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An Overview of How Pay Per Click (PPC) Works

This is where you decide to advertise using PPC services on the web yourself. There are a many companies that provide pay per click programmes. Google Adwords is the most established and has the largest market share so we will use Google Adwords as our example. The following sections and description outline how a Google Adwords campaign works at a high level. In summary the steps are:

Lets look at each of these steps in a little more detail.

Identify Your Keywords

Once you have decided to promote your product or service with Adwords you need to identify the best keywords to use. This is not always as easy as it sounds as PPC is a very competitive marketplace. In order to identify keywords you can use a keyword tool such as Google's free keyword tool or a commercial tool such as Wordtracker. A good guide to PPC Marketing with Google Adwords is The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords.

Create Your Landing Page

This is the sales page that visitors will see when they click your add. It is important that your landing page is targeted to your add and the people you expect to click on that add. Many companies just put their homepage as the landing page!

Create Your Google Adwords Account

This is straightforward. Just go to Google Adwords and create an account. They will take you through the signup process and there is a a comprehensive set of help and tutorials for beginners.

Create Your PPC Campaign

Google will walk you through setting up your first campaign. You will start with the Starter Edition of Adwords but can upgrade to the Standard Edition at any time. This is well worth doing. However before you start to spend money advertising with Google Adwords you need to take the time to fully understand how Adwords works as you can easily burn your advertising budget.

Your Ads Are Displayed To Searchers

Once you are satisfied with your campaign you can set it running and Google will show the ads every time your chosen search query results are displayed to searchers.

Interested Searchers Click On Your Ads

Assuming that you have targeted your ads well people will click on your ads. Then its up to your sales landing page to do its job.

Summary

PPC is a bit of a science and you need to be careful to make sure that you advertising expense is not more than your profit. It is a great way to get traffic but it is not as easy as many online marketeers would have you believe. If you are keen to use PPC then The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords is well worth a look.