Steven Bowen
Some of the popular PPC advertising options include per-click advertising networks, search engines, and other affiliate programs. These days there are various PPC providers search engines or website, among which PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the top three largest network operators. These all three operate under a bid-based model.
What is Pay per Click?
Pay per click (PPC) is very popular Internet advertising model which is used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the hosting service when the ad is clicked. Generally, it is seen that with search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When you will compare the generalized portal with the portal that implements PPC model, you will find the generalized portal drive a high volume of traffic to one site, but PPC driven site implements the so-called affiliate model, that provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It performs this by offering financial incentives in the form of a percentage of revenue to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates in turn provide purchase-point click-through to the merchant. This is what the cycle goes on in Pay per Click model.
Paying per click can be positioned sometimes between paying per impression and paying per action. In the case, when paying per impression, the advertiser assumes the risk of low-quality traffic generated by the publisher while in the other case when getting paid for actions; the publisher assumes the risk of low-converting offers by the advertiser. In contrary to these, such things do not happen in PPC model. In case of Pay per Click model, the publisher does not have to worry about the sales conversion rate of the target site, and the advertiser does not have to worry about how many impressions it takes to attract the specified number of clicks. Websites that utilize Pay per Click ads displays an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are usually referred as sponsored links or sponsored ads which generally appears adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.
Models for determining pay per click
Pay per Click can be assumed in two different forms or models. There are two primary models for determining cost per click, the first one is flat-rate and the second one is bid-based. We will see both of these one by one. In both of cases the potential value of a click from a given source is considered or decided by the advertiser itself. This value may be based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, or what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. Let us see both of these models:
Flat-rate PPC
In this kind of model, the advertiser and publisher basically agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In most cases, you must have seen that the publisher has a rate card that lists the Cost per Click (CPC) within different areas of their website or network. The flat rate model is particularly implemented on such cases. It is mainly common to comparison shopping engines, which typically publish rate cards. However, these rates are sometimes minimal, and advertisers can pay more for greater visibility.
Bid-based PPC
In the bid-based PPC model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. In that contract each advertiser mentions the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot which is often based on keyword. The advertiser has to pay for each click the visitor is making on the site. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
How to Create Pay per Click (PPC) Ad Campaigns for a Local Business on Google Adwords
Most often you might have seen that little ads while searching or using the Internet. These little ads seem to be small but in reality these are quite cost effective and prove to be effective source of new customers for small or local business. Pay per Click (PPC) is that particular term which is used to describe such little ads. Going through the concept of Pay per Click, you must be thinking of the fact that how one can create pay per click Ad campaigns for a local business on Google Adwords. Setting up a Pay per Click campaign that produces good results is not an easy task. But, you need not to worry. Here we are presenting the entire steps which will acknowledge how to setup a pay per click-PPC advertising campaign for a local or small business.
Steps
Open a Google Adwords account
The first step towards creating a PPC Ad campaign is to open an account on Google Adwords. For this , you have to go to the link http://www.google.com/ads/ and click on Google AdWords link and then click Sign Up Now. After then follow the presented steps to open account.
Create first AdWords campaign
Once you have an account on Google Adwords, the second step is to create the first Adwords Campaign. The key to getting clicks at a very low cost is setting up your keyword lists and location settings correctly. In the way, you will need 2 campaigns i.e. local and national. For setting the national campaign login to your AdWords account and click “Create new AdWords campaign”. On this first page you can use the default settings for Name, Language=English, and Target=”Global or nationwide”, but you have to enter an Ad Group Name. The name of your business should be meaningful and attentive. After you enter the Group Name, click Continue. In case, if you are in US, you can use the default settings the Target customers by country page and then click “continue”.
Create your ad.
After creating your first Adwords campaign, now read carefully the Common Questions sections before you start and then work up and create a short, catchy ad.
Build your keyword list
This is one of the most important step which servesas the key to getting targeted, low cost leads. For this, you need to make a base list of keywords that people would use to find a business like yours. For example, a Chinese Restaurant would use terms like: Chinese, Chinese food, Chinese delivery, etc. After then you need to localize the list by making a list of locations your business serves and combine the two lists. The final list should contain all possible combinations of the two lists.
