Pay Per Click Advertising - Keyword Driven

Over the last few years, pay per click advertising (PPC) has leapfrogged free search engine listings and banner ads as the preferred method of online advertising. PPC is essentially the process of writing an ad, selecting various keywords, and paying a set amount each time a person clicks on your ad (and gets taken to the page you specify on your website).
The most popular exponent of PPC advertising is Google AdWords. Do a search for something in Google and have a look on the right hand side of the page - those little ads you can see are pay per click ads. This means, the advertiser will pay Google if you click on their ad!
Here’s an example of a typical PPC ad:

Brand name tennis racquets. Wilson. Prince. Head. Yonex.Free can of balls with every sale.www.tennisracquets.com.au

The sort of keywords you would use for this ad could be “tennis racquets”, “tennis racquet”, “cheap racquet”, “wilson racquet”, “cheap prince racquet”, “racquet Australia”.

The most popular (and still the best, despite its imitators), is Google Adwords. You can set up an account and create an ad campaign in about 15 minutes, and be generating traffic to your website within minutes of the campaign launching. Each click will cost you a minimum of AUD$0.05, but you could pay AUD$15 for a very popular key word!

You decide whether to pay more than the minimum to increase the ranking of your ad. Depending on how competitive each individual key word is, you could be anywhere from No 1 to No 100!
Obviously, if you are out of the top 10, the chances of your ad being seen will diminish quite rapidly. But, don’t feel you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to be no 1. It is not worth it. For a whole lot of reasons, the optimal position is between 3 and 7.

here is a whole science involved in Google Adwords. Many people have written ebooks about how to maximize your advertising dollar by getting the best return from Google. The best Google guru around is the fabulous Perry Marshall. I was lucky enough to see him live at the X10 Seminar and the guy is brilliant!

y the way, I have recently received his Advanced Google course with Dan Crowther – and it really is awesome: filled with sophisticated tips and tricks to take your Google campaign to the next level.

For more information on search engine optimisation and pay per click (PPC) , visit webcare at http://www.webcare.com.au

How are the Prices of Web/Online Advertising Calculated?

One of my students was thinking about adding online/web advertising to his website and asked for some info about how rates for online/web advertising is calculated. I thought it might be useful to post my answer on the WebCare blog:
Web advertising is a bit different to display advertising - but I suppose the principles are similar.
The main cost driver is not size, but no of impressions (ie how many times the ad is viewed) - so how much traffic is each page on your site getting? Until you are getting reasonable traffic levels, advertising is not really worth much (because very few people are seeing it).
The other driver is click through rate (CTR - how many people actually click on the ad to go through to the advertiser’s site?).
You can sell ads by:
no of impressions
CTR
size
location (top rather than bottom)
sub-pages
time
etc
I was talking with a client yesterday who told me they looked at advertising on one big niche market site - start price is $20k!!! So - they are advertising with the competitor of that big niche market! But, they are not advertising on their site - but in the emails that get sent out to people on their mail list - and that is costing $900 per email just to people in one state!! It is massive traffic that is driving these prices.


To my mind impressions and CTR are a much better measure than time - as you could buy a months worth of advertising that only gets 50 impressions and 0 CTR’s!! CTR is better than impressions (which is why google adwords works so well) as you are paying for actual traffic rather than potential traffic! So, if you can guarantee advertisers on your site a certain level of traffic to their site (which is what CTR measures) then I think you are offering a much better deal than just impressions.

For more information visit us at www.webcare.com.au