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Pay Per Click / PPC

Why should you pay per click to get web site traffic, isn't SEO enough?

It's a fair question - after all most businesses on and offline have tight budgets to play with and need to make each and every penny count.

( A brief note I should interject here.... I believe in PPC only until normal SEO efforts replace it on a particular search result, If the goal is page one, we will ppc only until the organic or free result is acheived. OK, now back to the article.....)

So why should you as a business pay good money to drive targeted traffic to your site?

Perhaps there's a clue in the last question.

What other options are there?

You have 3 basic choices to get traffic to your website:

1. You pay - using PPC, ezine ads, banners etc...
2. You borrow - constructing Joint Ventures and endorsed offers with partners
3. You grow your own - with natural search engine optimisation

So which is the best?
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But why PPC?

You need PPC because you can:

* Control the flow of traffic to your website
* Target buying customers and those most likely to buy through correct keyword targeting
* Test different offers

Killer Flow can create or manage your PPC campaigns and provide timely reporting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, at a very affordable figure.

The last benefit above is perhaps the most important. Remember a page on a website doesn't have to stay recorded online forever...

Just because you've completed your site in terms of the pages you want to add (although in truth you'll never be finished as you can continually add more related content), this does not preclude you from testing other pages...

The value of testing Pay Per Click

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Simple scenario: You want to test 2 price points for a product/service. (Yes you can do this and people don't have to know about it so don't be worried).

With a PPC campaign you can have your normal web page (Page A) sitting as normal at the well known web address with all of your normal links pointing to it.

You 2 price point test pages (Page B & C) are a different kettle of fish - they sit off to the side and you push traffic to them using PPC to quickly determine which is the winner.

You can do this for any test you dream up, the bottom line is you can quickly determine what is working and what is not in your marketing.

Knowing what's not working is more important than what is (particularly if you are sailing close to the wind) because you SAVE money you would otherwise have thrown away.

The Affiliate Advantage
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When you have a website that is converting well, you will be able to attract many affiliates (and even super affiliates if you are doing a good enough job and providing a good enough incentive package).

Affiliates can make your business explode overnight if you have done your homework and have the site converting well.

If you have not you may attract them, they may pump some traffic and then they will disappear to pastures new when they see you are not doing a good job.

In summary
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If I could give you one reason why you should use PPC and in particular Google Adwords as part of your internet marketing campaign it would be this:

"Feedback fast, feedback cheap"

Yes you may spend a little money up front, but you can save yourself a whole lot of heartache on the back end.

Often, sites view SEO and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC For Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.