by Andre Sanchez

Unless you know how to write a PPC advert correctly, you could be wasting a lot of money.  A normal newspaper or magazine advertisement can be designed to provide general information about a business and its product range.  You are not concerned if the reader is not directly interested in your product since the exposure is valuable in getting your company or brand name known.

In PPC advertising, however, you are not paying for the placing of the advert but for every time that somebody clicks to look at it. It costs nothing if magazine readers open to a page with your advert on it and read it, but it would if they clicked on your PPC ad to have a look at what you had to offer.

For example, let’s assume that you are selling running shoes, particularly Adidas running shoes, and place an advert on Google Adwords for “Running Shoes”.  Somebody clicks on your advert, checks out your products and then clicks away again immediately because they are looking for Nike running shoes.  You can’t say you have just lost a potential sale, because the visitor didn’t want Adidas shoe, they wanted Nike.  However, it has just cost you click.

You have learned lesson Number 1:  be specific.  So you change your advert to “Adidas Running Shoes” and sit back waiting for the sales to roll in.  Perhaps a few sales do come rolling in, but you might find that they advertising costs are still higher than you anticipated and that your conversion rate of clicks to sales is low. Take a look at your stock, and what you are actually offering.

Are you offering the full range of Adidas running shoes or just a few?  Perhaps only response, Supernova and some of the adi Star range. Somebody visits your site for Megabounce and you don’t offer them.  That is another wasted click you are paying for that could have been avoided by being very specific in your PPC advertising.

When you run ppc advertising campaigns what are you paying for?  It has already been said that you are not paying to place the advert, but for every time somebody clicks and visits your website.  Because of that, you can have as many individual adverts as you want in your campaign:  it will cost you no more than one.  In fact it will cost you less per sale because that means that you can have an individual PPC ad for every product you sell.  Hence, you can even go as far as offering an advert for “Men’s adi Star Fusion Red, Size 10”. There is no ambiguity there, and if your conversion rate is not higher than 50% then your price is too high.

If you offer 5 styles in each of 5 sizes, you can have 25 adverts, unless you have all sizes in stock, in which case offer a different ad for each style with the full range of sizes advertised on your landing page.  The same for each color.  Your pay-per-click ad will only cost you when somebody looking for men’s adi Star Fusion red running shoes clicks on to your ad offering exactly that.  They are going to see what they are looking for.

However, effective use of your PPC advert does not end there.  You could use one or two of the lines offered to state a range of sizes, e.g. “Sizes 4 - 11 Men, Women and Kids” with 32 characters fits one line of 35 allowed.  You must also use the direction URL correctly.  The display URL can be that of your website, but the direction URL for each individual advert must lead to a page offering the product advertised. You won’t sell much advertising Adidas Star Fusion and sending a visitor to your Adidas Megabounce range.

Your advert would then read:

Adidas Running Shoes
Low Cost “Start Fusion” in Red
Sizes 5 – 11 Men, Women and Kids
http://www.  runningshoesads.com

If you understand the correct way to word an advert, and the importance of the landing page reached by a prospect clicking on your advert, you will not waste money needlessly.  All else  being equal, if there are two types of product A, and you sell only product A1 and not A2, then an advertisement for only “Product A” will cost you twice as much as if you had made the ad for “Product A1” only.

A large part of the secret of making money using PPC advertising is knowing how to write a PPC advert, and where each advert should send the person clicking on it.  Put yourself in the place of the people you are trying to attract and decide what you would do.  If that is not what you want them to do, then change the ad.

How to Write a PPC Advert was originally published  at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com