PPC - anyone using it? beginner advice?

[rhelling]

ive heard a lot of good things about ppc advertising...but ive also heard some nitemares. does anyone have a limited risk way to 'test the waters'. ? lol

any opinions on ppc?

[DebraLloyd]

PPC can run away with a budget very quickly so it's important to know exactly what your objective for a campaign is before you start and to hone your ad copy before you start spending.

Is your target market highly competitive? Whats the average PPC for the terms you want to target are there other ways you could target the same market without the ad spend?

Cheers,
Debra

[rhelling]

So...if I hear you correctly (...or read between the lines lol), you would use PPC to drive traffic directly to an ad copy. I guess I need to figure that out. I've read a lot about using PPC to drive traffic to your site. But I guess if your site isn't converting...then you're just wasting your money driving traffic to your site.

I've held off on PPC (first, because I'm cheap!) lol But second, because I want to get a few months of stats on my various niche sites before making the investment.

Can't you just set your account to spend a maximum amount? Like at $100 it stops...?

Randall

[slowstarter]

Hi Randall.

You can set a daily budget by campaign - once you reach the budget - give or take a few pennies, the ads stop showing and you stop getting clicks.

A lot of people recommend using ppc to get a quick feel for converting and popular keyword phrases before making the time and energy investment into getting organic traffic. (You can shortcut to profitable keywords very quickly with PPC and then do the SEO and other organic search stuff, knowing that the traffic you get will be worthwhile.)

If you are planning running a lot of keyword phrases it's certainly worth using Google's adwords editor to set up your campaigns on your PC before uploading and going live. It's a great tool and - down the line - will let you tweak and hone your ads, CPC, ad position and budgets relatively easily.

On our e-commerce sites, we've launched 4 so far with just PPC traffic. With the conversion and traffic data from our PPC ads, we had great indications for what we should concentrate on SEO wise now that we have generated some profits from the PPC alone.

Martin

[rhelling]

Thanks Martin...
I think I've taken away most of what you said...with a few more questions. ;-)

1) I hear people refer to a "campaign" all the time and I'm still not sure about what that exactly means. I'm assuming it is just my advertisement that I'm wanting to distribute, correct? (...different ad with different keywords would be my various campaigns?!?)

2) I have been using Market Samari to gather keywords. Not really sure what you mean by setting up campaign on my PC before going live....but just assuming that you mean I should do my research first.

Randall

[slowstarter]

It's definitely one of those things where you get to grips with the terminology by getting stuck in and trying it out, but like Angie says you do need to be very careful setting budgets to make sure you don't overspend.

1. To explain "campaign" - in my office supplies business for instance - a campaign would be for a product group like
Epson Printers. I might have another campaign for HP Printers etc. Google Adwords uses the term in the same way as any advertising agency might -they are advertising campaigns for different products or services.

2. Yes you should research first, but I was actually meaning that when you get into adwords in a bit more depth you really want to be using Google's free tool "adwords editor". If you start working with a lot of keyword phrases for your ads, adwords editor is a great way to save time and get control over your campaigns.

Martin