PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a way to buy website traffic. Remember, traffic (website visitors) = money. The more traffic you have to your sales page, all things being equal, the more money you will make. It’s simple statistics.
The best kind of traffic is a natural (organic) search engine listing for your primary keywords. It’s great because most people use internet search engines like Google to research things they want to purchase. And, a natural listing is free (if you don’t count the time and money you spend to help your website rank high).
Paid traffic allows you to bypass time-consuming search engine optimization. You sign up for an account with one or more of the primary internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and basically PAY the search engine to list your website for certain keywords, or on other websites. These little ads look different from the main search results, though, like classified ads to the right of the natural listings with a few prime spots above.
You select to pay per click (when someone clicks your ad), or pay for # impressions (CPM) — the number of times the search engine shows on any website in the world. For example, if your website sells toy cars, you can bid $3.00 per click for the keyword “toy cars” or pay $0.50 per 1,000 views of your ad. If at the end of the week you had 20 clicks and were using PPC, you would be billed about $60.00 (you won’t be charged the full $3.00 in most cases, just once cent above the bid just below yours– a favor from the search engine).
PPC was originally designed to give businesses an option for an immediate search listing (the ad can appear as fast as 15 minutes after creating it). It was a good way for small businesses to elbow their way past the big players.
But in internet marketing, PPC is an entirely different beast. Affiliate marketers use PPC to push their vendors’ products and play a sort of “arbitrage” with the system. You see, it is possible as an affiliate to use PPC to earn a living. If your PPC costs are less than your affiliate commissions, then you have a profit. For example, let’s say my PPC costs were $1,500 for the month, but my affiliate commissions were $4,000. I made $2,500 gross profit for the month.
As Google became flooded with affiliate marketer PPC ads, Google raised the bar, weeding out the worthless ads. Google’s business model is all about delivering relevant content for its users, and it is very protective of this. It doesn’t want to provide search results consisting of a bunch of cheap commercial pitches as it would risk losing credibility. So what Google did was create a Page Rank system. It’s a rating (no one besides Google engineers really knows how it’s calculated) Google assigns to websites (including sales pages) that will determine how much the advertiser is charged per click.
The bottom line is if you are using PPC for affiliate marketing, you need to have ALL your ducks in a row: a website domain that is not blacklisted and preferably aged; good content on your site that matches the keywords you are bidding on; and “reassurance” elements like an About, Policy, Disclaimer, and Content pages. Not having these will make your PPC experience a hairy experience: you’ll get hit with high minimum bids (called a “Google slap”), your ads may not even show, and you’ll have low conversion rates (which means money down the drain– visitors are clicking your ad, Google is charging you for the clicks, but the visitors are NOT buying the product=no commissions for you).
There is a “science” to creating the ultimate pay per click ad. Currently, wisdom says that your ad must be tightly compartmentalized into Groups with a small number of keywords that match the Group’s landing page. Each Group must have its own ad text, the title containing the main keyword. It would help to have the ad’s Display URL contain the keyword as well.
For example, if you are an affiliate for a golf store, and you want to advertise several of its products using PPC, what you don’t want to do is create one Ad Group, bid on a bunch of mixed golf keywords (golf shoes, golf clubs, golf shirts), and have the ad link to the golf store’s homepage. In other words, don’t mix up all the products, segregate them into their own Google Ad Group. For example:
Group 1: Golf Shoes
Keywords: golf shoes, best golf shoes, mens golf shoes, etc.
Landing page: www.golfstore.com/golfshoes.htm
Group 2: Golf Clubs
Keywords: golf clubs, putters, drivers, etc.
Landing page: www.golfstore.com/golfclubs.htm
Group 3: Golf Shirts
Keywords: golf shirts, Ashworth, Jerzeez golf shirts, etc.
Landing page: www.golfstore.com/golfshirst.htm
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The above is a very abbreviated explanation of PPC advertising. There are many good resources available to learn this strategy, including my Fast Track Internet Marketing ebook.
