Pay-Per-Click Campaigns (PPC) Pay-per-click (or PPC) is a type of search engine marketing where advertisers pay either a set amount or a 'bid' amount to have their ads appear within search engine results. Actually, the advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on their ad. How does pay-per-click work? When a term that the advertiser is bidding on is searched for, the pay-per-click ad will appear in a special location on the results page (display thumbnail image of Google AdWords). The order in which the ad appears is relative to the bid amounts of other advertisers competing for that search term. The ads will appear in the order of highest bid to lowest bid. When and only when the ad is clicked on, the advertiser will be charged their bid amount for that click. If the same user clicks on the ad multiple times, the advertiser is only charged once, and the advertiser is not charged when ads are displayed but not clicked on. A budget amount is also chosen so that when the monthly budget has run dry (i.e. the advertiser's ad has been clicked enough times that the total amount paid for the clicks has reached the budget level) the ad will no longer be displayed until the account has been replenished with more funds, or the next month arrives and an auto-renewal of funds takes place. Why does pay-per-click work? You bet. In fact, PPC campaigns are one of the most popular forms of web promotion that our clients undertake. The reasons? They are simple: * Low risk It doesn't take a lot of money to get setup, and you can spend as much (or as little) as you like on your daily/monthly budget. * Targeted visitors Your ads only appear when someone searches on a phrase that you have identified as being valuable to your business. E.g. if you sell widgets and some one searches on "widgets for sale", your ad will come up; if someone searches on "cheap cruise vacations", it won't. Your ad is placed in front of people who are already looking for what you sell. * Results are measurable Most PPC services offer some form of tracking. This enables you to gauge whether or not someone who clicked on your ad ended up buying something - or contacting you, or answering your survey, or whatever you specify as a "conversion" or "sale". These metrics demonstrate which ads are most effective, which keywords are bringing in the most revenue, etc. Will pay-per-click work for you? A simple calculation to determine whether or not PPC will work for your business is this: Calculation to determine if PPC is right for you E.g. You receive 10,000 visitors to your site in June. You also figure that your website was responsible for bringing in about $10,000 of revenue. This formula would indicate that each visitor to your site is worth $1 to you. It stands to reason that if you can "buy" your visitors with PPC for less than $1, you'll make money. The trick here is typically measuring how much revenue your website generates. If, like us here at Apis, you sell a service, measuring how much of your business comes directly from your website is a difficult undertaking. Typically estimates are made in favour of tracking down the hard and fast numbers. But so long as common sense is applied, the above formula can give you the answer you need.
Pretty good 101 lesson for the novice. Now the next task to tackle is to get those keywords and relevant content spidered by the SE's to bring more relevant searches from potential customers.