PPC - Overlooked and Underrated

Guest contributor WebsiteBox says:

Pay-per-click advertising is the payment for premium placement in search engine results. Using the largest network, Google, as our example, it works like this:

1. You set up a Google Adwords account, develop ad campaigns around keywords and phrases, and bid against competitors for placement in the top and right side paid ad results.
2. You construct individual ads around individual key phrases, such as "yourtown real estate," and "yourtown homes for sale." Each ad has a title and a somewhat longer ad text block.
3. Your ads are placed in page positions on the top and right based on your bid in relationship to the competition, but also on other proprietary criteria used by Google.
4. When someone clicks on one of your ads, they are taken to your website and the page you designate, and your account is charged some amount up to the maximum CPC, cost-per-click, that you bid.

It's a pretty simple system, at least if you don't care how much you spend. In fact, when you talk to real estate professionals or business owners who have been unsuccessful with PPC, they usually say something like "it cost a lot of money and I didn't have good results or generate leads." They're not inaccurate, just uneducated in how to do PPC right, and one other very important bit of information. They're not aware of Google's Ad Quality Scoring and how it changes everything.

First, learn the fundamentals and follow Google's recommendations about how to word your ad title and text and incorporate your key phrase. This is as far as most advertisers go, and it's why many fail and stop their PPC activity due to high cost and low performance. What they don't know is that Google gives your ad a score (Ad Quality Score) based on monitoring performance, and that score is based on numerous factors including:

• Your ad's CTR, click-through ratio, which is the number of clicks it receives in relation to the number of "impressions," or times it's displayed. So, if it is displayed 100 times in searches and gets five clicks, 5/100 = .05 or a 5% CTR.
• Your entire account's overall CTR.
• How relevant is your keyword(s) to your ad?
• How relevant is your landing page where they're taken to your ad?
• Other landing page factors related to quality and visitor navigation.

Those aren't all of the scoring factors, but they're the most important. So, what's the big deal about your ad's Quality Score? It's a major influence on how high your ad is placed in the paid results sections, how effective it is, and how much it costs you, your CPC, cost-per-click.

The big secret many never discover is that increasing your ad's Quality Score moves it up in the results and at the same time lowers your CPC, no matter what your bid. When your ad attains a Quality Score higher than the scores of your competitors' ads, your ad moves up higher than theirs in paid results. Yes, this means you'll pay less but rank higher!

Consistently it's, been shown that CPC can be reduced by 20% to 30% or more if your ads have high Quality Scores. And, that higher placement will get you even more clicks to your site. Even better, the high Quality Score means that your landing page is very relevant and it should be generating leads for you.

If you've dismissed PPC in the past, it could be time to take another look.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.