enquiry about PPC

I am interested in having details about the PPC.

 

PPC is search engine advertising like google, yahoo, aol... you pay when people click on your ads. The price is not fixed and you have to "bid" on keywords to be in 1st, 2nd ... nth position. Very effective but can be very expensive :

We are using PPC since 2-3 years with a lot of success. But you have to be very careful selecting your provider...

We tried 'little ones', very cheap and unfortunately used by no one - useless.

The 2 only realistic ones are Overture.com and Google.com both of them have special offers for new accounts.

Now be very careful on your keywords…

For example in our industry – the keyword “travel” is searched over 20,000,000 per month. The top position is around $1 and brings 5% of the searches. Monthly cost: $1,000,000. My first try, $50, went in the drain in 5 min.

After plenty of homework and listening to no one. I bid on plenty of very specific keywords with searches between 50 and 4,000 and bids under $0.25 and get the first position with a maximum bid of $0.25.

For example:
Cancun hotels over 60,000 searches and bid at $0.48, monthly cost: $1,440 and 3,000 visitors
Hotel deal Cancun, 3,000 searches and bids at $0.18, monthly cost: $27 and 150 visitors
Hilton Cancun, 4000 searches and bids at $0.22, monthly cost: $44 and 200 visitors
Sheraton beach Cancun, 3000 searches and bids at $0.1 cost: $15 and 150 visitors…

I still get 3,000 visitors but it cost me $516 per month instead of $1,440. That’s the first advantage.

Second one, broader is your keyword, broader are the visitors. Refining your keywords allows you to refine your visitors but you have to define pages for your visitors and potential customers.
For example, in our case:
Sheraton beach Cancun sends to a page where we talk only about Sheraton hotels in Cancun with links to other pages like “discount hotel Cancun”, Hilton hotel Cancun”… Not only the visitors stay on the page as he sees what he is looking for but also he can visit “discount hotel” and Hilton hotel Cancun without having to make another search. It increases considerably the buying factor.

Personally, I prefer Overture. Overture allows you to customize title, description and URL for each keyword with very little work. It also gives you the volume of search and cost for 1st position when you select keywords. This helps saving time.
Customizing your title, description and URL is very important!
For example:
“Sheraton beach Cancun” keyword has:
Title: Sheraton beach hotel in Cancun
Description: We offer great price and deals on Sheraton beach hotel in Cancun, blah, blah
URL: http://www.mysite.com/Sheraton_beach_Cancun.html
This type of customization increases your rate from 5% up to 20%... when you get there even in 3rd position you get more visitors than the advertisers in first and second, better yet 3rd position keyword are cheaper than 1st.

As I said, very efficient, very good ROI but a lot of work.
Another little secret: never reveal your keywords, the traffic you get and their cost… I did it once on a forum and the very next day, for that specific keyword there were 5 competitors ahead of us with the exact scheme and bidding like crazy. That keyword 1st position was at $0.15 before and $1.20 after. Good keywords lost = good business lost too.
It's why my examples are made up. We don't bid on Cancun hotel way too expensive and too much junk.

 

What do you want to know?

 

Exactly, it's a very broad topic.