How Much is a Click Worth? Pay per Click Strategies for Beginners

When ChooseWhat's SEM Analyst Koby Wong started as an intern with the company, he learned all about pay per click (PPC) strategies before evolving into the SEO expert he is today. “PPC is a great tool to build SEO strategies on,” he advises. “So it's important you optimize your tactics accordingly.”What exactly is PPC? It's an Internet advertising model used on search engines, typically the Big Three: Google, Bing, and Yahoo, through which you create an ad to show up when Internet users search for specific keywords. You will only pay the site when your ad is clicked on. Typically you make a bid with the search engine to compete for the top spot in the paid search section.“If you do PPC for your site and bid high enough, you can get traffic to your site quickly. Plus it gives you a better understanding of what keywords drive traffic and conversions.”Here are Wong's pointers on how you can make PPC work the best for your company:

See the Larger Trends

We typically run reports on the keyword level to analyze the performance of our PPC accounts, but it's also important to take a step back to look at your accounts from a higher level. Wong says it's easy to create these reports with pivot tables in Excel, where you can see how your account is performing from both an ad group level (i.e. the group of similar keywords, such as send fax, sending fax, etc.) and a campaign level, which is the site itself.

Focus on Major Ad Groups

Like with many things in life, the 80/20 rule can also be applied to PPC. Wong says that roughly 80% of your PPC account's revenue will come from roughly 20% of the keywords. By focusing on the performance of your major ad groups, you can have lager impacts on the performance of your account by tweaking just a few things.Your major ad groups include:

• The keywords that generate the most clicks
• The keywords that produce the most revenue
• The keywords you spend the most money on

“Always Be Testing”

According to Wong, PPC is a game of always testing and never settling. You should test everything, from ad copy (the content that people see in your ad), to max PPC bid, to your landing page (the page they land on from your ad), and more.  But, when you find something that works, make sure to keep testing to find something that works better. By doing so, you'll be able to stay ahead of your competitors. Wong warns that PPC is not something you can set and forget.“Remember, a lot of times you'll think something will work, but you have to test a lot of things and remind yourself that you don't know exactly what a buyer will do,” Wong says.

Utilize Negative Keywords

According to Google, “negative keywords” are words that keep your ads from being shown when  a user does a search. A perfect example is the phrase “how to.”“People who tend to search for ‘how to' do something aren't typically buyers, so you want to make sure your PPC is only seen by those who will lead to conversions,” Wong says.Wong suggests adding negative keywords to your PPC accounts in order to filter them out because it gives you greater control on who sees your advertisement.

Track Conversions on Specific Keywords

Tracking conversion rates on a keyword-level basis is an absolute must in order to have a successful PPC account. Each of your keywords should have a unique tracking ID so that you can see how many people are coming to your website on each keyword and how many of those people are converting into leads. It's not just enough to see which keywords spike your traffic if they don't lead to sales. Knowing whether the people coming to your website are converting is the most important piece of PPC, according to Wong.