by Andre Sanchez

If you know how to use pay per click advertising properly when selling a product online, your chances of success in internet marketing are greater than if PPC were incomprehensible to you.  Not only are you more liable to make money, but also to save it!

The first rule in pay per click advertising is to set yourself an advertising budget that you can afford.  Many people have maxed several credit cards by failing to set a budget, and failing to make sales early in their PPC campaign.  They then try to make up their losses by advertising even more, and the way that Google, especially, operate their Adwords program, it is possible to lose large sums of money without realizing it.

That’s the warning over.  Now onto the techniques that can improve your success rate with PPC advertising, using Adwords as an example.  Google Adwords is the most successful PPC program on the internet at the moment, and it contains several ways for you optimize your adverts.  The first is choosing the breadth of coverage you want. 

You can elect to have your adverts shown world-wide without restriction or you can limit it to specific countries.  You should choose the latter since there is little point in your English language adverts being shown in countries with a very low ratio of English speakers (or readers).  The USA is the world’s biggest internet market, and many restrict themselves to advertising here, or may also include Canada and the United Kingdom.  Add Australia, New Zealand and Ireland and you are covering most of the English speaking world.

Next, you will be allowed to choose keywords for your advert.  You should choose good keywords that have a high demand but low supply on Adwords.  There is software available commercially that you can use for that, but the bid prices are also a good guide.  The higher the bid price, the more Adwords pay per click adverts there are on Google. Your keyword should be specific to the product you are selling, and not simply generic.  Hence, if you are selling blue square widgets, you should use that as your keyword, rather than just ‘widgets’.  Not only will your advert be cheaper but your visitors will be more targeted.

Having chosen a few keywords to sell on, and got them at the lowest price per click you can, you should be ready to compose your advert.  Google allow you three lines for the ad itself, and each is important.  The first line is the title of the advert, the second should provide a feature of the product and the third line a benefit to the buyer.  The title should state exactly what you are selling.  It should be specific, such as ‘Blue Square Widgets’ and not just ‘Widgets for Sale’. 

Keep in mind that you pay every time somebody clicks on your advert, so it is very important that the visitor knows exactly what you are selling.  If you only sell blue widgets or square widgets, you don’t want somebody wanting red round widgets clicking on your advert.  On the next line state a feature of your widgets.  For example, ‘French Widgets $10 – $15’.  The potential buyer now knows that you are selling blue square widgets that are made in France and cost from $10 – $15.  Anybody looking for American widgets for $5 will now look elsewhere, rather than costing you a click before they find that yours are not what they want.

Finally, on the third line, provide a benefit that could sell the widgets. For example: Fit all Widget machines’.  The buyer knows that they can use your widgets in all widget machines so they needn’t look elsewhere for widgets that fit their machine.  You are doing two jobs when designing a pay per click advert:  selling and trying not to attract visitors that your products are wrong for.  You therefore have to sell and deter at the same time.

Finally you should analyze your adverts in order to improve the conversion rate of visitors to clicks.  Google allow you to run two or three adverts together, so make slight alterations in the wording and choose the one that gives the best result.  If you keep doing this, each time retaining the best performing ad, then you will eventually end up with advert with the best possible return for your money.

Finally, the URL that the potential buyer is sent to must land on your sales page for the product.  Do not send them to your home page, or any other.  The purpose of the advert is to sell, and unless they land on your sales page they are likely to click away and try another advert.

Pay per click advertising is an excellent tool to use in internet marketing, but unless you know how to use a PPC program effectively it can be very costly and you could spend a lot of money and sell nothing.

How to use Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) in Internet Marketing was originally published  at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com