Make final settings and start campaign
Now, with a localized list, you can set a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) of $.05 and $.10; now, you can use the setting you feel comfortable to get a potential customer; you may set you daily budget to $1 – $2 a day or any amount you can afford. After doing all the settings, now save campaign to finalize your settings.
Set up a campaign using Google’s location targeting option
This step plays a vital role in the making visitor’s traffic. By default, Google attempts to locate users based on their Internet address, but sometimes, due to a number of technical issues Google often cannot locate a user, and as result, only shows them ads from the national ad pool. Thus, it is very much necessary to setup the national campaign first as it makes available to larger audience of users.
Set up a second campaign using Google’s local targeting, to cover all your options
After completing the above steps, now set up the second campaign using Google’s local targeting to cover all the options. For this, login to your AdWords account and click “Create new AdWords campaign” and follow the same steps what you have used till to create the national campaign. Only you need to take care of two exceptions. In the section “Target customers by location” select either “Target customers by regions/cities” or “Target customers in a circular area around your location” and enter your location and service area. In other exception is you will have to use a keyword list without adding location terms; just use the base keyword list you used in the national campaign before location terms were added.
Maintain your campaigns
Now you have completed the Pay per Click Ad campaign. In order to maintain your campaigns, login to your account time to time and see which keywords are doing well, add any new keywords you think of and remove terms that have a high cost per click and that you are feeling that particular keyword is not doing well or are not resulting in new customers.
How to Advertise Across Thousands of Websites on the Pay Per Click Basis
Once you plan for creating Pay per Click (PPC) Ad Campaigns for a Local Business on search engines, now it comes to advertise across thousands of websites on the Pay per Click basis. Let us see, how do you perform that. Go through the steps given below:
⇒ First of all browse categorized directory of websites.
⇒ Then, select the appropriate channels for your business
⇒ After then, choose your desired keywords
⇒ Then set your desired geographic targeting
⇒ Set your pay per click bids
⇒ Your ads are up and running.
Traffic and Price Estimation of Pay per Click Campaigns for different Search Engines
We are hereby providing the details of several Pay per Click prices and traffics concerned to the specific search engines. Here we have enlisted top 10 search engines, their price rate, traffic, interface and any extra which can be done while establishing the pay per click campaigns. Here each search engines will be reviewed under on the basis of four criteria which are described as below:
Price: Price indicates that how much do you need to spend to open an account, what is the minimum bid amount etc?
Traffic: Traffic signifies what volume of traffic you are expecting on your website, how much visitors you want to your website.
Interface: Interface mean the listings of the sites where your listing will be published. Find out where your listings will be published.
Extras: Extras term signifies that if you want to share any extra tidbits about the service, you can do it through this criterion.
Google Adwords
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: vary according to the currency you use and the country where your billing address is located. Minimum Bid Amount: varies. |
| Traffic | The Google Network reaches about 80% of Internet users |
| Interface | Ads appear alongside or above the results on Google.com search results pages. Ads could appear on the search and content sites and products in the Google Network e.g. Ask Jeeves, AOL and Netscape. |
| Extras | You can select which countries your ads are displayed in. |
Yahoo! Search Marketing
| Price | Set your minimum monthly budget and your own minimum bid. Yahoo also recommends a minimum bid |
| Traffic | Results go out on Yahoo! |
| Interface | Search results that are sponsored are displayed at the top of Yahoo search results |
| Extras | Narrow your campaign to specific areas with geo-targeting. Use content match to feature your ads on publisher sites, newsletters and emails. |
Go Click
| Price | Minimum Account deposit: $10 Minimum for a new sign up, or £25 for an existing advertiser. Minimum Bid Price: $0.01. No minimum monthly spend or startup costs |
| Traffic | Network handles hundreds of millions of searches per month. Your bid price depends on where you are positioned on the page. |
| Interface | Fast, easy setup. Campaign up and running in less than 10 minutes |
| Extras | Tools such as BidMaster(tm) eliminate the monitoring of keyword bids and positions that plague other PPC search engines. Bulk uploads thousands of keywords at once. Geo-targeted traffic by setting your traffic zone from US/Canada to worldwide. Manage multiple sub-accounts from one interface. Can set a daily |
T10
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: £25 Minimum bid price: £0.03 |
| Traffic | Handles over 600 million searches monthly |
