Pay Per Click Advertising

[Jimjim]

Anyone know any good PPC (pay-per click) experts or good info somewhere? For my website, if it's 10 cents per click, I would about break even, which would not make sense. 5 cents is ok, but the best would be 1-3 cents for me to really make a good profit without having to spend tons of money to pull in that profit.

Just wondering if anyone knows a good place to find expert information on the best way to use Google Adwords, Yahoo, or any other system in order to get the maximum clicks per day at the lowest cost.

[peter991]

Here's a couple of links to get you started:

1) Pay Per Click Guide

2) What is pay-per-click advertising?

3) BidVertiser

4) Banner Click

5) The Performance Network

6) Oxado - displays 537 million ads/month on 30,126 sites.

Peter

[cdnvic]

Actually, Google groups adsense newsgroup is pretty good. Personally, I'm not impressed with Yahoo's services but Google has been excellent.

[Jimjim]

Actually, Google groups adsense newsgroup is pretty good. Personally, I'm not impressed with Yahoo's services but Google has been excellent.

Are you talking about adsense putting google ads on your site? I was referring more to adwords where I am paying to put ads on the google network and bidding for the cost per click.

Thanks.

[cdnvic]

Actually, Google groups adsense newsgroup is pretty good. Personally, I'm not impressed with Yahoo's services but Google has been excellent.

Are you talking about adsense putting google ads on your site? I was referring more to adwords where I am paying to put ads on the google network and bidding for the cost per click.

Thanks.

Same answer then, just go to the adwords group instead.

Microsoft Adcentre has given me the best return on my advertising dollar, and better quality traffic as well. Google is quite good and is the only one with high enough traffic to supply a niche site. Yahoo is changing but I'm still not at all impressed. For the cut of the search market they have, they really should be feeding me more traffic, but they barely keep up with MS.

[Cyberstar]

I think the one most important thing to reduce PPC costs is extremely carefully considered keywords. Tailoring keyword for ads is sort of thinking in the opposite direction of tailoring keywords for general search. A good exercise is to think in terms of "How do I prevent users from clicking on my ads"? Once you have tailored your keywords as close as you can towards that goal, you can start to relax a bit.

An obvious example: The little word "free" is part of quite many searches. Consequently, you might want to offer free samples of your services so you rightfully can use that keyword throughout your site and hit the top ten in a general Google search. However, you wouldn't want to pay Google too much for the privilege of handing out freebies.

Consequently, if the word 'free' appears on search-engine-friendly places throughout your website, you might want to define it as a negative keyword (so that your ad don't show if the search string contains 'free').

Another example: If you truly are in a niche - let all your keywords refer to that niche rather than the general field. Even one single word can reduce the number of non-performing ad clicks considerably.

I have a niche site - sort of - inasmuch as there's no chance anyone would call for my services unless they're located in the Chiang Mai area. Consequently my keywords are tailored so that my ads don't pop up unless the user includes 'Chiang Mai' or 'Chiangmai' in his search string. In about 6 weeks I've paid for 7 clicks and have had 2 paying customers, that found me via Google ads. Quite reasonable value for money there ... However, now I've stopped my ad campaign. A whole bunch of my pages have indexed by Google (6 weeks after their launch) and whenever someone search for "Chiang Mai / Chiangmai' and any of the obvious keywords defining my services, they get 3 - 5 of my pages among the first 5 - 10 links on page one of Google's results - really no sense in having a paid ad on the same page.

[cdnvic]

Linking adwords ads is the fastest way to get Google to find your page because they spider every page an ad points to in order to check for objectionable content.

[dsys]

You have the first important thing figured out - your ROI. Now that you have that I would suggest that you have a look at this website http://www.adgooroo.com . I use them and find it very profitable. Here are a few tips:

1.The idea about minimising your cpc (cost per click) often leads to people setting up their accounts incorrectly. The main thing you need to watch out for is the exposure of your ads. If you set your daily budget too low you will see your ads placed highly but they only show 1% of the time. So I would advise against getting out of the minimise cpc mindset and get into the maximise exposure mindset.

If you are getting 1000 clicks that you are making 2c on its better than 10 clicks with an ROI of 9.

2.The other thing to be aware of is that adwords is very time intensive to manage correctly, so the big guys only optimise their accounts once or twice a month, never go after the top spot - NEVER! you can get to number one without increasing your budget. Adwords rewards better performing ads even if the cpc is lower. A/B testing is crucial here and you need a good stats package to do it.

3.The page that your ad clicks through to must be tightly optimised for the Keyword that you are using.

4. Watch out for the default settings and track your click throughs, adwords will display your ads on semantically relevent pages unless you tell it not to. For a tightly controlled butget turn this feature OFF. You will be throwing money down the pan otherwise.

5. Expect your competitors to click on your ads about 20% of your clicks will be fraud. I have found that setting up a dummy campaign in your most competitive keywork is the most effective way to stop this. eg. Your keyword is Widgets and it costs 10c a click to get to number one. Set up a campaing with a daily budget of 40c and the time of the camaign to run from 0900hrs to 1100hrs

1200hrs to 1400hrs

1600hrs to 1730hrs (these are usually the times your competitor is surfing)

Now when your competitor clicks yoyur ad 4 times it does not diplay any more. Your competitor thinks that your a has dissapeared. Make sure you are not bidding for this keyword.

6. When starting out dont bid for your most competitive keyword at all. If you bid for your long tails and your semantics after a period of time you will appear for the most competitive in the top ten at a greatly reduced cpc.

I have been doing this for a number of years and it works well. Try the link i added and stick with their advice

I am not linked to that site in any way. If you need further advice or links let me know

ps sorry about the spelling not my strongest point

[Entrep]

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