Good to Know

PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising

ASMART Solutions is a creative team that specializes in Custom Web Design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). In web design we design sites for our clients using latest web development tools and do website analysis, keyword research, competition analysis, on- page optimization and off page optimization as part of our SEO Process.  We always encourage our clients to consider paid listing i.e Pay Per click as another way of augmenting traffic to their sites. An excellent combination of paid and organic listing can deliver desirable results in terms of targeted traffic and increased conversion rates.
PPC advertising nowadays is the fastest growing marketing tool. The successful growth in this area is the result of the beneficial characteristics of PPC such as affordability and effectiveness. Actually, any site owner starting a SEO/SEM campaign will receive targeted traffic when using proper keywords directly relevant to site’s content. It is advisable to use PPC advertising in the periods before good organic rankings come about. Below are some of the major benefits of PPC advertising that we have experienced in this fastest growing marketing tool;

• PPC protects you from long organic re-indexation periods and seasonality by providing a steady stream of traffic.
• Using PPC your site gets instant and measurable targeted traffic that leads to increase in conversation rates
• PPC helps to get prime exposure on Google, Yahoo! and other major search engines.
• You only pay for the clicks you receive and most importantly there's no limit to the traffic.
• You personally set the daily budget, monthly budget and CPC (cost per click) for each keyword, ad group or even the entire campaign.
• From webmaster tools we get detailed instant PPC performance reports that enables you to review and evaluate the entire PPC campaign performance

While many companies offer PPC advertising, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the largest network operators as of 2008. MSN offers their own PPC services with their MSN adCenter. There are more PPC search engines available such as Ask.com, Kanoodle, LookSmart, Miva and etc. Bottomline is that the most common and widely used PPC advertising is Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing which we also highly recommend for our esteemed clients.
Before starting PPC campaigns, we ensure that we follow the following process:

• We analyze your business niche and learn who your competitors are by using the latest SEO tools
• Pinpoint the search terms that we will use in the ad (keywords we are going to target and the negative keywords that you should omit);
• Write compelling Ads that have a call to action and a high clickthrough rate (CTR);
• Work hard on the landing page you will link your ad to - make sure  visitors do not navigate away from the sales area of your site;
• We utilize tracking solution(s) that will help track and analyze the PPC campaigns, measure conversion rates, measure ROI, prevent click fraud, etc.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is definitely our first and arguably most important stop when it comes to PPC advertising. AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product, and it's main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines.
Google AdWords delivers instant results; we can have your ad campaign up and running in 10 minutes flat. Compared to this, Yahoo can take anywhere from 2 to 5 days while they manually review ads. With AdWords, we can go target your prospects geographically down to countries, states and cities. This is a great advantage for businesses selling hard goods or services – you would prefer local prospects as opposed to someone half way across the world. Another favourite quality about AdWords is that, for an ad that converts (clicks/impressions percentage) exceptionally well (high click-through-rate (CTR)), your ad will get better ad placement as well as better pricing. Google wants to display the most relevant ads for the user. It makes perfect sense that YOU will pay less per click, the higher the click through rate of your ads.

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Apart from Google adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing is another reliable top player for our PPC advertising campaign. In the base of the new Sponsored Search is the New Ranking Model. With the new ranking model, an ad's rank in search results is determined by bid amount and ad quality. Thus, ads with higher quality can deliver a lower cost per click and/or may receive better placement on the results page relative to lower quality ads.
Ad quality is determined by quality index calculated each time your ad is shown. The ad's click-through rate relative to its position and to other ads displayed at the same time will affect the quality index. Remember you may be rewarded with a better rank or lower cost on your ads making your ads more appealing.
Using Yahoo! Search Marketing as any other pay per click provider your site gets only the targeted prospects and pay only when prospects click on your listing. Fortunately, it is a powerful way to find your site for customers who are searching for what you sell. 

MSN adCenter
MSN offers their own pay-per-click ad-bidding system called MSN adCenter that pairs search results with sponsored text messages from advertisers. They help to start your an advertising campaign and target ads to the times, places, and customers you want the most. This program also has built-in tools to manage your advertising process for better results.
Keyword generation tool will automatically generate keywords based on the word or website address you choose. This add-in has been developed for Excel 2007. Among its basic functions are building or expanding your keyword list, monitoring performance and researching trends. Keyword Forecasting option gives historical and future forecasted impression counts for the specific keywords, monthly reports and shows daily traffic.
Moreover, we can optimize ad campaign performance by preparing timely reports with help of another special built-in tool. Thus we can create the advertisement for listing, define keyword match options, set price per click and manage the campaign to see when the clicks lead to sales.

Conclusion

At ASMART Solutions we recommend using PPC advertising for our clients to augment traffic from organic listing. An excellent combination of paid and organic listing can deliver desirable results in terms of targeted traffic and increased conversion rates. We believe and understand that successful PPC advertising is based on three things: focused keyword research, creating compelling ads and effective landing pages.