Top 10 Tips For Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising has completely
revolutionized how advertising is done over the
Internet. No longer must advertisers purchase banners
or text link ads on sites for a flat rate per month,
but with virtually no guaranteed results (not even a
guarantee of a click); instead, they can purchase “pay
per click” advertising through a massive contextual ad
server service, such as Google Adwords.

Now, with this new ability to advertise effectively
comes several responsibilities: in order to use it
correctly, you must understand how it works. You can't
simply purchase the top right corner of a site for a
flat rate per month. Below, I've included 10 important
tips for PPC advertising:

1. Actually browse through sites that serve your
advertisements. Eliminate those that are low quality
or that are likely to inflate the price of advertising
by giving you too many clicks per 1000 views.

2. Remember to always determine whether or not it is
cost effective to advertise on contextual ad networks;
or whether you should restrict your pay-per-click
advertisements to the search engine itself.

3. Use “day parting” features to determine when your
advertisements will and wont be shown. If, for
instance, you find that at certain times during the
day, you get a lot of clicks, but none are serious
buyers, you may want to remove your days from that
period of time.

4. Use the statistics program on whichever pay-per-
click advertising program you are using to determine
the effectiveness of ads. If ads are not effective (or
are too effective), replace them with something else.

5. Test and refine your ads until you have the best
possible advertisement (i.e. one that pulls visitors,
but not visitors that don't buy).

6. Determine how many clicks you can afford to pay for
per sale. You should be able to mathematically
determine the optimal price per click.

7. Use Google Adword's keyword tool feature to search
for additional keywords to use in your campaigns. The
more you have, the more traffic you will pull.

8. Remember to segment each campaign into a list of
keywords and an advertisement that matches that list.
The smaller the list of keywords, the more narrowly
focused the advertisement can be, making it more
effective

9. Remove keywords from your campaigns that are not
cost effective. Many keywords will pull searches, but
will end up decreasing your click through rate or not
converting to sales after someone clicks through.

10. Use negative keywords to prevent freebie seekers
from running up your click through count. For
instance, get rid of keywords like “free” and “cheap,”
unless your product is free or cheap.

Follow each of these ten tips carefully and you will
find that using pay per click advertising isn't as
hard as it may seem initially.