Essential Guide To Pay-Per-Click Advertising

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Which Engines Should You Use?Following Goto.com's (now known as Overture) phenomenal successwith pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, more than 160 PPC startupshave sprung up.Out of these 160 PPC engines,...
Which Engines Should You Use?Following Goto.com's (now known as Overture) phenomenal successwith pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, more than 160 PPC startupshave sprung up.Out of these 160 PPC engines, only a few may actually have thesearch volume to generate a respectable number of clicks for yoursite.Most PPC startups require between $10 to $25 of setup fee whichcan be applied to clickthroughs. They offer low minimum bids of$0.01.
But with limited search volumes, they may bring you only afew clicks each day!My recommendation is to go for established PPC engines with highsearch volumes that can generate higher clickthroughs. The bigboys are Overture (previously known as Goto) athttp://www.overture.com, Sprinks at http://www.sprinks.com,FindWhat at http://www.findwhat.com.Overture is the best because they serve over 2 billion searchqueries monthly through their partnership with major searchengines such as America Online, Lycos, Altavista, Netscape,Hotbot and InfoSpace.You can test the startup PPC engines but commit only the minimumsetup fees.
If they generate decent traffic, you can always topup your account. That way you minimize your risk to only $10 to$25 per PPC engine.
For a list of over 160 PPC engines, seehttp://www.payperclicksearchengines.comHow To Find Relevant Keywords?Since you are paying for each clickthrough on your bid, it makesgood sense to ensure that your keywords are relevant to yourtarget audience.One of my favorite tools is Overture's Search Term Suggestion athttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/Enter a keyword and it shows the number of times the word wassearched - which indicates its popularity. The more popular thekeyword is, the higher are your clickthroughs.
Overture alsogenerates a list of similar keywords and their search counts inthe previous month.Overture's tool is one of the best ways for finding good keywordsto bid on. Another alternative is to download Good Keywords athttp://www.softnik.com/products/gkw/index.htmEnter a keyword into this free software and it will display alist of relevant search terms and their search counts acrossmultiple PPC engines.You can also try JimTools' Keyword Toolkit athttp://jimworld.nu/keywords.htmlJimTools can generate a list of related keyword possibilities,some with search counts, from Goto, Google, Magellan andWebCrawler.How Much Do I Bid?The bigger PPC engines such as Goto and Sprinks require a minimumbid of $0.05.
Startup engines have lesser minimums of $0.01.How much to bid depends on your return-on-investment (ROI)calculations.For example: If you bid $1.00 per visitor, and 1 in every 10visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00.So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15,then your net profit will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit minus $10cost-per-sale).Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses,is 50.0% ($5.00 net profit / $10 cost-per-sale). Always priceyour bids to achieve a positive ROI!A great tool that you can use to compare bids for a specifickeyword across multiple PPC engines is athttp://www.compareyourclicks.comTo read about how you can maximize your returns from PPC engines,go to http://internetmarketingfocus.com/article.php?sid=53You'll learn how to reduce your bids while still maintaining thesame ranking or get a top 3 position for maybe just 1 cent more!How Do I Track Clicks?Most of the time, you'll notice that the number of clicks trackedby yourself is between 15% to 30% more than the clicks the PPCengine reports.This is because reputable PPC engines such as Overture haveinstalled anti-cheating mechanisms that prevent your competitorsfrom repeatedly clicking on your listings and wasting your bidfees!They will count multiple clicks within a specified timeframe fromthe same computer as only one clickthrough while your own logwill usually register the multiple clicks.There was once when I noticed that my log was registering lessclicks than Overture's reports.
They were experiencing some bugwhich prevented clicks from being properly delivered to theadvertiser's website.Because I was tracking my clicks, I notified them of the problemand they credited my account for the bad clicks. Tracking yourclicks give you a more reliable picture of how well your PPCcampaign is performing.If you have access to your CGI directory, I recommend LnkinLite,a small yet powerful tracking software that can track clicks toyour site in the background.
Get it athttp://www.dtp-aus.com/cgiscript/lnkinlte.shtmlOtherwise you can consider free online trackers athttp://www.hypertracker.com or http://www.linkcounter.com Article Tags: Search Counts Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .