Why You Should Avoid Fixed Price PPC

Fixed price pay per click advertising (PPC) might seem like a good deal but will not provide you with the natural, ethical results you are after. There are plenty of online marketing companies offering fixed price PPC services, claiming that you will get a quick result for a low cost, but an ethical SEO company knows that there's a lot more work involved to create an ad campaign that really works.

The reason fixed price pay per click advertising does not work is because the bid price of keywords is continuously changing. Bid prices determine whether your keywords and phrases are shown on the first page of search result pages. To set a fixed price for a competitive keyword simply wouldn't give first page results over a period of time. The way fixed price PPC works is to group together low value keywords and set a limit on click price. The internet marketing company then makes money on the difference between what they bought and sold the click for. The customer, therefore, gets a sub-standard deal and the PPC campaign will be mediocre, meanwhile the company offering the fixed price PPC lines their pockets.

When venturing into search engine optimisation (SEO) and PPC, it's always best to work with an ethical internet marketing company to avoid scams or unethical search practices that will result in your website being penalised by search engines. Many new online businesses choose a cheap option in PPC and SEO, only to find a few months later that all their links have been lost and their ranking dramatically drops. To keep costs low, unethical search marketing companies outsource their work abroad, including content writing, which can often result in terribly written ads, blogs and web content, as the author may not be fluent in English.

An ethical internet marketing company wants your campaign to be successful so that you keep working with them. A get-rich-quick marketer just wants a short term deal with you so they can take your money, fob you off with a botched attempt at PPC, and move onto the next business.

A successful online marketing strategy for search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising includes working closely with businesses and clients to determine their goals, the most beneficial keywords and phrases, and any other aspects of their internet marketing that could be improved. You should receive regular reviews and reports on the progress of your campaign, including keyword reports, click-through-rates, the relationship between clicks and enquiries, and sources of traffic. A successful PPC campaign does not simply mean you blow your budget and hit the number one result on Google for a week. PPC may be a faster (and more temporary) method than SEO, but its results should still be maintainable.

If you are running a PPC campaign, it's a good idea to set up website tracking. This could include a unique phone number to record sales calls. However, you shouldn't need to do a great deal of tracking and analytics yourself if you have chosen a fully managed PPC campaign. This may involve creating bespoke landing pages to cater for your PPC ads and make search results even more relevant.

When putting together a pay per click marketing campaign, it's important to choose the right internet marketing company. Spending your entire advertising budget on a fixed price PPC campaign that promises fast results is a surefire way to lose that money with nothing to show for it! Instead, look for a pay per click marketing company that has an established reputation and an ethical search strategy.

Targeting PPC Ads by Location   

Comparing Popular Ad Formats

There are many types of ad formats that you can use on your website. Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of design, visitor experience, and effectiveness. Below are some forms of the most popular advertising formats and their respective pros and cons.

Banner and text ad

The banner ad is the oldest and most common type of advertisement consisting of an image. A text ad, also known as a text link, is an advertisement which only uses words to describe the offering. These two forms of advertisement are very basic and simple. This simplicity is what makes them so easy to design and implement. On the other hand, their simplicity and familiarity can make it more difficult to attract the attention of the internet surfers who have become immune to them.

Floating ad

This type of rich media advertisement appears on the website in an animated fashion as if it were floating on top of the current page. Typically, such an ad contains a close button giving the visitor some flexibility, making it less intrusive than other ads. Also, in most cases, the advertisement disappears after a programmed amount of time. A more advanced floating ad actually scrolls up and down the page following the visitor's scrolling actions. One positive thing about this type of ad is that it definitely attracts the user's attention when it appears. Designers are able to create very attractive floating ads that result in a higher click-through rate (CTR). Due to their uninitiated appearance, visitors may find them to be unwelcome and similar to the dreaded pop-up ad described next.

