What Is PPC Advertising

What is PPC - Intro

PPC Campaigns are one of the most effective ways to grow your online business rapidly.

If you would rather not take the time and effort to run, and manage an effective advertising campaign online, just Contact Us for a very low-cost solution.
(usually in the low-hundreds rather than mid-thousands)

We have specialized, low cost solutions for small startup businesses as well.

With that being said, we certainly understand that many people like to learn by doing. This overview will give you a good understanding of how to run a PPC Campaign. Although we will try our best to keep you informed of potential pitfalls, there is no way to have all the pitfalls on paper due to the ever-changing environment.

If you run your own PPC Management and Advertising Campaign, we certainly wish you the best, as running an effective campaign can open up limitless possibilities.

What is PPC SEO and what does it stand for?

This term stands for Pay Per Click - Search Engine Optimization. This is the method by which you combine two, very powerful website marketing techniques, to help magnify your website traffic. Understanding the critical importance of PPC SEO Advertising and how to apply those methods, can make all the difference in your web marketing campaign.  So, what do these terms mean. Search Engine Optimization is the method in which you encourage a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo) to “understand” truly what your website is trying to say. This method is commonly used to increase your “organic” exposure. In other words, if someone sees your website during a search, you do not pay for them to physically find it, nor do you pay for them to “click” into your website. The more optimization you have applied to your website, the more a search engine, such as Google, or Yahoo, will want to place the website in a higher position on a search. In other words, proper Search Engine Optimization results in your search engine giving you better results than your competition. SEO techniques can help a website see 100’s of daily visitors where it was once seeing only 1 or 2. Sometimes even thousands of additional visitors per day can be seen from proper Search Engine Optimization!

To find out more on Search Engine Optimization, you will want to read our “6 Step Program” for Optimizing your Website.

PPC Advertising, on the other hand, is the act of paying the search engine to force your business to have greater exposure, and a higher number of clicks. In exchange, you pay a small fee per visitor to have that massive advantage over your competitor. This small fee can vary anywhere from just a few cents, to several dollars per click. In the case of PPC Advertising, however, you are paying for customers that are physically looking for you, as will be explained later. Look at it this way…When you advertise through mailers, newspapers, magazines, etc., you are advertising to people who (for the most part) are not looking for manufactured housing. You are spending a substantial amount of money to get in front of large amounts of people, in the hope that someone is looking for a new home. How much have you paid for other advertising that was seen by customers who weren’t even looking? Effective Pay Per Click Advertising is highly regarded as money better spent, as it targets customers who are physically looking for you, and we will discuss this shortly.

Therefore, Pay Per Click - Search Engine Optimization, is a combination of streamlining your website for “Organic Results”, and paying search engines to give you better website visibility. I will also share some information regarding other ways that combining these two things will maximize your results online.

Now, there may be one main question you are asking if you are already familiar with PPC SEO.

It may sound like I am referring to Search Engine Management, or SEM, rather than SEO.  So, therefore, what is the difference between SEO and SEM?
I might as well address this now. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, generally refers strictly to the act of getting results without paying.  SEM, or Search Engine Management, is the technique of getting results through payments, or physically “advertising online.” There are several methods of SEM, from paying for banners, PPC Advertising, Partner sources, forum links, etc…We won’t go into detail about each of these. Since Search Engine Management is not confined to just one area, like Pay Per Click Advertising, which is the most proven form of online marketing, we will continue to refer to this procedure as PPC SEO Advertising.

Pay Per Click Advertising – How do I identify it?

Let’s take a look at a typical Google Search…Let’s say I am looking for Manufactured Housing in Minnesota: How do I tell the difference between PPC SEO, and regular organic results?

You go to Google, and type in “Minnesota Manufactured Housing” and this is what you will  see:

In this example, I highlighted the most optimized “Organic” sites in Green. A prospect can click on these sites all day, and it does not cost the retailer a dime. Also, it didn’t cost the retailer to get their website in that position. It is primarily a result of Search Engine Optimization. Your goal should be, over time, to use Search Engine Optimization techniques, such as those outlined in our “6-Step Program”, to begin maximizing your website traffic. Once your website is optimized properly, it can be a low maintenance, high volume catalyst to your business. Imagine if you could be on the top three pages of most major searches relating to your specific field? How much would that increase your business? Search Engine Optimization is the most critical aspect of getting your website noticed by search engines.

