PPC Bidding
November 9, 2007
One of the most common questions I get asked is whether or not PPC is worth the expense. There are countless people hyping up Google Adwords and Yahoo Search at any given time. But there are others damning the whole system, saying it is all a waste of money. Is it true? Are small business owners losing their shirts because of faulty PPC campaigns?
The answer is yes… unfortunately. Pay per click programs are nice because they allow you to target specific areas of your site with a focused keyword. For instance, I set up one the other day with a ‘Safe Toys’ ebook. The site is brand new, so Google doesn’t trust it enough to start sending organic traffic to it, but we still want to get it in front of people. The response? Set up a PPC campaign.
A lot of people are fine going into it themselves. In fact, PPC marketing is a pretty easy process initially. You create an account, load up some prepaid funds, and pick your keywords. Where most people come up short is they don’t manage it. They just set it up once and think it will run itself.
Pay per click is an advertising medium that changes every day. It isn’t like you buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal for a set price, and it runs a set number of days! Bid prices change on a day by day basis, and sometimes hourly. The reason is, each person in there has the ability to pay as much for an ad, or as little for an ad, as they like. All the bid price determines is where your ad will be placed.
When we set up the ‘toys’ campaign, we had a top level bid price of $.20 per click. This was good enough to get us into almost 175 different keywords, all very well targeted. A couple hours later, we logged into Adwords and saw that someone bid the price up to $ .50, so we had to adjust accordingly.
The thing is, if we hadn’t logged in and seen that change, then the ad would have been at the bottom of the tier, being clicked on by fairly unqualified candidates. That would have wasted quite a bit of money for our client!
So you see, the key to PPC is actually the management of the campaign - not the initial setup! I can guarantee that all those people condemning Adwords didn’t take the time to go in and see how it was performing. After all, it’s your advertising budget! How well do you want it to perform for you?
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