What is Pay Per Click?
Pay per Click or PPC for short is an advertising model where the advertiser does not pay for the space of the advertisement but rather for clicks on the ads. To put it another way, it is like only paying for the advertising space in the magazine based on the number of readers that have actually read the ad.
The concept behind PPC is a very simple one. The big search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo allows you to buy space on their site to place your ads. This is done through a bidding process where you bid against other advertisers for the space and the highest price wins. These ads then get displayed typically on the right and top of the normal organic search results. The space you buy is also based on keywords which mean you only buy space for the relevant keywords you specify.
This means that you essentially buy traffic for your site. At first this sounded rather dodgy and sinister to me but after studying the PPC Affiliate Rockstar course I realized that all traffic comes at a cost. The other thing to keep in mind is that even if you have the highest bid for a specific search term it is still not a guarantee that you will be listed first. Every site also has a quality score which also influences your ranking.
The advantage of PPC is that you only pay for people that actually visit your site. If your ad appears and is never clicked, it will not cost you a dime. If that is the case however, you have some serious problems. Even with PPC it is very important that you do the basics right. I have learned through PPC Affiliate Rockstar that there is no substitution for hard work and study.
PPC is a great way of driving targeted traffic to your website. It allows you to get maximum exposure while still leaving you in total control of your budget. You can track every little detail of the advertising campaign and you can continually tweak and optimize your advertising campaign.
A word of warning though, if not done correctly PPC can destroy your advertising budget. You can easily end up paying highly inflated prices per click if you don’t know exactly what you are doing. The other problem is that you can drive lots of irrelevant traffic to your site which does not convert into sales. This might look good but will burn a hole in your pocket without giving anything back. You want to keep your cost per click as low as possible while still maintaining a profitable position on the page. You also want to increase your conversion rate of clicks to sales in order to maximize your ROI. All these secrets and a couple of others are uncovered in the PPC Affiliate Rockstar training course.
I believe that PPC can be a great tool for the online marketer if it used wisely. As always good practices must be at the heart of not only the PPC campaign but also the design of the site.