The Pay Per Click Ads are on the right side, and also the top beige box. I did not create the beige box, as it always appears that way so you can identify the organic results from the PPC Ads, often called “sponsored links”. These are the websites that pay each time someone clicks on their site. Look at this search. It is important to note that there are not many people who pay for PPC Advertising for “Minnesota manufactured housing”, so someone could literally get away with paying, for example, 5-cents per click, and be right on the front page, since there are only three other people using PPC advertising for this keyword phrase. That could be a beneficial advantage for someone starting a Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign.

Why Run Pay Per Click Advertising, if organic results are the ultimate goal?

There are several reasons why it is important to do Both PPC and SEO at the same time. But here is the primary advantage to Pay Per Click advertising.
First, PPC Advertising is immediate. It takes a long time for Google to notice that you even exist. Sometimes it can take a couple of months just to register a change. When you make changes to your website, or begin to utilize Search Engine Optimization techniques, the results will often not be recognized by top search engines for months. Search engines have “robots” which literally crawl through every site that is active, indexing all the information. They index most words, and in what order, they index how often words and phrases repeat, links going out of your site, code, and more. And that was just on one page! With tens of millions of sites, hosting billions of pages, it takes time for these robots to get back through to your particular site, and read through it, line by line.
Pay Per Click Advertising is almost immediate. If you start a campaign today, you will likely have “hits” tomorrow or the next day. If your site is presented well, and your PPC campaign in managed properly, than new prospects can potentially begin “emerging” within one or two days! The Ad-word campaign takes effect almost immediately.

One area where this can work in conjunction with your Search Engine Optimization, is that the more hits you get from PPC advertising online, the more your natural “rank” will increase, often pushing your website above competitors who are not running a PPC campaign as effectively (or at all). Now, if you run a PPC SEO campaign in conjunction with each-other, than you can see how results can be compounded. I will give other examples of how these two campaigns can work hand-in-hand, not only giving you more results, but saving you even more money.

In the end, however; if you run a strong PPC SEO advertising campaign, you get to a point where your organic results are “self-sustaining”. You may not need the PPC at all if that time comes. Ultimately it is possible, although realistically very difficult to get to the point where your optimized website may be pretty much all you need for an effective marketing campaign. But even if you never get to that point, wouldn’t it be nice to have an effective marketing campaign that targets specific buyers and yields better results?

How does PPC SEO Advertising target specific buyers?

There is a big difference between Pay Per Click marketing and traditional marketing or advertising. In traditional advertising, you go to the masses searching for the right buyer. You send out mailers in search of the right prospect. You send out a radio ad in hopes that a qualified buyer may hit your site.
Effectively, you are in search of potential buyers.
With PPC SEO advertising, buyers are already in search of you. You are just making yourself more visible, than competitors.
This is how it works:
Anytime I go to the internet, and look for anything. It doesn’t matter whether it is a mobile home, a book, a jet-ski, or a Christmas present, I have to type information into a search engine to get the results I want. Most of the time, I will type it into Google (or a search engine powered by Google – as they are the #1 search engine, and the #1 website), or I might use my MSN search bar, or Yahoo, or Verizon (which is also powered by Google), etc…Either way, I have to enter information based on what I am looking for.
So, let’s say I am looking for a Mobile Home, and I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Let’s say your retail location also happens to be in Minneapolis (or at least services the City).

As the customer, I might happen to type the following into the search engine:
“Minneapolis Mobile Home”
This is three keywords combined to form what the search engine sees as only one keyword, which is exactly “Minneapolis Mobile Home”.

When you put together a Pay Per Click campaign, you are able to tell the search engine what specific “keywords” you want applied to your campaign. In other words, you can physically say that if anyone types in the words “Minneapolis Mobile Home”, you want to appear in the Ad-words that appear on the right, so someone can see your page! The search engine will say that in order for you to appear on the front page, the estimated charge per-click could be anywhere from 5cents to 5$ or more depending on the volume of searches, and how many competitors are running PPC campaigns. Special Note: These charges are usually over-inflated for obvious reasons, so you are often encouraged to start at a lesser amount to start, and work up from there.

Now, when someone types in the keyword: Minneapolis Mobile Home”, your site may just appear on the front page! If a few hundred people are searching for this keyword, than your ad gets seen by a few hundred people who are actively looking for “Minneapolis Mobile Home”, so they are likely potential buyers, and you now have an opportunity to get in front of those buyers. If they click on your link, you pay a marginal amount of money for a qualified buyer, who, for some reason is seriously interested in looking at your message. Imagine if your traditional advertising expenditures were geared toward Pay Per Click Advertising to this type of market. Especially since 75 or more of your potential buyers will search the internet first, to locate where they will buy their next product!