| Interface | ‘Sponsored links’ appear at the top of search results |
| Extras | Tailor ad campaigns, specify which countries you want your ads to go out to |
Brainfox
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: $10, Minimum Bid Amount: $0.01 |
| Traffic | Reach users over 400 million times per month. |
| Interface | Featured listing listed first, labeled listings, takes about 10mins to make your listing |
| Extras | Sign up special: spend $25, and get a 25% bonus on your first deposit. Customer Service: offers a support representative for each client account |
AdOn Network
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: £20, system allows you to set up your own max and min bid, there are no set up fees. |
| Traffic | 30 million searches per day |
| Interface | Account is activated typically 1 – 2 business days from the completion of registration. |
| Extras | Customer Service: Client Services help line available if you require assistance |
Gazabo
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: $25, Minimum Bid Amount: Not Displayed |
| Traffic | Traffic Ranking Meter on Homepage |
| Interface | Highest bid at top of search results. Bid amount displayed as ‘cost to advertiser’ |
| Extras | Specials offered: Deposit $50 and get $50 free |
Seek99.com
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: Not Displayed, Minimum Bid Amount: $0.02 |
| Traffic | Not specified on Site |
| Interface | Search results listed under ‘premium results’ |
| Extras | 24/7 Support Toll Free Number or Live Support |
Findology
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit: Min Account Deposit: $25, Min Bid Amount: 0.3 cents. |
| Traffic | Over 4 Billion searches per month. |
| Interface | Sponsored Listings Only; Bid for placement within 24 hours. |
| Extras | Optimize your traffic with Traffic Reporting, Geo-Targeting and Daily Cap tools. |
Enhance Interactive
| Price | Minimum Account Deposit:$50.00, Minimum Bid Amount: $0.05, Minimum Monthly Spend $0.00 |
| Traffic | 2 billion visitors per month. Includes targeted traffic from Marchex’s Vertical Network as well as partner sites such as Dogpile, Metacrawler and Snap.com |
| Interface | Bid price shown next to listing, highest bid price at beginning of results page |
| Extras | You can set a daily marketing budget on Enhance Interactive called your “daily cap”. When the number of clicks you receive reaches your daily cap, your ad is removed until the next day. Expert account optimization by Enhance’s search team, helping you to choose keywords, write ads and manage bids |
Pay-Per-Click Terminology
Pay per click is a very vast subject. It includes a web of puzzling words. We are presenting a comprehensive list of these words with their acronyms and definitions. It will help you in setting your own pay per click campaign.
CTR: CTR indicates “Click-through rate”. It is the percentage of visitors to the website displaying your ad, who click on your ad and go “through” to the ad’s target web-page.
CPM: It means “Cost Per Mille”. It can be defined as the cost per thousand “impressions” of your ad, on the displaying page.
ECPM: It means “Effective Cost Per Mille”.
CPT: CPT symbolizes “Cost Per Thousand”. It is what the same as CPM.
CPI: CPI is meant for “Cost per Impression”. It is defined as the cost of a single impression of your ad.
PPC: It stands for “Pay per Click”. It is what, the costs of the entire system of displaying your ads on the internet, and paying a set cost for each “click” on your ad.
PPI: PPI signifies “Pay per interaction”. It is defined as the variation of PPC, where you pay a set cost for each “interaction” resulting from your ad.
CPA: It means “Cost per Action”. It is c calculation of what it is costing you, to get one visitor to take a particular action you desire.
CPC: It stands for “Cost per Click”. The specific subset of CPA, where the action you want the visitor to take, is to click your ad.
ECPA: ECPA means “Effective Cost per Action”.
SERP: it basically stands for “Search Engine Results Page”. When you enter “keyword/keywords” in the search box of a search engine, that engine returns a page-by-page listing of web-pages, which match your keyword(s). This is referred to as the Search engine Results Page.
XML: It is a programming language that supplies a set of standards for programmers to follow. In case of pay per click services, XML provides the ability to paste a simple piece of code into the web page and thus, easily obtain an automated content “feed”.
ROI: ROI stands for “Return on Investment”. It is the percentage of your original investment, that you get in profits.
The Top 10 Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Although there are large numbers of search engines available on Internet which provides pay-per-click services or opportunity to the chance seeker. But the problem is to decide that from where to get start with. It is really a challenging task to choose which one is the best pay per click search engine to get started with among bulk of numbers. No doubt, every search engines have some pros and cons, but looking over the popularity and power of the Google search engine, one can say without any hesitation that it is best to start out with Google search engine. Although, it is quite struggling to compete at the Google search engine, but it should be noted that competitiveness allows you to pick up the basics at very fast pace.
