An Overview on Adwords and other PPC Programs

If you have never used Adwords to promote your business, you’ve been missing out. Not only is it one of the fastest ways to advertise (you can get ads up in less than 5 minutes), but it is also one of the easiest ways to reach a massive audience.

You don’t need good connections. You don’t need a big mailing list. You don’t need a massive budget (in fact, you don’t even have to pay for your advertising fees until the end of the month). And you don’t need a degree in computer science to “engineer” a site that ranks well in search engines.

So what do you need in order to be successful with Adwords? First of all, you need an account. If you haven’t started one yet, cruise over to Google Adwords and sign up for one. 

Once you open an account, you should start by testing some of Adwords’s features. Try out the keyword tool to find new keywords related to your niche. Use the bid tool to determine approximately how much your advertising campaign will cost. And navigate through their site until you’re familiar with how it all works.

Once you are familiar with Adwords, you should consider starting a campaign for your business. But before you do that, you need to understand the following two things, which will help you to structure your campaigns correctly:

1. Google Adwords—and all “pay per click” advertising programs—charge you per click, not per impression, action, or sale. What does this mean? It means it is incumbent upon you to ensure that you are a) paying the right price per click; b) purchasing the right keywords; c) writing ads that people will actually click on; and d) making sure the clicks turn into sales. Google will serve ads for you, but other than that, it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to get a decent ROI.

2. Two things determine how well an ad is ranked by Adwords (but not necessarily other PPC advertising programs): 1) your bid; and 2) your ad’s click through rate (CTR). What this means for you is quite simple: if your CTR is phenomenal, you can get a high ad position without paying more money per click. If, on the other hand, your CTR is mediocre, you’ll have to pay through your nose to get that same position. So make sure you write an ad people will click on – or be prepared to pay.

As a new Adwords user, you will have a lot to learn. But if you keep the two things above in mind, you shouldn’t stray too far from making successful campaigns and capitalising on them.  You can also learn more about running successful PPC campaigns on Adwords by taking up courses, such as the Google Magic Formula or Adwords Profits 2.

Aside from Adwords, you shouldn’t forget that there are other pay per click advertising programs available. While Adwords offers high quality traffic in large volume, it also costs more to use (i.e. bids for keywords are higher) than most other pay per click advertising programs.

Although Google holds the largest share of searches on the internet, you should still consider complementing your Adwords campaigns by creating parallel campaigns with the following advertising programs:

1. Yahoo Search Marketing: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com. While Yahoo has a much smaller market share of the search market than Google, it is still formidable when compared to most other search engines (it ranks second after Google out of all the search engines). Additionally, many keywords on Yahoo are much cheaper than on Google.

2. Microsoft Search Beta: http://advertising.microsoft.com. MSN, like Yahoo, receives a considerable amount of search traffic – although still much less than Google (MSN comes in third). If you want to pick up some cheap PPC keywords, consider checking MSN out, too.

So there you have it: a brief overview of how to use Google Adwords, as well as a list of its major PPC competitors.