Pop-up

This format of ad appears in a new window in front of the current one. Pop-up ads have grown to be one of the most hated forms of advertising. Although they tend to aggravate visitors, certain advertisers tend to like them. They force the visitor to view them and provide higher click through rates than regular banners. Many modern browsers are able to block most pop-ups, decreasing their usefulness and effectiveness. Yet programmers keep finding ways to bypass such pop-up ad blockers. Be careful, annoying pop-up ads with flashing colors can deter visitors from returning to your website. However, there are valid pop-up ads offering a special non-deceiving promotion. In these scenarios, they can prove to be very favorable and effective.

Expanding ad

This type of ad increases in size following a user-initiated action which is usually a mouse-over or a mouse click. They can also be set to expand and contract after a certain predetermined amount of time. One advantage of this ad format is that it takes up less space on your website in its smaller state. Furthermore, once the creative has expanded, it provides a large area to deliver the intended advertising message. Another advantage, in the case of the action-driven expansion, is that you can measure how many times visitors expanded the ad and even the amount of time the ad is expanded providing valuable feedback. If the expansion is time-driven, it can be distracting to the visitor who was looking elsewhere on your website and can feel bothered by the advertisement.

Interstitial ad

Such an advertisement appears as a full page before the visitor reaches their expected content page. The advertisement can be of any type such as: a simple banner, rich-media, or a video. Typically, a frequency cap (eg: once every 24 hours) is set for this type of ad so that visitors do not have to encounter it every time they visit the page. The way the ad surprises the visitor, who was expecting to reach the content page, causes a highly visual impact. Because it is clearly seen, an interstitial ad can be very effective. On the negative side, this ad type stops the visitor from going directly to their desired page and can hence be perceived as aggravating.

Peeling ad

This type of ad displays a small "peel" on a corner of the website. A visitor can opt to view the entire advertisement by moving the mouse over the peel. The full ad begins to display in an animated fashion as if a page was being peeled. The great thing about peeling ads is that they intrigue the visitor but do not force them to view the ad like a pop-up does. This non-intrusive form of advertisement also takes up a very small, typically unused, amount of space on the website and is attractive to the eye. The clear disadvantage of peeling ads is that if the visitor never moves over the peel, either because it is overlooked or purposely avoided, the ad will not be displayed.

Polite ad

Some ads can be very large in size, which need a long load time. This affects the visitor's experience on your website. Polite ads were created to tackle such problem by loading the advertisement in two phases. First, a compact image is loaded and displayed with very little delay. Second, after the entire page has been loaded, the full version of the ad starts to load. This loading strategy has a clear advantage over the single load. It gives the visitor a more positive experience by allowing them to view the contents of the page without having to wait for the ad to be fully loaded. It also gives advertisers more flexibility when creating the full advertisement knowing that they do not have to worry so much about the ad size. However, this ad type requires more technical knowledge to implement.

As always, we highly recommend all publishers to evaluate and offer different types of ads to your advertisers to maximize your advertising revenue. Consider your website design, content, its unused space, and load time.

Targeting PPC Ads by Location   

Making Online and Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work for You

How to advertise online

There are many different ways that you can advertise online, from using social networks to placing banner ads on a variety of different websites. One of the best ways to find effective advertising opportunities is simply to put yourself in the shoes of your customers for a while. Start searching online just as they would if they were looking for the products or services that you can offer. The search results that are returned will certainly contain some of your competitor's websites, but there may also be results relating to third-party websites. These could be an excellent place for you to place an advert.

Finding your own advertising opportunities online can take time, particularly as you may need to send email messages to the owners of websites to discover if it is even possible to place an advert on their web pages. If you simply don't have the time for such a campaign, then you could instead buy advertising space from a network that handles all of the finer details for you. These networks will place your adverts on websites that it calculates will have the right sort of audience, so although you don't have direct control you should still expect to see more views to your website.

