Today, more and more businesses and small business owners are looking into the internet as the cost effective way to boost their income. Majority of them consider search engines to be the most effective targeted traffic generators. However, getting top rankings for chosen keywords can be quite difficult. As a matter of fact, it can take up to a year or more for a website to get top placement in major search engines. But there’s another way to get listed in search engines, fast.
It’s called pay-per-click search engines. PPC search engines can put your website next to other search listings and start bringing you quality and targeted traffic within minutes.
How Pay Per Click Search Engines Work?
You have probably seen ads on the right side of Google search engine listings, or top and bottom of Yahoo search listings. These ads are called “sponsored search listings” or simply PPC ads. They appear whenever advertisers bid on the keywords that visitors are searching for.
Let’s say you’ve decided to advertise on PPC search engine. The first step you do is keyword research. You make a list of keywords that represent your website or product. Later, see how many times people search for these keywords. And then bid on those keywords. Depending on a search engine, bids may vary from 1 cent per click to $100 per click.
If you bid too high, you might run out of funds very quickly. If you bid too low, you may never receive any traffic at all or receive only few clicks. So you have to choose the best cost-per-click for you if you want to get decent traffic and positive ROI (Return on investment).
After bidding on keywords, you also have to write an ad message that will be displayed when a visitor searches for the information relevant to your ad. Then your message is reviewed by staff members. If approved, your ads start running immediately.
So when a visitor enters a keyword or keyphrase that you are bidding on, your message appears next to the search results. If a visitor decides that your message is relevant to his search and attractive enough, he will click on your ad. When he clicks your sponsored listings, the amount of money you choose to bid on that keyword, will be deducted from your account. You have to be careful though, cause you can run out of funds very quickly if you bid too high.
Conversion Tracking and ROI
One more step before jumping into the PPC game is to determine your ROI. For example, you sell a product that costs $100. We’ll assume your conversion ratio (CR – number of people who buy compared to the number of people who visited your site) is 1%. That means 1 out of 100 people buy your product. You bid $1 per click and you get 100 visitors. So you pay $100 in PPC marketing and you make $100 from the sales (no return on investment).
If you have additional expenses, like the shipment of your product, then you’ll lose more money than you’ll make. In this case you should bid less that $1 per click. However, if your conversion ration is 10%, then you can make some nice profit. CR is different in every industry. It also depends on your website (how it converts), your ad message and the keywords you select to bid on.
The Best Pay Per Click Search Engines?
Many people ask the same question: “Which is the best PPC search engine?”
Majority of advertisers will tell you that Google Adwords and Yahoo are the best PPC search engines. They are the largest in the industry, they offer professional support and they receive quality and targeted search traffic. As people claim, they bring the best ROI compared to the other engines.
However, smaller PPC search engines can also be very profitable. As said before, it depends on many factors. Some niches might bring better ROI using smaller PPC’s than the large ones.
Let’s say on Google, to be listed in position 1 or 2, you would have to bid .50 (50 cents) a click for a selected term. Then you would have to spend $50 to get 100 visitors. We’ll assume you sell a product that costs $10. If you have 5% CR, then you sell your product to 5 customers and get $50. Again, you have no ROI. But, smaller PPC’s might be a better idea. Here’s why:
You sell the same product for $10. But your conversion is lower, 1% instead of 5%. As long as the PPC search engine is smaller, you now pay only 0.01 (1 cent) a click. Now with 1% CR, 1 out of 100 people buy your product. You spend $1 to get 100 visitors and make $10 per sale. You spend $5 and make $50. As you can see the smaller PPC brings you much better profit in this case. However, it’s just a theory. You need to test and track every keyword and every campaign in order to discover how it actually converts in your case.
In Conclusion
PPC search engines can be risky. You might guess how many visitors you’ll bring, how much money you’ll make, but the reality is usually very different than your calculations. You may not receive so many clicks in the beginning, so you’ll have to bid higher. If you bid higher, you might spend more money than you were planning to. So you better have good funds in your account in the beginning, because you’ll probably have to spend a lot of money upfront, before you make a sale.
Some people are making thousands of dollars a week from pay per click search engines. So try it out, and if you master the art of PPC’s, you can make some serious money online, from the comfort of your home.
