Books have been written about it. And I mean big, thick books… Pay-per-click marketing, as best perfected by our Californian friends at Google, is touted as one of the most effective forms of online advertising. It’s quite a simple model really – advertisers show their highly targeted messages to potential consumers and pay a fee to the service provider only when a consumer clicks on their ad and goes through to their website. The ads are displayed if they are relevant to the search term, or keywords, entered by the searcher. Simple, really, and highly profitable to the Googles of this world.

Depending on the competitiveness of the niche, advertisers can pay as little as five cents per click up to more than 40 or $50 per click, such as in the case of certain personal injury attorneys. Pay per click marketing is itself marketed as a perfect form of advertising, yet it is pretty complex and takes a good bit of understanding on the part of the advertiser.

There are a number of things to remember when it comes to successful pay per click marketing. Essentially, you must make sure that your ad is correctly put together and is part of a well thought-out campaign. It is not enough to come up with an ad and expect to get the best rates, the best position, or the best display to click ratio. As far as Google’s Adwords is concerned, for example, the position that you achieve on the page of search engine results is based on the click through rate of your advert, and not just the bid price. The higher the CTR of your advert, the better position you will achieve, for the lower bid price.

You must make sure that your ad copy is very well thought out. First of all, you will need to make sure that your search phrase or keyword is as targeted as possible — the ubiquitous long tail — otherwise you will pay very highly and get few qualified results. Your ad copy’s title should be highly relevant and ideally contain your keyword. Not only will your viewers think this is more relevant, but the Googles of the world who are in the business of assigning a much maligned “quality score” to your campaign, will think so too.

Make sure that the page your ad points to, for click through purposes, is also highly relevant and matched to your keywords in the content of your ad. Otherwise you will get a penalty and your quality score will suffer, meaning that your ad will not show as highly on the page, and/or your cost per click will be higher.

Always track the success of a pay per click campaign, and test, test, test. Use a large number of targeted key words and be sure to track which ones are effective. Get rid of those that are not, as soon as you possibly can.

In short, pay per click marketing can be highly effective, but it requires a lot or preparation and attention during the running of the campaign!

Do you have any other tips on Pay Per Click Marketing?

Adam Toren