How to Increase Your E-Commerce Sales with Pay Per Click Advertising
	By Kevin Fleming | February 18, 2008

Although Google Adwords, Yahoo Publishers Network and Microsoft Adcenter have been around for quite awhile now, I think few businesses have really explored what pay per click advertising, and search engine marketing for that matter can do for them. The great thing about pay per click advertising is that it’s truly scalable to any budget out there and drives targeted, ready to buy traffic directly to your site. If set up and fine tuned correctly Pay Per Click can be an extremely cost effective option for promoting your website and products.

So How does it work?

I am going to give you a very basic overview of how PPC advertising works. Although there is a lot of technical terminology (which I will try to cut out) the concept is actually pretty simple. Pay Per Click Advertising works just like the name entails. You bid on “keywords” that are relevant to what you are trying to sell. Your ad then appears in search results for people searching those “keywords”, and only pay when your ad is clicked and a visitor is directed to your website. Below is an example of what a PPC ad looks like, you may have seen these around on Google and other search engines.

Generally the price you’re willing to pay for these clicks determines your ad positioning hence the more you are willing to pay the more clicks you will receive. For example, lets say that I’m selling televisions. Through the Google Adwords system I can bid on relevant “keywords” or words that people will search for in Google. The ad I create will then show up in Google when someone searches for one of these words or phrases. So for my keywords I choose LCD TV, LCD Television, LCD Monitors. I then need to set a maximum bid price (maximum cpc) for each of these keywords. This price is the maximum amount I’m willing to pay every time someone clicks on my ad from a specific keyword and is directed to my site.

Once my ad, bids, and daily budget are set up I’m ready to go and the campaign is started. I then focus on fine tuning the campaign. I ALWAYS create multiple versions of my ad and test which one works best. I can see all my stats in the Google Adwords Dashboard including how many times my ad was shown, how many times it was clicked and how much I have spent. The better your click through rate is the less you will have to bid for a prominent position.

If you have an extremely low click through rate you will be penalized and have to spend more for the same results. For this reason you want to test out multiple ads and see which ones performs the best. I have found that 90% of the time I put into PPC I spend fine tuning my campaigns. Once your ad runs for a few days, you can see which keywords are doing well, which ones you should remove, and maybe even which ones you can add. You can also adjust your bids accordingly as time goes on.

Overall this is a VERY brief overview of how PPC marketing works. I hope this helped give you an idea of what Pay Per Click is all about, and why there is so much buzz surrounding it. I am working on a few articles that will be focusing more on specific ways to increase your sales with PPC.

Landing Pages Anyone?

I also recommend you build out a Landing Page for each product that you are targeting with the Pay Per Click. Having a focused sales page for the product helps achieve a higher conversion rate than simply sending visitors to that products page in your store.

Filed under: Guides, Advertising |