Pay Per Click Advertising – Understanding PPC Basics

PayPerClick, otherwise known as PPC, is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways of driving targeted traffic to your online business.

It’s called Pay Per Click simply because you, as a business owner, don’t pay each time your ad appears as in any publication, but instead only pay for the advertisement when someone actually clicks on it.  In other words, you only pay for results.

Getting clicks is good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can capture their details, offer a freebie or even close the sale and make a profit.

There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.

These ads appear as ‘sponsored links’ at the very top or down the right hand side of Google (refer to (2) in figure) and appear as relevant links to the specific keywords or term typed in the Google search bar by the user (1) as opposed to the natural or organic search results (3).

Before you head over to Google to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:

1.  How many people are looking for your products or services?  Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.

2.  How much will your click’s cost?  Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.

3.  Who are your competitors?  Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.

Setting Up Your First PPC Ad

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first Pay Per Click ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 characters for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.

Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling an abdominal strengthening exercise eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells weight loss information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that ab strengthening exercise eBook.

Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. I recommend you set your budget low in the beginning as you can always adjust it. Create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re ready to go.

Don’t forget an important element of Pay Per Click advertising. Track the success of your ads. With tracking, you can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.

Start attracting more prospects to your website as you understand the basics of Pay Per Click advertising.