Pay Per Click Advertising

Of the many elements of online marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising is one of the quickest and most straightforward ways of getting traffic to your website. With PPC advertising, you can also enjoy having complete control over the advertising costs. You've probably already heard of Google AdWords. Although there are other companies which provide PPC advertising, this is by far the most common one.

AdWords and other PPC programs work by placing advertisements on sites which have AdSense installed on them. Hundreds of millions of webpages have AdSense installed, since it provides a small stream of income to the owner of the site it's on. Every time someone clicks on an advertisement, the owner of the website that it's displayed on gets paid. Meanwhile, you get another visitor to your site.

Using PPC advertising, you can set your daily advertising budget. If, for example, you set your daily budget to $10, your advertisements will no longer be displayed for the rest of that day once they've received $10 worth of clicks. The cost per click varies greatly depending on the keywords and phrases involved, but it is generally only a few cents per click. Advertisements where there is a lot of competition can be a great deal higher though. You can find out the estimated cost per click by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool is also useful for helping you to choose the right keywords for your advertisements.

To get started with PPC advertising, you'll first need to get yourself an account with Google AdWords. If you already have a Google Mail account, you can sign up using that email address. Once you're signed up, you can then use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help you select the optimal keywords for your advertisements. You can then set your daily budget for these targeted keywords. You can also choose what types of advertisements you want (text, picture or both) and choose where to display them. Your advertisements can appear as sponsored listings in Google's search results or they can appear on sites with Adsense installed. Generally, you're best off going with both options for maximum exposure.

PPC advertising isn't all about Google, however. There are many other companies that offer a variation of the theme. Some companies provide in-text advertising, automatically changing certain words in your website's content into links to advertising affiliates.

Various social networking sites such as Facebook also provide pay per click advertising programs of their own. With a constantly growing collection of more than 800 million accounts, Facebook is one of the most commonly used websites in the world. Because of this, using Facebook's PPC advertising program can greatly increase your company's exposure. As with any PPC marketing program, you can also set your daily budget with Facebook.

Unfortunately, PPC advertising is also open to abuse. In the hopes of making easy money, some website owners will deliberately click the advertisements on their own sites or get others to do it for them. This is known as click fraud and is, of course, illegal. Google and other PPC marketing providers realize this and provide various countermeasures so that the cost to the advertisers is minimal.

When used effectively, pay per click advertising will help you to attract significantly more visitors to your website which in turn, will give you a better chance of converting clicks into sales.

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