Pay-per-click advertising

We haven't yet mentioned one of the most popular means of online advertising known as pay-per-click. This can be a very successful advertising strategy because, as the name suggests, you will only pay when someone actually clicks on one of your adverts, taking them to your website. Most pay-per-click providers, such as Google AdWords, provide very useful record keeping tools that allow you to see exactly when someone visited your website and how long they actually stayed there for.

Some other advertising schemes allow you to pay for impressions instead of clicks. This means that every time your advert is displayed you will be charged a small amount of money. Although it's possible a visitor won't pay attention to the displayed advert, many will skim the name of your company, building brand recognition for the time when they actually do need the goods or services that you can provide.

Putting your online advertising plan in place

For a really effective online marketing strategy you are likely to wish to incorporate several different means of advertising. From free strategies such as social networking and article marketing, to paid adverts like banners on websites relating to your market area and pay-per-click advertising solutions, all of the different methods on offer can be effective at increasing the traffic to your website.

Before starting your advertising campaign it is important to put a plan in place that deals specifically with your advertising budget, the tools that you plan to take advantage of and the timeframes in which you would like to see results. You should also put some thought into how you will monitor your advertising activity to ensure that you are really receiving good value for money with every method.

Targeting PPC Ads by Location   

PPC Marketing - Its Basics, Significance and Benefits

In the past, most businesses paid newspaper or television channels to air their advertisements. The price for these services depended on various factors such as the publisher's popularity and the slot given to the business. This is the case when it comes to television channels there are prime-time slots where the chances of people seeing your advertisement is substantially higher than others. However with the rise in popularity of the internet, more and more people look to it as a better means of obtaining information and entertainment as compared to newspapers and television. Thus, it would be beneficial to businesses to invest in advertising through the internet as is the case with PPC Marketing.

What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and as a follow-up will define what PPC marketing is as well. It is certain that at least once as you browsed or surfed, through the internet you have come across online advertisements. They can appear on social networking sites, on search engines or online game sites and are the online version of billboards.

Now, the rent paid by a company for their billboard advertisement operates much in the same way as the rent for an apartment would. When it comes to online billboards, however, how a website or a search engine gets paid by business companies for keeping their advertisement up varies a lot more, but one of them is through PPC. As was mentioned PPC marketing stands for pay-per-click marketing and as the name implies the website hosting the advertisement is paid by the company depending on how many click their online billboard has received over the course of, let's say a month.

Which sites host PPCs?

That depends on what your advertisement is about, after all one can hardly expect any interest in their discount skiing gear when the website hosting it is about a summer getaway. In the case of websites, businesses will usually determine for themselves which ones to invest in. However in the case of more popular ones such as social networking sites the amount of space that can accommodate your advertisement is limited.

PPC marketing through search engines generally receive more traffic than through websites. But search engines can't exactly just place your advertisement on their home page or on every search results page, when your online billboard pops up is determined through keywords entered in the search engine.

For example, in the case of the discount skiing gear business, keywords that could trigger the advertisement for it might include; discount skiing gear, skiing gear, skiing, ski. When someone enter one or all of those words in a search engine, along with the usual results your advertisement also pops up in a pre-designated location reserved for advertisements. Unfortunately, PPC marketing entails a bit more complexity than that. As is the case in the previous example, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to register for all of those keywords as other businesses, read your competitors, are vying for them as well. In this case a bid is performed; the company with the highest bid gets registered for the keyword.

Other variables in PPC marketing also include the region where the website or search engine is being accessed, as well as even the device being used to browse through it. This, along with the aforementioned keywords, means that your advertisement is shown only to those that are most likely to show an interest in it. Yet again, we can use the previous example, let's say your complete advertisement is "Discount Skiing Gear in Canada" not only will the advertisement be shown on skiing websites and search engines with the right keywords typed in, but now it will only pop up on those that are accessing the website in Canada.

Is it worth it?

Depending on the website, the price can become quite steep for PPC marketing. But given the fact that you will only pay should your advertisement get traffic or in this case get clicked, you are far from being ripped off as that means those that do click on your advertisement are quite interested thus are more likely to avail of your services, negating much of the cost.