PPC SEO – Keyword Matching

Well, we identified one of your customers, and a search that they may type to find a website, and they ended up seeing your site. Here lies the technical side of a Pay Per Click, or Adword campaigns.
So the customer typed in: Minneapolis Mobile Home”, saw your website, clicked on it, and you perhaps made a sale, or they left and looked for something else.
There may be a few people who search for this keyword every month, and you may see some results…Actually, the one single keyword “Mobile Home” is searched for over 4,000 times per month.
Now, instead of someone typing in “Minneapolis Mobile Home”, what if someone types in “Minneapolis Mobile Homes”. Will your site show up? The only difference is that the word home was made plural…The answer is NO. Unless you have that exact phrase in your list of Keywords, than you will never be seen by people who may type it in plural.  Now, if you didn’t have this new keyword, you would be missing about 4 times the search volume, as there are about 12,000+ searches per month for the keyword “mobile homes”. So, now that we are up to about 16,000 searches per month with just those two keywords, what other possible variations exist? Pay Per Click campaigns do not charge you for the number of keywords that you use, so the options are virtually endless. Note: They will drop irrelevant keywords from your list, such as if your started placing keywords like “music cd’s”, or actors names, or anything else that is highly irrelevant to what you may be selling.
This is where you start finding ways to “help” the customer locate you during their search. This will start maximizing your PPC SEO campaign. You start adding keywords like: “Minneapolis mobile homes,” “Minneapolis Modular Homes”, “Minneapolis mobile home”, “Minneapolis Modular Home”, all surrounding cities, provinces and counties (remember, a person might live in a city attached to Minneapolis, and having those specific areas will make a difference). What about “Minneapolis home builders,” (wouldn’t you want to be seen when people are searching competitive markets)? The list is almost endless for Pay Per Click advertising. You may add several keywords that only result in a click per month/year. But if you have 1,000 keywords, some seeing tens, some seeing hundreds, per month, you do the math.
There are people seeing well over 2,000 website visits per day from well managed Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns.

PPC SEO – Pitfalls

There are certainly many pitfalls that you can run into during your PPC advertising campaign. Much like running a mediocre advertisement in a local newspaper, you can find yourself in the unfortunate position of having tossed some money out of the window.  This information will help you avoid some of the main pitfalls that you can run into, although there are certainly others…So be wary, and walk before you try to run.
First, make your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign targeted to only where you currently service. The number one mistake I see, is that a retailer who may be selling an item in a certain County of South Carolina, might come up for a search for that same item in Minnesota, or Idaho. PPC Advertising can be centralized to the are you are specifically doing business, so that your Adwords do not appear outside of that region. Imagine paying hundreds of times what you should be paying because you are listed in not only all 50 states, instead of just one city, but you are also being found in Korea, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, etc...
If I was looking for a mobile home in California, I will likely “click” on your PPC Ad, not realizing you can’t sell a home to me, and I will leave within 10 seconds, and you just got charged some money. It may be a small amount, but it adds up, when you factor in all the other states, and countries that are online!
Make sure your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign has controllable financial limits set.
You can control exactly what you want to pay on a daily basis. You can “cap” your daily expenditures, so that you spend no more than X dollars a day. After you hit the maximum number of dollars per day, your PPC Ad will stop showing up on searches until the next day. You can also set when you want your ad to show up, and if you want Google to control whether it shows instantaneously, our throughout the day. For all these items, there is not right or wrong answer. Some people may have better results having their searches hit people quickly, so they get seen by the “early birds”, and most potential buyers in your market might actively be looking at a certain time, so having your PPC Advertisements appear as searches come up may be more important. On the other hand, you may run a worldwide campaign (although not seen in this business – but just an example), and you don’t want to use your daily allotment prior to your site getting in front of customers in different time zones!
 Also, when I talk about controlling your financial limits, you also need to control what days your PPC Advertising Takes place. Just like businesses are cyclical, so are website searches. You might find that on Sundays and Mondays, you rip through your daily budget, but on Tuesdays through Thursdays, you don’t get many hits, and on Fri & Saturdays it’s hit or miss. You can automatically control your budget to set higher limits on days where you know you will see more traffic.
You can also automatically set start and end times. You can literally hone your PPC advertising campaign to a point where you maximize the times and days that you get the best results.
Make sure your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign has a message that is accurate.
As you continue your PPC SEO Campaign, you need to ensure that you are lining up the right message for the right people.
As we discussed, you have virtually limitless keyword selections to choose from. Let’s say we are still working on the PPC Advertising campaign for the Manufactured Housing Retailer. By now, you have keywords for Mobile Homes, Manufactured Homes, Modular Homes, Trailers, Singlewides, Doublewides, etc…When you right an ad, it will look like this:

