Pay per click (PPC) advertising has become a popular way to get your ads seen while controlling your marketing budget. If you have a small- to medium-sized business, your budget is probably not that large for your advertising needs. While you still want to grow your business, you don’t want to waste your marketing dollars on advertising that is either too expensive or is ineffective for your product niche. So pay per click advertising lets you customize your ad campaign in order to spend only what you can afford.
We have explored this in a previous post, but we’ll touch on the premise again to be sure you understand how the process works. You create your ads, making sure that you use compelling copy in order to get people to click on them. The ads are placed with a PPC search site, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing (to name a few), and you supply the keywords that you feel searchers will look for in order to find your product. This is where you need to put most of your attention. The keywords or combination of keywords that you use will determine whether anyone sees your ads or not. For instance, if you sell pet products, the combination of keywords can be rather extensive. You should include as many items as you can in your list of keywords, since the array of pets products can range from pet food to pet clothing. You never know which term someone will search for.
The next step is to determine how much you can afford. You only pay for each time someone clicks on your ad, and you can set a daily or weekly limit of your costs depending on the traffic you get to your site, and whether those clicks are resulting in sales. You can also have your ad placed on other sites, which might save you some money. Sites other than search sites often charge a flat rate per click, sometimes only a portion of cent.
If you have tips that can help your fellow marketers to take advantage of pay per click advertising, please share them here. This can be a great way to get your small business out there to build to a big business.
