Pay Per Click Services -Prevent Mistakes
This article discusses paying other websites for the privilege of sending people to your website.
Note that Pay Per Click (PPC) the process of paying the search engines to list a sponsored link to your website in search engine results is such a large topic that it has it’s own article on this Website.
Now you may feel some reluctance to pay for advertising, and like any expense you should ensure it’s relevant and worthwhile to what you are trying to achieve.
It’s also critical that when paying for web traffic that you ensure you know your statistics.
You need to know the number of click throughs you are getting for a particular ad in order to gauge its effectiveness.
If your not actually tracking these statistics in some meaningful way they you have no way to determine if the paid traffic is providing a return on your investment. In other words you need to know exactly how many people are visiting your site by clicking the link on the site you paid advertising on.
This is one of the areas where I see a lot of people fall down, they make the decision to buy some advertising space from another website (or mailing list) and then do not track the effectiveness of it. How can you measure the effectiveness of an ad if you are not keeping statistics? (hint… You can’t!).
This is where decent ad tracking software comes into play, what you can do is set-up a new tracking link for each and every paid ad you set-up, so that you can know with certainty the amount of traffic you are receiving for it. Because each paid ad has a separate tracking link you know with certainly how many clicks you are getting on the link, and this gives you much more power as you have some real statistics you can use to gauge the effectiveness of each ad you pay for.
Before we go into any more detail, lets talk about the type of traffic you can purchase , and discuss the pros and cons of the different ypes of paid traffic method.
Banner Ad’s on Competitors Websites
This can be a great way to leverage visitors from another sites traffic. Usually you pay a fixed fee per month for the banner ad and it’s displayed for a full month on the website.
Depending on the amount of money you pay, it may be a fixed ad, or may be mixed in with a number of other ads and displayed on a rotational basis (e.g. visitor 1 is shown ad 1, visitor 2 is shown ad 2, etc).
Other options may include paying for a fixed number of impressions. E.g. 10,000 impressions would in theory mean that your ad would be displayed for 10,000 visitors to the website.
It’s very important that you choose your websites to buy ad space on very carefully. Obviously you want to ensure the website has products or services related to your particular niche, and that the website does have good number of visitors.
Usually when you approach the website the webmaster can give you some statistics on how many visitors they get per day on average, etc. If they can’t provide you some real life statistics I would suggest you pass on using that website.
By utilising a range of tools it is a relatively easy matter to determine how relevant the website is in the search engines.
Many people claim to be experts in the area of pay per click software. We suggest you do some careful research yourself first before jumping in.Traffic web sites.
Another method of paying for web traffic is traffic websites. These are websites that you pay a membership fee to. and they in exchange guarantee to send you a number of visitors. Sounds good in theory, and there are many good sites out there.
Remember that in general you don’t just want any type of traffic, instead, what you do want is qualified targeted traffic.Which would you prefer 1,000,000 people arriving at your website with absolutely no interest in your product? Or 100 people who re interested in the exact products you have for sale?
I’m sure you will agree targeted traffic wins out over sheer volume any old day. You need to ensure the traffic website you sign up with does allow targeted traffic.
Also be wary of some of the less reputable sites that guarantee traffic to your website, as sometimes they achieve this by using automated computer software. It may appear that you have received the traffic (and your web logs may confirm it) however it is all traffic generated by a computer, meaning a human has not visited your site. Result? No sales, and a waste of money.
Make sure you use reputable companies to ensure you don’t get burnt. If you see a super duper offer offering a million visitors for $1 it’probably is too good to be true!
General tips
Some general tips for any type of paid advertising.
1. Ensure your ad is of interest to and relevant to the visitors/readers.
There is no point advertising on a website or paying for an ad in a mailing list where visitors/readers have no interest in your website, most of the time you will be wasting your time as well as the visitors/readers. You will also be wasting any money you have spent on advertising.
2. Do your sums to determine what you are trying to achieve – Weigh up the cost of the advertising, vs expected click throughs and profit. What is your break-ever point, how many sales do you need to make to break-even.
3. Use a decent tracking software for each ad so you have the information at
your fingertips on how many people have connected, etc.
Check out Pro Track Manager, it is a fantastic product that I use myself and recommend.
You will be totally blown away by twhat this package can do and exactly what it can track. It can even track where people are leaving your website from, easily highlighting web pages you may need to work on some more.
Post a comment