What To Know About Pay Per Click

I see it all the from members of Wealthy Affiliate.  They constantly are asking questions about Pay Per Click (PPC) and whether they should include it in their marketing mix.  I often advise people to do so only when they fully understand the proper methods of implementing PPC (I will give information about how to do that later).

But first, I decided to include an infographic that describes the benefits of using PPC. Here it is included for you to take a look:​

Embedded from Digital Marketing Philippines

It's pretty clear from this infographic that you really can get a boost from PPC as long as you integrate it with Search Engine Optimization (organic results).  But as I stated before when I advise people about PPC I try to impress upon them that they need to fully understand what it's all about.  Otherwise, they will be wasting several hundreds of dollars with no results to speak of.

Major Benefit of PPC

I think the biggest draw with PPC is how quickly you can get traffic with it.  You can set up a campaign right now and within a couple of hours, you going to have people coming to your website.  That's all well and good.  But here are some information about PPC that you should be aware of:

PPC is Cold Traffic

What does cold traffic mean?  When someone sees an advertisement and they click on it, they are brought to a web page of a website that they probably have never seen before.  This means that the trust factor is pretty low.  Contrast this to being brought to a webpage from an email list.  If the person didn't unsubscribe from that email list, then they know the person who is sending them emails. Here the trust factor is much higher and this type of traffic is very warm (and possibly even hot).

There is also what is known as warm traffic.  This occurs when someone does a search for a keyword and clicks on a result, which takes them to a webpage.  Then they read the article that is on the webpage, and depending on how well the article connects with them, they start to get warmer as far as establishing trust.

Now I know that you could argue that when a person clicks on a link from an advertisement it could bring them to the same page as the warm traffic and therefore that too should be considered warm traffic.  And from a purely technical standpoint that would be correct. 

However, and this is a key element, you should seldom send PPC traffic to pages that are information only.  You want the PPC visitor to take some kind of immediately action, like get the​m on your mailing list or actually buy something from you (preferably both).  If you write an article and send PPC traffic to that, you are most likely going to waste that click.

Broad Keywords

​Both Google and Bing have a provision that you can set up in your campaigns to include broad based keywords, exact match keywords, and phrase match keywords.  Broad based keywords are keywords that don't contain quotes ("") or brackets ([]).  This means that any of the words within the broad phrase could trigger the ad to be shown.

An example of this would be​ the phrase car parts.  Now if you were selling car parts and you only wanted people to click on ads related to car parts, if you included the broad based keyword then your ad may be triggered for any phrase that has car in it and any phrase that contains parts.  So body parts could trigger your ad as can train box car.  This is clearly not what you want, especially if you are paying by the click.

Relevant Campaigns, Keywords, and Ad Groups

If you get nothing else out of this article, make sure that your PPC campaigns are very focused and relevant.  That means the ads, ad groups, keywords, and the landing page will all have very much the same information.  This will actually make the ad servers (Google, Bing) like your campaigns and reward you with lower bids.  I have actually seen bids close to 0 (free) because my campaigns were highly relevant.  It doesn't happen all the time, but even the average bid is often much lower than what I specified as the max bid.  Relevancy matters!

Tracking PPC Efforts

If you don't learn how to properly track your PPC efforts, then my advice to you is don't use PPC.  You need to know exactly which campaigns are converting for you and the only way to do that is to properly track.  What conversion means needs to be clearly defined and measured.  Do you want them to sign up for you email list?  That is your conversion metric.  Do you want them to buy something from you?  That is another conversion metric.​  Both Bing and Google make it pretty easy to set this up.  It's amazing how many people don't take advantage of it.  Those that don't have no way to measure their return on investment with PPC and will hence, waste a lot of precious money.

How To Get Started

If you do want to incorporate PPC into your overall marketing mix, I cannot emphasize enough that it's important to fully understand the dynamics of this methodology.  I have included some training for you to get started with.  The name of the training is: The Proper Way to Use PPC with your Website