"I never click those". Really? Somebody does! And those ads are not always where you think they are. The most obvious place for Pay Per Click ads is at the top of a normal search. But those ads don't just exist there. They exist in more than a half a million sites, apps, games and more. You don't even know you're clicking them sometimes.
Google is the king of pay per click but it's probably not wise to ignore other platforms like Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Super Pages, Ask and of course the social media sites. All of them get significant traffic and all have pay per click programs.
Running just a single pay-per-click campaign on Google can seem like an overly complicated task to many. Most small local businesses don't do it for any number of reasons but those that do can reap the benefits of showing up first in the search results above their nearest and dearest competitors.
COST
The cost to run a pay-per-click program is usually in the range of $1,000 to $1,500 per month for most small businesses. Many businesses that used to (or still do) shell out 10's of thousands for Yellow Pages may consider this to be too expensive. However, a well optimized pay per click campaign should have a decent return on investment. Campaigns are established by a bidding process and as it happens, businesses generally will not bid more money than the campaign returns in revenue. Cost is controlled by keyword bidding, daily and monthly expenditure capping. The beauty of pay per click is you can stop if it doesn't work. You can also change the campaign on the fly, change your ads and your sales page (or your home page) to accommodate your campaign parameters. You could never do that with Yellow Pages.
BUDGET CONTROL
There are several ways to control your budget on a pay per click campaign. The best campaigns are setup with a few keywords, a very targeted ad and a custom landing page specific to the keywords and highly relevant to the campaign ad. In fact, the more in line your landing page is with your ads and keywords, the cheaper it will be. Google rewards quality! Campaigns that use the spaghetti at the wall approach with hundreds of keywords, a simple ad and a home page destination will cost the most and generate the least amount of ROI. The broad search terms cost more than the niche terms because more people bid on them. Even so, because of the time involved in setting up a quality PPC campaign, most small businesses will take the lazy approach to building a campaign, stuffing all relevant keywords into a 3-5 ad campaign and sending the clicks to their home page. And then they will complain that the Pay per Click process is too expensive and yields very little results.
BEST PRACTICES AND RECOMMENDATIONS
If you want to venture into the Pay Per Click campaign territory, start small and grow your campaigns once you understand what works and what doesn't.
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Choose a high profit niche and do some keyword research
- Set up your keywords with both long-tail and broad search terms - but very relevant to the niche you want to advertise in.
- Keep your ad very focused on the niche
- Create a landing page that has lead capture (forms) and offers something in return for contact information
- For products and services that have urgency (like plumbing) - make the phone number part of the ad and prominent on the landing page.
- TRACK results, tweak and split test until you are satisfied with the campaign returns.