out online by Googling “pay per click management programs”.

Pay Per Click is the Advertising Method of Choice

The facts are out there: you can advertise with pay per click advertising and better exposure from partnering sites or you can throw your dice at the natural search results lottery. What I mean is that companies who do pay per click advertising have the know-how to strategically place your company’s ads and links in places where they are most likely to be found. In the natural, or “organic”, search results, you have to rely on yourself to put in the correct format, wording, and concepts into your web pages in order to match what the search engines are doing at the time. You have to constantly adjust your site to accommodate these algorithms in order to fight your way to the top of the search engines. Everyone should be doing this with their web sites at any rate; however, relying on this method as your sole advertising technique is not a smart move.

Is Pay Per Click Marketing Right for You?

You bet it is! With the millions of web pages out there when people are searching by keywords in Google, you want to be sure that you’re at the top. Pay per click ads cost by the click for people to find your site, but it’s worth it because they are finding you after searching for goods or services they need at that moment. In the advertising world, getting someone to purchase from you in that moment is the goal. Don’t give consumers the option to find a competitor’s web site first…use pay per click marketing to harness the power of the Internet in your favor. Like I mentioned before, organic search results are always important, but if you are relying on that method as your sole form of Internet advertising, you are missing much of the game.

PPC versus Traditional Advertising

The reality is that printed ads as well as TV and radio spots are the most expensive forms of advertising. How about a mailer sent out to households? The problem with that is if you are planning to target consumers worldwide, nationwide, even just in your state, you can quickly see how much it would cost to hire an ad expert to make the ad, a printing company to publish the flyer, and then the postage required to get them out to everyone. The failure rate of mailers is astronomical, so it is hardly worth your money to select this route. If you’re like most online businesses and want to target the masses, PPC is always a better choice than traditional advertising due to both cost and accessibility concerns.

PPC Advertising Means More Profits for Your Business

Think about it for a moment: you’ve budgeted $10,000 for advertising (a modest sum) to get the customers to your site and the only thing you’re looking for as proof of success is that they will make a purchase. The big surprise here is that if you are not investing in PPC advertising, you are simply not going to earn the profits you are hoping for. With this form of advertising, you are getting your business to shine at the top of the search engines, on partnering sites, and possibly even through blogs or other smart ways of getting people to find your site. These are far superior methods to finding consumers because they already are looking for what you can provide them and their mindset is likely in the “buy it now” mode.

PPC Management is to Success as Follow-Up is to Customer Service

What good is having a customer service department if they never return emails and phone calls? What would happen to your customers is this: they’d quickly dry up as they discovered that you don’t care to help them. It’s the same thing in the advertising world if you invest in pay per click ads but don’t follow-up with PPC management in any way. You will basically be blindly operating your business and throwing money to the wind. Get yourself locked in to a good PPC management program and stay abreast of what’s going on with your visitors, response rates, and profitability as a result of your ad investment!

About The Author:

James A Karl is an experienced business writer and a regular contributor to A Touch of Business.com. For more of his work, visit A Touch of Business.com.