Pay-Per-Click Advertising
(or PPC)
 Since 1998, we have tried many different strategies and over the years
pay-per-click advertising has emerged as the quickest and
most profitable way to drive traffic to our web sites.
What is pay-per-click advertising?
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is an advertising strategy where you bid to get an ad
placed near the search results for a given term at a set
bidding price. For example, if you go to Google and search
for “low
acid coffee”, you will see blue rectangle at the top
of the screen with text ads in it and some text ads to
the right of the search results. These are all labeled
“sponsored ads”. When a visitor clicks on one of these
ads, the advertiser is charged a fee. In this example
of low acid coffee, we bid on this term for our ChamplainCoffee.com website. You should
see our ad in the right hand side of the screen for search
results.
There are many advantages to using PPC advertising. You have a lot of
control on where your ad will be placed and how much you will pay. Also,
you only pay if a prospect clicks on your ad to go to your website... you
only pay for qualified leads! You can pay as little as .10 to $10 per click
on your ads. What you may have to pay to get listed on the first page depends on
how many competitors you have for a given term and what they are willing to pay.
Because many businesses are now using PPC advertising, we do much more research
than we used to do in figuring out which terms are best for us to bid on.
For example, we could bid on the search term "coffee"
for ChamplainCoffee.com, as we were advised to do by some
pay-per-click firms. This really made no sense to us as
the term is too generic… we would get a whole lot of traffic,
but at too high a cost. The sales wouldn't justify the
advertising cost. However, being that we sell low acid
coffee that is 75% acid free, we decided to bid on terms
such as “low acid coffee” and “acid free coffee”, which
through our research, turned out to have a lot of searches
and very high rates of return.
Interestingly, we found that while the term "acid free
coffee" has less searches and an average bid
cost of almost half as much as “low acid coffee”,
it produces more sales. Therefore, being the most profitable.
We also found that bidding to be #1 or even #2 in search
results is often most unprofitable.
In conclusion, PPC advertising is quicker and easier
than other methods of getting traffic to your website.
However, due to increasing popularity it’s more difficult
than it used to be, but still by far the most effective.
As we have been very successful with doing it for our
own businesses generating over $1 million in sales as
a result, we have decided to offer pay-per-click advertising
management services to our clients. We are able to
do this for as little as $25/month, which should be affordable
to any business serious about doing business online.
If you are interested, please contact
us to discuss it further.
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