Websites provide you a great platform to advertise your product and services with high possibility of conversion. If you want your advertising to be a success, then you must adopt pay per click method which is an interesting form of online advertising. Once you will adopt PPC strategy, you would prefer this simple and easy form of advertising. For increasing click rate, it becomes essential to do an effective PPC campaign management. Pay per click advertising helps you to get your website listed among the most visited sites on search engines.

If you want more conversions, you must spend a good amount of money on pay per click advertising campaigns. On flip side, if you do not undertake a well thought out PPC campaign management, then it will not lead to desired conversion rate. It is usually observed that when visitors click your tempting and enticing advertisements, they get a sorry message. Consumer is the top priority in pay per click method and if you cannot convert them due to poor service, then the main purpose is defeated. Your online business gets badly affected because your valuable advertising is wasted leading to no conversions.

A well structured PPC campaign management will help you reap the actual and desired benefits of pay per click strategy to advertise your products. If you run your business through phone involving PPC, it becomes extremely important to place your advertisements strategically with the help of ad scheduling. The basic principle is that your advertising can work during business hours in order to save your money on PPC advertising. If your business operates 9 to 5, then through ad scheduling, you should place your ads in this time frame only in order to ensure more conversions and for the successful implementation of PPC campaign management.

Your hefty advertising budget can be well utilized only if it turns into appropriate conversions which can only be promised through an intelligent PPC campaign management. With the help of ad scheduling, you can smartly place your ad during specific hours of the day. All the visitors while clicking on the advertisement will turn into consumers with appropriate response from your side due to your availability. Listening sorry from your side is an unpleasant experience for the visitors and a complete failure of PPC strategy.

You can choose the ad scheduling feature and can also adjust your bids for certain hours of the day. This is really helpful in actualising the pay per click method because when you know the specific highly visited hours, you can place higher bid for that. So, do not disappoint your visitors by saying ‘sorry, we are closed’.

In the beginning, Google AdWords system was applied on the MySQL database engine. But later, the management chose Oracle which was a more commercial option to apply its system on. But the company had to return to MySQL because the system slowed down with Oracle.

MSN ad Center or Microsoft ad Center as it has been rechristened recently is the PPC service from the Microsoft Network. Microsoft is the latest search engine to develop this system. Before 2006, ads displayed on MSN browsers used to come from a company called Overture. In late 2006, MSN bought DeepMetrix Company that makes web-analytics software and based its own PPC on the technology on the technique designed by them. In late 2007, company released the Beta version of its Pay per Click campaign.

Just like Google AdWords, MSN ad Center also has two types of tariff systems – bidding system that awards an ad space to the person pays the highest price on every click and special rates on advertisements which get good amount of clicks. These systems not only motivate advertisers to create good ads but also to advertise only at spaces which are important for their advertisement.

The next line to top PPC advertising platforms is Yahoo! Search Marketing. This is a PPC campaign by Yahoo and has all the features which you will find in Google AdWords and MSN ad Center like keywords bidding and Pay per click search engine advertising. Yahoo started PPC Campaign Management when it bought Overture Services, Inc. in 2003. Slowly, Overture was phased out and it has now come under Yahoo! name.

These three PPC Ad Platforms are ruling the roost in PPC industry today with Google AdWords in clear lead.

PPC or Pay per click search engine advertising is an online advertising model that is used by search engines, content websites and advertising networks. In this model, advertisers pay for their ad according to the number of clicks on it. These advertisements are quite short and have one line as title and not more than two lines for the content of the ad. Images and videos can also be added to these ads.

Search engines use this model by asking advertisers to bid on keywords relevant to them. Bidding on keywords ensures an advertiser that whenever a user searches that keyword, his website’s link twill appear in the sponsored link category. Content websites on the other hand, charge according to clicks instead of bidding system.

There are many PPC advertisement platforms which provide different kind PPC services. The most popular one of them are Google AdWords, MSN ad Center and Yahoo! Search Marketing are most popular ones.

