PPC, short for Pay-Per-Click means exactly what it says; you pay for clicks to your site. I.e. if you’ve paid for a PPC ad on the search engines and someone clicks on it and goes through to your site, you will pay a rate for that click. PPC advertising, like other forms of internet advertising, is all based on your keyword choice and search terms you set out.

Your PPC campaign needs to be well managed and well directed to get the right targeted traffic that you are after. This means that your campaign is targeted to consumers who are looking for what you are advertising and therefore will hopefully complete a transaction through your site. Because your traffic is targeted, you will see a higher percentage of success.

It is extremely important to use a tracking service to measure your results through your PPC campaign. By using a tracking service you can see what people do on your site once they have landed on it. It also allows you to…

1. Set the conversion rates (Conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors that turn into customers)

2. Help determine the price per click

3. Sort out keywords which bring most visitors

4. Learn which search engine brings the best results

Having a tracking service in place can also show you the quality of your traffic. For example if your quality of traffic is low, it can tell you why. Some common reasons of low quality traffic can be, you are targeting the wrong people or group you were originally aiming to target.

Another reason could be your link to your site is presented randomly i.e. as a pop up advert, again this means you will be targeting the wrong market. Or it could be that visitors are landing on your homepage, but then leaving and not clicking any further. The duration of people’s visits is an extremely important feature which you can track, this will tell you how long your visitors stay on your site for and on what pages. If this statistic is low this could be a problem with your site content, layout and information presented to the visitor.

When setting up your PPC campaigns, there are a few things you need to think about…

1. Evaluate the current traffic to your site to determine the right choice of keywords

2. Your keywords and text that will appear in your ad

3. Think about your budget, set your bids accordingly.

Bidding on your position of your PPC ad, competing to be in first position, is most typical for many PPC Campaigns. Being the first listing can be a highly competitive position, advertisers will pay through the roof to get to that position.

You need to weigh up how much traffic you have currently going to your site, and how much you’re willing to pay per click in order to get more traffic. In all PPC campaigns can be a very effective way of getting more traffic, but just make sure you constantly track your campaigns and alter them when needed.