Pay per click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used on websites, where advertisers pay their host only when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Cost per click (CPC) is the sum paid by an advertiser to search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on their advertisement, which directs one visitor to the advertiser’s website.
Pay-per-action (PPA) advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site.
PPC search engine promotion can be a very cost-efficient and effective way to market a business. But it’s important to follow a few pay-per-click marketing best practices to ensure that the business is not wasting its advertising budget on costly, irrelevant keywords. Best practices for PPC search engine marketing include:
- Discover and analyze keywords carefully
Build a comprehensive, personalized keyword database. - Group and organize your keyword database
Organize your keyword database, which is critical to long-term PPC success. Solid organization will allow you to actually do something useful with your many keywords â namely, create ad groups and landing pages around them so all those searchers out there can find you. - Discover and expand negative keywords
The idea, in any marketing initiative, is to try to get your message in front of as many interested parties as possible. You want hot leads and qualified clicks. What you donât want is to waste your money showing ads to people who have no interest in buying what youâre selling.Luckily, Google and other search engines support something called ânegative keywords.â This means that within a given ad group, you can designate not only the terms you want to bid on, but also the variations of terms you donât want included in your basket of paid clicks. Negative keyword discovery is a critical component of any effective PPC campaign. Designating negative keywords will ensure that youâre not wasting money on superficially similar but irrelevant keywords.Googleâs âbroad matchâ keyword matching option is potentially very useful, in that it allows you to capture impressions from search strings that are semantically similar but not an exact match to your purchased keyword. However, if you donât specify a list of negative keywords, youâll also capture (and pay for) lots of useless impressions. To return to the cabinet example, you might want to bid for the keyword âUS cabinet sales,â but you certainly wouldnât want your ad to display for âUS cabinet members.â
