When you promote an internet business or e-commerce website, the main aim is to drive targeted traffic to it. Targeted traffic means people who may be interested in the product or service which you are promoting. There are different ways to drive targeted traffic to a website. But the fastest way is to use ‘Pay Per Click’ or PPC. The greatest advantage of PPC is that you pay only when some visitor clicks on your ad and visits your site. Of the different PPC networks, Google Adwords is the most popular one.
Google Adwords
Though PPC is the quickest and the most effective way to generate targeted traffic to a website, it can be very risky. Unless you know what you are doing, you may lose a substantial amount of money without much gain. The following are some tips which would help you to profitably use Google Adwords for promoting your site:
(a) Fix a daily budget for your ads. For a starting campaign, keep the daily budget as low as $5. If the campaign becomes successful, you may increase the same.
(b) For a new campaign, keep the bids low. It is better to have fewer clicks than to lose a lot of money.
(c) Try to avoid content match, as the conversions are low.
(d) Keyword research is essential for your success with Adwords. Different tools ( both free and paid) are available for this. These tools may be used to find out ‘Long Tail Keywords’, which attract a lot of traffic but have less competition. The keywords should be specific and well chosen.
(e) The ads should be broken up into small groups. Similar keywords may be used for separate ads.
(f) Test with different ads. The ads which get more clicks will be preferred by Google and will have less cost per click. The ads with low clickthrough rates may be deleted.
(g) You can put brackets around your keywords. This will get fewer clicks but the keywords will get exactly matched by Google.
(h) You can use ‘dynamic keyword insertion’. In this way you can have Google place your keywords right in the ad title. This will lead to more clicks and higher conversion to sales but cost per click may increase.
(i) If the clickthrough rates on your ads are less than 1%, then the ads should be changed or certain keywords should be deleted.
(j) To avoid ‘freebie seekers’, never use the word ‘free’ in any ad. To get more targeted traffic, you may put the price of the product you are promoting, in the body or in the title of the ad. This will get you fewer clicks but the rate of conversion will increase.
(i) Sometimes, targeting your ad to certain countries may get you better returns than to show your ads globally.
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