Pay per click, or PPC, advertising is one of the best Ecommerce methods to use to attract targeted niche traffic to your website and squeeze page. It can also be an expensive and unproductive source of traffic, if not used correctly. In this lesson, I am going to give you a brief primer on using PPC, and give you some advanced thoughts on using it profitably.
I also recommend that when you are first starting out with PPC, before you have a proven profitable campaign, never spend more than you can afford to lose. It can cost literally thousands of dollars to do sufficient testing and tweaking to create profitable campaigns. Of course, once the campaigns are profitable, they basically run on autopilot – but until that point, you can lose most of your investment to the training phase.
Pay per click is the process of purchasing advertising space on search engine results pages. Generally you are charged each time someone clicks on your ad (hence the term pay-per-click), although there are a few other pricing models, such as pay-per-view and pay-per-conversion.
One of the fatal flaws with PPC is the propensity of web site owners, who receive a commission each time someone clicks on your ad on their web site, to click on their own ads, and remain undetected.
The big PPC companies, Google AdWords, Yahoo and now Facebook claim to have reduced this number to something manageable.
However, my personal experience with Google AdWords as one of my time Ecommerce strategies, is that when I advertise only in channels where only Google-sponsored search results display my ads, my conversion rates on my squeeze pages are in the 20% to 40% range – low, but acceptable.
When I advertise in the various channels that earn commission for webmasters when the ads are clicked, my conversion rates are around 5% and many times less than that. This simply indicates to me that there are a set of individuals who are clicking my ads and due to the fact that they are not genuinely interested in the topic (as they would be if they were a genuine search engine user), they are not opting into my squeeze page.
My advice, therefore, is that no matter which PPC company you start with, you start with only the company-sponsored search engine listings. This will practically eliminate the amount of fraud in your campaign, and help keep your conversions high.
Once you have established a value per conversion, then you can add in additional sources of PPC traffic, isolating them in such a way that you can still tell the difference between each subscriber and their source (do not aggregate your PPC leads, instead isolate the ones coming from each different channel).
This will allow you to determine if the decrease in price that is generally associated with the content or partner ads (what AdWords calls ads hosted on partner sites) is commensurate with the reduction in the quality associated with those leads. Using the above strategies will give you a boost in your Ecommerce revenue and help you attract targeted subscribers and customers to increase your online sales success.
If you are out to attract prospective customers and develop your online presence and exposure, you owe it to yourself and the financial future of your business to learn everything you can about Internet marketing.
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