Pay-Per-Click Advertising - Risky?

I've gotten a message just the other day asking me "What is PPC?"...

Looks like I'm attracting all kinds of curious visitors to this blog by visiting blogs all over. Perhaps most came checking out my picture on mybloglog; I admit I do the same especially for those interesting ones ;)

Well, that's one way to generate visitor traffic isn't it? Again, that's what internet marketers like to classify under Web 2.0 or "community traffic". My only vibe about it is how "targeted" can these traffic be?

Obviously, I've should be hanging around blogs that talk about making money online since there's where my target reader gathers. Otherwise I'll be getting questions like the above. LOL

So here's a post to answer that question and something related.

First of all, in the online marketing world there is something call the "Search Marketing". It refers to the act of advertising to those people who do a "search" online via search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is one form of search marketing, further classified under "paid search marketing". With PPC, an advertiser will bid to have an advertisement listed in the search results, commonly known as "sponsored result". The advertiser pay for every click that a searcher do on that sponsored result, thus pay-per-click.

The good thing about PPC advertising is that the advertiser only get billed for that click if it's performed, and the goal then is to craft the advertisement (usually a few lines of text) to convey a message that will ONLY attract the right prospect - they don't want just any clicks.

Each click can cost anywhere between 1 cent to tens of dollars! It's a bidding (auction) system therefore depending on the advertiser's intention, they control how much they are willing to spend per click and set a budget for the day. Some big corporations uses PPC for branding purpose and simply send these traffic to their home page, but most of the time we find ourselves landing on some sales page of the advertiser.

So, is PPC risky?

I often see new online marketers shying away from PPC after trying it a while and having spent more than they profit from it. Then these "newbie" will jump on the "free traffic" bandwagon (like community traffic and doing SEO) thinking it can't be wrong since it's free...

Well, think of PPC as placing ads on the newspaper; if you're in business have you bought those $5 per line of classified ad space in the classified section of a newspaper? Imagine now you can track and measure the value of every reader who react to your ad (e.g. make a phone call to you).

If you discover that by spending $25 for those 5 lines of ad, you get X amount of phone calls, and Y% will buy from you over the phone thus giving you $Z in profit, will you keep running that ad on the same newspaper over and over again, perhaps testing with different ads to see if it "converts" better?

In fact, online PPC search marketing is so much more predictable than off-line advertisement campagins.

With the ability to track every single click and measure the conversion (into sales, for example) rate of your spent in PPC, the only possibility is to end up either dropping the campaign or tuning it for more profit.

We can get almost instant traffic via PPC adverstising, and more importantly, these traffic are targeted. This means that if I bid on keyword terms like "online marketing tips" or "internet marketing guides" or even "paid search consultant" ;) in the PPC search engines, I can present these visitors the relevant content page on my website since I can roughly tell what they are "searching" for.

Relating this to my first paragraph of this post; I then don't have to be concern about catering my website content to visitors of all shape and sizes, explaining "What is PPC" ;)

Here's another twist: If you're selling something online, bidding on the right keywords bring you so much further into the sales cycle. The trick is to identify those "buying keywords" so you won't waste money bidding on just any keywords that bring non-converting traffic. (and conclude that PPC is not for newbie)

With community traffic such as what I'm getting here with this blog, most visitors are not in the mood of buying anything so there'll be more "work" for me to do trying to get your credit card out. You're just on a different end of the sales cycle, if any. I've to gain your trust, build relationship, yada yada... Not bad at all, just that it's... different. (As such, most bloggers try to monetize their blogs with Adsense and get paid getting clicks from these type of visitors - Adsense is a whole new topic I may blog about later)

What about SEO traffic? Yes, these can be targeted and great (because it's free) IF you can get good ranking in the first few search result pages for the "buying keywords" you would otherwise bid for. The caveat is the big IF. Anyone every ask whether SEO is risky for the newbie?

Do the obvious, but do it differently.

(hehe... this last phrase has nothing to do with this post, I saw it on the cover of a magazine call "Expat" in my local shopping center just now)

Later, Hans.

PPC Management?

Now, the next feat I'll attempt is to rank for the keyword "PPC Management"; this will be more challenging as a search in google reveals a number of PR6 and PR5 top listings, with the last few having PR4 at the bottom of page 1 result.

SEO again? Haha...well, this blog was started as an assignment to try out some search engine optimization tips anyway. So if you're expecting more specifically on how I make money with ppc, I do have a dedicated site which you can subscribe ;)

Back to the PPC Management key-phrase, why do I select this term to rank? The whole idea of getting into the page 1 SERP is to look for low competitions keywords and hopefully with some traffic. While there are many other factors that determine how well you can rank against other sites (especially back-links), my understanding is that with all else equal, the PageRank of your page matters most; to Google anyway.

To get some page rank is easier than creating many back-links; you may have read about how creating blogs on domains like blogspot.com or wordpress.com help (that's why I'm blogging here!). More about that if you're interested - post some comments.

PPC Management was choosen because it's listed at the top in my quick keyword research on the generic term "ppc". I got a list of keywords that have "high traffic", but "low competitions" - these easy to rank keywords can help us tap into target traffic and act as the anchor texts! Here's a video on the tool I use for such research. You can also try it free.

This term also relates to my pay-per-click consultancy service; therefore I'm hoping to rank it for some qualified traffic. If you've landed on this page by searching for "ppc management", that means I'm there! What are you looking for anyway? PPC software tools that help you to manage your payperclick campaigns or planning to outsource the management of your paid search marketing to an expert?

Tell me about it?

PPC Consultant Ranked in first page of Google!

A PPC marketer doing SEO? I'm not kidding when I wrote about learning very practical and effective SEO from the workshop just a couple of days ago.

Hey, PPC marketers are bias towards paid traffic right? LOL

Well, SEO is a must for every websites, just that in my book, SEO comes after I've discover the "converting" keywords from my PPC campaigns. That's probably a topic for another day. In this post I like to boast about my google ranking for the key phrase "Paid Search Consultant":

Ya, sure I may have picked an easy target, but that's not the point. This little experiment just open up a world of possibilities for me. Will you be as excited if you have similar result to show for yourself?