Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Using Google AdWords for Your PPC Campaign

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Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising using AdWords is perhaps the most popular form of advertising among small businesses. This is partly because of Google's reputation and partly because it allows the small business owner to control costs. There are various ways Google AdWords can help you as a small business owner, but it takes some basic instruction to get started and tap ultimately tap into its full potential as an advertising tool.

The key to successful advertising is to find a method of conveying your information to as many people as possible while keeping your advertising costs to a minimum. Pay per click (PPC) advertising may be one of the easiest ways to generate traffic to your website and score some decent profits from your search engine marketing campaign. Google AdWords is the most popular form of pay per click advertising for small businesses, partly because of Google's popularity, and partly because it allows you to control your expenses by setting daily maximums for each ad.

How PPC Advertising Works

With PPC, you pay only when someone clicks your ad and visits your Website. Ads may be placed on search engine results pages (SERP) or on Websites that are identified as related to your targeted keywords.

How much you pay for each click depends on how much you're willing to bid for your selected keywords, and in Google AdWords, to some extent on your "Quality Score". The higher your bid (and, in Google, the higher your Quality Score), the better chance you'll have of getting your ad listed at the top of the ads displayed on the page. When managed skillfully, pay-per-click advertising can help you attract prospects to your Website and convert your prospects to paying customers.

Other Ways Google AdWords Can Help You

Google AdWords is not only a pay per click advertising outlet, but it's also a powerful tool that can be used as an advertising template for your online ads. Additionally, as arguably the largest web-based global marketing network, Google is a good way to get exposure for your Website on the Internet. You can get information about Google AdWords from just about every search engine results page Google displays by clicking the Advertising Programs link at the bottom of the AdWords welcome page. By placing the highest bid on a keyword or keyword phrase you can get great noticed when someone types your keyword into their browser for a Google search.

Setting Up and Managing Google AdWords

Google AdWords makes pay per click advertising easy to manage. You create an account, select potential keywords, write your ad and then place your bid per click and set your daily maximum for your targeted keywords. You decide if you want your ads to appear only on Google's search pages (Search Network) or on other Web sites (Content Network - Google AdSense) or both. You can also use site targeting that allows you to select individual websites where your ads will appear, such as on this About Home Business website. Your ads are subject to Google's approval but the approval process and launching your ads happens very, very quickly.

There are plenty of sites that want to host your ads, too, because making money with Google AdSense has become a hot business of its own. When sites place your Google AdWords ads on their site and a link is clicked, part of your Google AdWords payment is directed to the owner of the site through Google AdSense.

Google Helps You Learn AdWords

Google provides online tutorials that break up information in small, easy to understand parts, all of which you can access before you even create your Google AdWords PPC account. Google’s Adwords runs a little differently than standard pay per click (PPC) advertising programs.

Google AdWords Position Preference Feature

In addition to the amount you bid for your targeted keywords, other factors may be used to determine your ad's ranking, such as the quality score, which takes your agreed cost per click (CPC) and then multiplies it by a quality score factor.

Google allows you to specify your position preference. Using this option, you can specify the highest and lowest positions acceptable for your Google AdWords ad. Your ad will not be displayed at all if it's not going to rank at least in your lowest acceptable position.

You can set different position preferences for each ad or ad group. Using Google AdWords tools, you can get a good idea of how many clicks you can expect for your ad and an idea of how much your online advertising campaign will cost. Stopping or pausing a pay per click campaign is also very easy and fast.

Conclusion: PPC With Google AdWords

PPC can be an important part of your Internet marketing, and specifically, search engine marketing strategy. You can also take a reasonably priced online course to learn the ins and outs of pay per click marketing to improve your skills. Using a pay per click (PPC) campaign effectively can result in increased traffic to your website and increased sales for your business.

Google AdWords features a nice set of tools for managing your pay per click ad campaigns. Their online tutorials make it easy to understand, implement, and manage online advertising for your website.

Using Google AdWords is a great learning experience. Because of the easy to use tracking features, you can even learn from your Google AdWords mistakes by seeing which targeted keywords result in conversions and which do not.

If you want to use Google AdWords you'll need to first create a Google account.

PPC advertising is just one of the many tools available to home businesses when it comes to online marketing. What about Google AdWords matched up against Facebook Ads?