You will control what is said on the entire Message. If you use a selection of Keywords that are related to “Modular Homes,” do not use an ad that says “Mobile Homes.” You can actually run several different PPC Advertising “Campaigns” at the same time, and write Ads like you see here that are designated for each group of keywords. If someone is in the mindset to purchase a “Mobile Home”, and the see an Advertisement for “Modular Homes,” they may visit the site, but there mentality as they are looking at the pictures (most potential customers will read very little), is that you are just selling Modular Homes, resulting in more lost visitors.
While we are discussing this, let’s also talk discuss Impressions vs. Clicks, which is very important to PPC SEO Advertising.
When you are running a Pay Per Click Advertising campaign, you are at the mercy of the online customer. They may or may not click on your message, but how do you even know your message is getting seen? Maybe you are using Keywords that are not getting proper results, or maybe your message is not clear enough, and customers are just not “clicking” your PPC Advertisement.
How do you determine what tweaks to make to your Adword campaign?
Within your Pay Per Click Campaign, you will have access to several various reports. One of those, which you see immediately when you sign in, is a report that shows you your “Impressions”, your “Clicks”, and your “Click Through Rate”. Note: You do not pay for Impressions.
An Impression occurs when a PPC Advertisement is physically on the same page that a prospective buyer is viewing. Basically the “Impression” was visible to a potential client.
A “Click” (also called a “Click Through”) is where a potential customer saw your Adword, and physically Clicked on it and visited your site. This is where you get charged for the “Click.”
Finally, the “Click-Through Rate.” This is the percentage of Impressions vs. Clicks. Although you always want to aim to bring that percentage up, there is certainly no right or wrong number. Of course, the larger the percentage, the more hits, interest, and potential you will have for seeing more business come from your PPC SEO advertising activities.
Let’s say that you have a very low clickthrough rate? What would you do to address that?
Usually, there is one of two main reasons that you will have a low clickthrough rate. One, is that your keywords are not specific enough to what your advertisement says. Such as our example of someone looking for Mobile Homes, but finding an add for Modular Homes, or finding an ad in the wrong state. Usually, this means the keywords do not match what you are selling.
The other is that the Pay Per Click Advertisement may not be written as well as it could be to attract that particular buyer. Check for misspellings, or misleading descriptions, was the item oversold? Was your company oversold? These are usually the main two reasons for a low click-through rate.
Point your PPC SEO Advertising Campaign to the right pages…
This is where it is crucial that you are utilizing the Search Engine Optimization methods outlined in the 6-step process.
One very important aspect of your website, is the content. What is physically written in your website, and what is that message. As you know, your website may have many pages. Some devoted to Modular, Some relating to Mobile homes, some relating to Singlewides, perhaps a page relating to the differences between HUD and MOD, and the list goes on and on.
You can physically tell your Pay Per Click Advertisement to take the prospect to a specific page. That is important for a couple of major reasons. First, if the customer is searching for information relating to Affordable Mobile Homes, they see your Affordable Mobile Home Adword, and they are excited enough to click on your site and visit. What happens if you take them to the “Home Page, where perhaps you just show pictures of high-end, custom built, Modular homes that are obviously outside that customer’s needs? The customer will leave your site immediately, looking for something more within his wants and needs. Or, at the very least, you force that potential customer to have to “find” information on your affordable mobile homes, but chances are, you already lost him or her. Now, if that same customer gets directed to a page that is very relevant, showing very nice pictures of well-lit, affordable sectionals, with pricing and information relating to the additional value you have in your particular homes, that customer will be much more likely to contact you, or just stop by your dealership.
It is important to understand that whether you are running PPC Adwords, Search Engine Optimization, or anything having to do with Online Marketing, that you have very little time to engage the customer. Customers  often stay on a website around 8 seconds. If you haven’t met that customer’s expectations within that time frame, your PPC Advertising campaign will be less effective.
The potential of a well run PPC SEO Campaign is literally staggering. You can increase the number of hits to your site by qualified leads ten-fold or greater in a very, very short amount of time. Imagine having 10 times your current drive-up customers visiting your website, walking through your pictured inventory, generating interest in visiting you. Wouldn’t that potentially change your business?
I would certainly not say that you won’t struggle, if you are now, but if you are…Wouldn’t you like to struggle less? If you are making marginal income, wouldn’t you like to make it take a step forward? If you are happy with your current progress, wouldn’t you like the opportunity to be happier?
I hope you have seen how proper PPC SEO can help you uncover a gold-mine of potential business that you did not have before, and how it can help you begin to maximize your online marketing potential.

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