The first and probably the most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management tool is the Google AdWords campaign. Even though Google has many innovative features in its kitty, Google AdWords is no doubt the most innovative and successful campaigns by the company till date. It allows advertisers to advertise their websites and pay for it according to number clicks on the advertisement. This campaign is distributed on the basis of region and compliments your search engine marketing strategies.

Recession has hit several sectors including the top PPC spenders like Finance, insurance and travel.

We have been running a PPC campaign in the banking and financial space since over a year now, and this is the first time that we’re seeing a substantial fall in cost per click even when the avg. positions have moved up.

Cost Per Click versus Avg Position - Google Adwords

The average cost per click in the first week of December has been $1.77 for an avg. position of 7.2. Compare this with February 2008, when a cost per click of $1.82 got us a position of 8.6.

There are several other SEM campaigns where we have seen a similar trend allowing us to safely conclude that some semblance of sanity is now returning to the way people have been bidding on their adwords campaigns.

I was going through the adwords blog a few days ago.  It said that the loading time of a landing page will affect the quality score of a site.
Load time is the amount of time taken for a user to see the landing page after clicking on an ad.

The reasons stated for doing this are:

1.    Users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business.

2.    Users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.
Google says that this change should be made in the next couple of weeks. Load Time evaluations will be added to the Keyword Analysis Page after which there will be a one month notice period to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the notice period, the minimum bids for the sites will be adjusted. ie. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

Determining budget for PPC is very subjective. It does not depend upon the industry, to your competitors’ budgets, or to other such factors. It totally depends upon how aggressively you want to market your products/services.
Just bidding high and ensuring top rankings is by no means a way to measure success of your PPC Campaign. The one factor that determines the success of your ppc campaign is your return on investment. If you are able to garner profits from your ppc campain, then by all means it is a success.
There are no specific figures for a PPC campaign budget. It totally depends upon how much you want to spend. However, there are few basic variables that need to be considered when budgeting for a PPC account-
1.  Cost per conversion: It is very helpful if you have ascertained a value for cost per conversion. This decides the upper limit of your bids.
2. Number of conversions: An estimate of the number of conversions that you expect to achieve (per month).

The ideal way to determine your budget is to run a pilot. Decide a budget, run a campaign for a month. Analyze the cost per conversions, average cpc bid for keywords etc. Depending upon this analysis, scale the campaign.

I wonder how serious Yahoo was when they re-initiated partnership talks with Microsoft… cause just hours after the official calling off of talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced a partnership with Google to host and display Google’s Adwords ads on its search engine result pages.

Is that good? Well, for Yahoo it is. Cause Google Adwords is much more popular than Yahoo’s search marketing program. Google Adwords Ads are also more expensive per click than Yahoo ads were. This means that Yahoo may get more revenue per click than their own program was able to generate.

For advertisers, the positive is that Adwords will now be able to give them a much wider audience. On the flip side, the deal makes Google a virtual monopoly in the paid search advertising (popularly known as pay per click) arena.

Again… I think this hasn’t ended and there is more to come! Stay tuned…

Users using the Yahoo search engine would have noticed google ads showing up on their search engine result pages. While this has just been a test so far, rumours have it that the test has been a success and Yahoo is considering a more extensive deal with Google.

What does this mean to Google, Yahoo & paid search advertisers?

It means that the Yahoo search marketing program may take a back seat to Adwords. It will also mean that Microsoft may have to pay a little more for Yahoo considering the fact that the Yahoo balance sheet may look better with part of the Adwords revenue than it would have with the Yahoo search marketing ad.

For those of you who often wondered why Google Adwords did not show your ads for a particular keyword, they have introduced a new feature that they say provides one-click troubleshooting for this problem.

While the magnifying glass that now appears next to the keyword in the Google Adwords dashboard provides basic information about your ad, I believe that Google needs to provide more information than just “This keyword has a low Quality Score, so the minimum bid exceeds your current maximum cost-per-click (CPC).”.

I am sure that over time the Google Adwords team will provide more information using this bubble cause this feature has the ability to make adwords campaign management easier than it is today.