Targeting PPC Ads by Location   

5 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Ad Click Through Rate

We've learned a thing or two over the years about increasing click through rates.

Now we want to share some of our top tips with you. Read on to discover 5 ways to entice people to click your ad!

Use close up pictures of people. In our testing, we have found this to be the best type of image for catching peoples' attention and getting them to click on the ad.

To be even more specific, images of happy, smiling women are your best bet. Your ad image isn't meant to be literal; it's meant to convey a lifestyle or evoke an emotion.

Would you rather click on a photo of a product (which, because of the size of the ad, people can't see really well anyway), or on a picture that carries the promise of potentially making you happy, solving your problems, or cheering you up?

Also make sure the image is only of the face.

Focus on color. If you think your color choices aren't that important, you are very, very wrong!

Use colors that stand out. Bold, exciting colors that pop out from the page will increase your CTR. You are not only trying to make your ad stand out from other ads on the page, but from the Facebook interface itself.

Make sure your ad copy is clear. Prequalify your clicks by specifying what exactly you want people to do.

Once people have clicked on your ad, you are going to be asking them to do something on the next page. What is it?

Enter their email to receive a free eBook? Like your page to watch an exclusive how-to video? Make it clear in your ad what you're going to be asking people to do.

If you're looking for more guidance on writing high converting headlines, check out our article on writing PPC headlines that get results.

Have a reason for your ad. Be specific. If you don't have a reason, create one! Have a sale, offer a discount or free gift, or advertise a limited time promotion.

Don't think people are going to click through just because you're asking them to. Give them a reason why they need to click NOW.

Use action words. Use words that conjure up images of physically grabbing your deal or product.

"Grab this".

"Take it".

"Claim yours".

These all work well to get people to take action. Action words elicit an emotional response - people don't want to miss out, and action words convey a sense of urgency.

Using these 5 tips can dramatically increase your click through rate, and in turn, your overall success with Facebook advertising.

What other tweaks have you noticed make a big difference in your CTR?

Targeting PPC Ads by Location   

Winning Clients Through The PPC Campaign

The greatest development in the world of advertising is the shift from printed materials to promotions making use of the World Wide Web. This is where modern technology meets the age-old concept of advertisements. The internet makes use of techniques such as search engine optimization, social media networking, and viral marketing to give businesses the visibility they need. One popular technique advertisers use today in winning clients and boosting sales is the Pay Per Click or PPC Campaign.

Pay Per Click is used to draw traffic to websites. This is used along with search engines because they are the major sites that most people visit every day. Advertisers start by bidding on keywords that are related to their enterprises to lead individuals to their business page. For example, a company that sells toilet seats wants to gain more visibility. They will now bid on possible key phrases that are relevant to their services and target market. In this case, they may bid on the words "toilet", "toilet seats", "bathroom", or "affordable toilets". Once an individual makes searches that involve any of these words, a link to the company selling toilets appears on the search results page. They can be in the form of banners, pop-out ads, widgets, or sponsored links.

Clicking on any of these transports the person to your site. The amount you bid relies on the location and visibility you desire. Survey shows that more than half of all individuals only visit the first result page, which is why these are the most expensive and sought-after spots to get ahead of competitors. In addition to spending money on the bids, advertisers pay publishers depending on how many times the ad is clicked. The good thing about this is that you only pay for the actual visits to your site. It also allows you to clearly keep track of how effective your promotional campaign is.

Two main things to consider in this kind of modern marketing strategy are creativity and competence. Just like all other forms of advertising, the goal of Pay Per Click is to get the attention of clients. The ads must be unique, attractive, and intriguing enough to lure people into clicking on them. There are plenty of PPC experts online which you may choose from. It is important to invest in a competent company that is armed with the latest tools and an experienced staff. Go through their previous works and look at the success rates of their campaigns with other clients before making a choice.

Targeting PPC Ads by Location