Pay per Click advertising is a very popular and productive way to promote your website, if the program is run well. Too often, people set their site up with a provider, choose a couple of keywords, and forget about the campaign. Later, they wonder why they don’t have success with their online ads. It is important to plan, implement, and maintain your pay per click advertising as you would any other marketing campaign. All campaigns have 4 major parts; Research and planning, Implementation , Measurement, and Analysis and adjustment.

Research

What are you marketing? Not all PPC services are the same and some will be better than others depending on the subject of the marketing campaign. Just as the cost per click through depends on the demand for that keyword, success will vary from site to site. For example, BizRate , NexTag , and PriceGrabber are used for price comparison and are geared for retail. Google is by far the most popular search engine with approximately 50% of all search activity.

Set-up Several Campaigns

It is easiest if you start with a single provider with several different keywords, you should quickly be able to tell which keywords are most productive. Once you have honed your keywords, launch with several other providers and compare the effectiveness of each. If you start your campaign with many different keywords and providers, it will be harder to differentiate the success of the site and the success of the keyword.

Metrics

All campaigns are a work in progress…always! To be effective it is important to track of your campaigns progress. Overall, you want information that will help you track your Return on Investment (ROI). At a minimum, you should measure and track the following:

• Times each specific keyword ad was clicked
• Number of people exposed to your ad
• Daily Unique Visitors
• Hourly Unique Visitors
• First time visitors
• Avg. page views per hour
• Page views per visit
• Page views today
• Visits today

Adjust

Now that you have collected and analyzed your information, adjust your plan. Don’t hesitate to change providers or keywords. The internet changes daily so it is important to continue analyzing and change as needed. The following is a list of the most popular providers of pay per click advertising.

• Google AdWords
• Ask.com
• Yahoo! Search Marketing 
• MIVA 
• ABC Search
• Enhance Interactive
• SearchFeed
• 7Search
• Findology 
• Microsoft adCenter

All pay per click campaigns has the potential to be successful. It is an ongoing process but very rewarding when your ROI grows. If you are not able to properly manage your campaign, you may want to look into hiring a management service. This is particularly helpful if you are not staffed to spend the time on research and statistical analysis or if you are investing large sums of money into your campaign. There are also many software programs that can assist with analysis and management.

Keywords: Pay Per Click

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.