Most often you will see that most of the successful marketers choose to expand their business through Google. But Google is not the only option; you can switch to other pay-per-click search engines in the world. The below presented top ten search engines are the most competitive pay-per-click search engine which will enable you get a hike in your pay per click campaign.
Google AdWords
Google Adwords is a popular pay per click search engine where a cost of $5 is required to set up an account. At this site bid starts at $0.01and whatever amount is charged at the beginning, is credited to the account. You should note that competition is very fierce on this search engine and hence its is required to be taken care of.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo is another popular web portal which provides sponsored listings in search results on the top portals and search engines covering around 80% of active Internet users. At its initial stage it was being operated as GoTo.com for about 8 years and later the name was changed to Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2005.
ABC Search
ABC Search is one of the top Pay per Click search engine which requires an initial deposit of up to $100 to open the account. It assures you for delivering qualified Pay-Per- Click traffic. It is estimated that about 2.5 billion searches are conducted on ABC Search currently at the monthly rate which is really a high traffic.
SearchFeed
Most of the top marketers of the industry prefer to use SearchFeed for availing the advantage of advertising services as advertising with Searchfeed.com provides a level of personal service extending an ad campaign to its fullest potential. This site offers exposure to millions of unique visitors each day on a Pay per Click basis.
7Search
The 7Search is really a remarkable pay per click search engine whose advertising program generates quality website traffic on behalf of thousands of advertisers through its pay per click search engine campaign. In the recent survey, it is estimated that it is currently providing sponsored results for over 1.5 billion searches per month which is really fantastic. This is best suited for those businesses who cannot afford to pay over ten cents per visitor or those website owners who are having low profit margin.
MIVA
MIVA possess a strong network of partner sites and generates huge website traffic by powering more than 2 billion searches on monthly basis. It requires $25 for signing up for having an account on this site. The different site which comes under its network includes CNet.com, InfoSpace and WorldNews. It provides a full suite of management tools which are helpful in maximizing the earnings.
Enhance Interactive
It is a strong pay per click network which provides a versatile platform that allows you to extend the reach of your search campaigns efficiently and cost effectively. For opening an account on this site requires $50. The new advertisers who are a new Enhance user will get a bonus of $25. It has been estimated that the Enhance network receives over 2 billion targeted searches on monthly basis.
Findology
Findology is a standard website which is dedicated to provide you with highly targeted, quality traffic that you are looking for or expecting with its customized technology and performance based advertising. It will make you site reached to its entire network of partners only by bidding on relevant keywords and listing your site, which can turn to a huge traffic of visitors. It allows you to open your account at any budget and not only that, you will only pay when potential customers click on your listings.
Microsoft adCenter
Signing up with Microsoft adCenter requires $5 signup fee. It is very quick and easy to sign up with this site. If anyone is spending $30 a day in search advertising, then he can take advantage of QuickLaunch and Media Specialists that will help him to plan, create, execute, and analyze his first adCenter campaign.
GoClick.Com
GoClick.Com is one of the most important Pay per click search engine which assure you that you will be charged only for unique clicks and not overcharged for your online advertising. There is no membership fees required to avail the services of this site.
Video Tutorial
How to create your first campaign in Google Adword
Part-1
Part-2
Conclusion
In summarized form we can say that, Pay per Click (PPC) is an Internet marketing formula which is used to price online advertisements and in which the online advertisers will have to pay Internet Publishers the agreed upon PPC rate when an ad is clicked on, regardless of the fact that if a sale is made or not. Going through the above contents, now your concept might have become clear of the Pay per Click Ad Campaigns. Now, it has become clear to you that Pay per Click is one of the most important sources of revenue generation if it is set in a planned and systematic manner.
As we all know well that everybody thinks a lot before spending or investing money somewhere. It is very much required to have the complete idea and concept of that particular thing where you are going to invest. If you need any more details of the pay per Click (PPC), you may go through the link which we are providing below. Visiting to this link, you will get the complete concept of pay per click in more detail. We hope this link will prove helpful for you in getting the basics faster and smoother.
We hope you must have enjoyed the post. Please share your opinion on this post through your valuable comments.
