Your boss, which could be you or your significant other, comes to you and says, “After all the money and time we spent building our website, why do we not have any orders or customers?”. You confidently tell him or her to be patient; great things are to come and are just around the corner. You tell your boss that it is all part of the plan and he or she will soon see. Frantically, you turn to Google and somehow found your way to this blog hoping to get an idea of how to not get fired. Or, if it is your spouse, how not to sleep on the couch since you were so persuasive to let you spend the money on the website in the first place. Well, pull on your boots, because we are embarking on a sure fire way to generate the web traffic that you have been promising. With a little patience and hard work, you will soon be the super star in your boss’s eyes.
So what is this magic formula? Pay-Per-Click, or PPC as it is known in the industry is just what you’ve been waiting for.
What is PPC?
PPC is where an advertiser of a website pays for immediate visitors to their website. If a user clicks on the advertiser’s ad, they pay for that “click”. The opposite of PPC is where the visitors that come to the website are “earned” because they somehow magically find the website without the advertiser paying for it. In this series of articles, we are going to focus exclusively on PPC, what it is, how to use it, and how to become that superstar in your boss’s eyes.
There are many forms of PPC, but since Google accounts for over 60% – 70% of all of the search engine traffic, I will use Google as the example. Most if not all of what we discuss can and will apply to most other PPC avenues such as Bing and Yahoo.
PPC Example
Let’s assume a user has a question or is looking to buy something. They go to google.com and search for what they are looking for. As an example let’s assume they are shopping for mens shoes. They type in the phrase “mens shoes” in google. Look at the figure below to see what results are returned when “mens shoes” are used as the search phrase in Google.
Looking at the figure above, I have marked what are paid ads versus organic or free results provided by Google. The organic or free is what I was referring to as “earned”. The paid sections are what we are referring to when we talk about PPC.
It is called PPC or pay-per-click because the advertiser only pays when the ad is actually clicked and not when it is simply shown. Since we are going to use Google as the example, the PPC model for Google is called Google AdWords.
What is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords is Google’s PPC platform. It is the single biggest PPC platform in the world. Millions of advertiser and millions of users use Google every day. According to a recent article I read, Google processes approximately 40,000 searches per second, which translates to 3.5 billion searches per day. I have read other reports that stated Google processes over 2 million search per second. In any case, that is a lot of searches. With this many searches being performed each day, imagine the amount of revenue Google earns per day from advertisers when their ads are clicked.
To help us understand the significance of the Google AdWords platform, Google’s Q1 2014 reported earnings was $15.3B. This would put Google on track to earn over $60B in the year 2014. Yes, that is a “B” for “Billion Dollars”. That is an enormous amount of money. That is also an enormous amount of clicks on ads. All you need is a fraction of a fraction of those clicks and you now are the superstar in your boss’s eye.
Why You Should Be Using Google AdWords?
When you first launch your website, it takes time, energy and a lot of patience along with doing all the right things from an SEO perspective to get traffic to your website. If you do not know what SEO is, don’t worry, this blog isn’t going to dive into that. Suffice it to say, that just because you create a website doesn’t mean that you are instantly going to have visitors to it.
This is where Google AdWords comes to your rescue. By setting up a Google AdWords account, you can start generating traffic to your website within minutes. Yes, you have to pay for it, but you will have immediate visitors to your site. And if your site is a good one that offers value to your visitors, you should receive leads or sales depending on your goal.
How Does Google AdWords Work?
Google AdWords works on an auction model where advertisers “bid” on keywords that they think their customers are searching for. This keyword matching will ultimately display an ad for your product or service. Google chooses the best advertisers to show on the result page and if your ad is clicked, you will pay Google for that click. This sounds simple enough, but there is a lot that goes into how Google chooses which advertisers to display. In future articles, we are going to lay out all of this in gory detail so that you can build a Google AdWords account the right way.
Now that you know what PPC is, and what Google AdWords is, our next blog will start with basic terminology that you need to know. Then, we will cover what makes up the very heart of all PPC campaigns…keywords. Keywords are the heart of all PPC campaigns and we will discover what they are, how to find them, organize them, and use them to display ads for your product or service.