Past Tense

Selling services and products on the Internet can be a lucrative endeavor, but for someone just starting out, it can be a tough road to navigate. Trying to understand the ins and outs can take some time, but one of the first things to figure out is how to get traffic to your website. There are several methods for generating the traffic, two of which are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. This article discusses why you might want to use Pay-Per-Click in your next campaign.

Pay-per-click and SEO are both aimed at placing your website as close to the top search engine results list as feasible. But a fundamental difference between the two is that it takes a few minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign, as opposed to months that can go into a successful SEO campaign.

Most of the popular search engines offer some type of pay-per-click advertising. To use it, you write an ad and bid on keywords that correspond to it. If your ad is shown on the search engine and the viewer decides to click on it, you are charged your bid price and the searcher is sent to your website. Although the mechanics of pay-per-click are simple, the intricacies of how to get the clicks for the lowest price gets more complicated.

There are definite advantages and disadvantages of using pay-per-click versus some of the other methods to get people to your website. One of the biggest advantages of pay-per-click is that to move up in the rankings, you can up your bid to get the ranking you want (amongst other possible tactics). This compares to having to update your website to make imrpvements if you are using SEO to get people to your website.

Pay-per-click advertising’s biggest downside is that if you aren’t careful about how you manage your ads, you might have your keywords bid up. Since the quickest way to move up in the ranking is to raise your bid, it also the most dengerous. A larger bid directly hits your bottom line. Luckily, raising your bid is not the only way to improve your rankings using PPC.

By doing some basic calculations, you can figure out what your maximum pay-per-click bid can be before you start to lose money. You can figure the amount by dividing the the profit of your website by the number of visitors. If 1,000 visitors makes you $600 in profits, each visitor has a value of $0.60 to you.

When we calculate the $0.60 break even cost, it gives us the maximum amount that you could pay for a click and not lose money. But of course, we want to make money, not just break even, so the bid per click would have to be somewhat less.

You should be aware that the most sought-after keywords cost substantially greater than 60 cents a click. To work around this, you could choose to bid less per click or you could improve your campaign so that you price per click were to come down. You could also do more research on your keywords to find those that do not cost as much to advertise on.

As menioned earlier, PPC seems easy to understand, until you realize all of the simultaneously moving parts. The better your ad copy (how well it matches the keyword and your website), the less you pay for each click. Getting a firm understanding of these details will determine whether you will turn a profit or not.