PPC Advertising for Small Businesses. is it Logical?

PPC Management for Small Businesses. Is it Logical?

PPC, or Pay Per Click Advertising is the number one way to increase the relevant traffic to your website. If you are interested in running a PPC Advertising Campaign there are a few things you should know and take into consideration before jumping right into it.

Do you have knowledge of PPC sources? Have you been wondering how to get your ads to appear on the searched on Google, Yahoo, Live and others? The sites you conduct your searches on, each sell their own version of PPC Advertising. Google is to date, the number one search engine providing over eighty percent of all online pay per click advertising. Googles program is called Adwords. Yahoo, MSN, and others have their own versions, each of which you can sign up for on their respective pages by searching for “online pay per click advertising”. This takes a small to medium amount of time to sign up and get your company ready to begin a campaign.

Do you know what keywords to use? Once you have signed up for a PPC Provider, you now need to start setting up which keywords you want your ads to appear for. This is NOT as simple as you may think. You can always put as many keywords in as you can think of, but remember that quantity is not equal to quality. You need to do extensive research on each keyword to find out:

Ø How much the keyword is searched for
Ø How often the keywords is used in an exact match
Ø Where geographically the keywords are searched
Ø What people do once they click a link relevant to the keyword

After researching your keywords you need to concentrate on writing your ads. This is the most important part of your campaign. You want your ads to stand out from the rest without blending in. Remember though, that your ads MUST be relevant to what you are trying to sell or you will be paying for clicks from people who don’t need your product or services. This is a major drawback from using too many irrelevant keywords.

Running the Campaign. Running a successful PPC Campaign requires DAILY maintenance. This is the part that most people disregard when attempting to run an advertising campaign. You need to constantly monitor:

Ø How many times each keyword is searched for
Ø How many times someone clicks on each keyword
Ø The % of each click per display (CTR, click through rate)
Ø How much you are paying for each click
Ø What place is your ad coming up? Top of first page? Pages 1-3?
Ø Would you get a better CTR by paying more per click, but using less keywords?

What I have discussed so far are just the basics of running a PPC Campaign. There are many more technical and detailed and very time intensive processes in running a very productive and cost efficient PPC Campaign. Can you run one by yourself? Yes. Is it worth it? Probably not. The problem here is that most PPC Management companies charge amounts ranging from 500 to 2000 a month, with setup fees ranging from 1000 to 4000 dollars, they are designed to work for large fortune 500 companies or companies with advertising budgets of tens of thousands of dollars a month. If you’re a company with an advertising budget of two, three, or four hundred dollars a month what should you do? Well, you can always use my tips written in this article and try it out for yourself, or you can search for the very few PPC Management companies that are certified by the Ad Providers like Google, MSN, Yahoo which also cater to small businesses.

If you don’t feel like searching around, we recommend using Versatility Marketing Group. Their information can be found at MyPPCManagement.com. Just a hint, their PPC Management plans have no setup fees and range between $99 - $199 a month with plans in between. They built the company up with the small business and franchise clients in mind. Give them a call and you won’t be disappointed.