PPC Advertising - Getting Your Ads Right

For getting the most traffic and sales to your website, it's wise to use both SEO and PPC advertising.

While SEO or search engine marketing will generate free traffic to your site it can take longer, whereas PPC advertising is more immediate.

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising lets you see results right away because the ads you create show immediately throughout the advertiser's network, and it doesn't matter if your site is indexed already or not.

With PPC ads you only pay if someone clicks on your ads. It doesn't matter how many times your ad is displayed, you only pay for clicks. And if you carefully watch your ad you can see how well it's converting to sales and if it's worth modifying or adding a new ad.

You can also run several ads simultaneously which means you can split test your ads. By doing this you can see which ads work the best and which ones are failing. This is also a great way to test your keywords. The keywords that get clicked on the most are the ones you can use to boost your organic search results.

In fact using ppc ads is a great way to test things like your product offerings, headlines, salescopy and price points.

But the best part of ppc ads is they are affordable. If you do them right you can dramatically improve your search engine rankings and direct targeted traffic to your website ... and yes, often without spending much money at all.

So how do you get your Pay Per Click ads right?

Find the right keywords

Start with at least 100 keywords. That may seem like a tall order but that's where tools like Wordtracker and Google's Keyword Tool come in, but no matter what tool you are using, simply identify 100 keywords that apply to your niche.

Once you have your keywords ready, divide them into 'keyword groups' which means group those keywords together that mean exactly the same thing, just in a slightly different way. For example, keywords for san Jose Bed & Breakfast may be:

San Jose Bed and Breakfast
Bed and Breakfast San Jose
Bed & Breakfast San Jose
Bed & Breakfasts San Jose

Bed and Breakfast San Jose, Ca
San Jose Bed and Breakfast

BandB's San Jose
BandB San Jose

B&B San Jose
San Jose B

San Jose B and B

B and B San Jose, Ca

etc....

For each keyword group create 3 or so ads. Then watch each of your ads to see which ones attract clicks. Keep testing and try to create ads that beat the current ads.

Create targeted landing pages

The main idea behind any good ad pay-per-click or otherwise, is that it sends a customer to where they want to go, that means your ad should tell them exactly what they want to see and send them to exactly what they are looking for.

Using our bed and breakfast example, there could be different themes to target. For example, you could target family friendly, romantic weekend or great for a holiday getaway.

For example, let's say you are trying to appeal to the romantic audience. Create an ad like this:

"Experience a romantic getaway at a San Jose Bed and Breakfast."

This ad would land them on the romantic getaway page. For holidays you could create a holiday landing page. This is a perfect way to see what theme gets more sales so that you can know where to focus your spending and also what types customers you are attracting the most.

Whatever it is, tailor a landing page for each theme and create separate ads and keywords.

Keep on Tracking

Not all your keywords and ads will be effective. You will have some keywords that don't drive traffic at all, some keywords that drive traffic but produce no sales, keywords that drive traffic with no immediate sales and of course keywords that drive traffic and sales - the ideal scenario.

For keywords that don't drive much traffic, you can get rid of them or leave them. I would say just leave them, they won't cost you anything and I've often found that at various times of the year they do produce some clicks.

For keywords that are driving traffic but produce no sales, take a look at your ad and make sure your landing page accurately relates to your keywords.

For keywords that drive traffic but no immediate sales, definitely keep these, they will eventually convert to sales, it just may take longer. In fact, you may want to consider creating an opt-in form on your landing page and work on establishing a relationship with your subscribers through email marketing which is a marketing strategy that you definitely want to incorporate into your online business.