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I thought I’d share a few tips for those of you on a budget looking to use Cost Per Click advertising.

·       Start with Google Adwords. There are many providers of CPC advertising, however many will fall short in sending the quality traffic you’re looking for. After achieving success with Google Adwords I would then move on to Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

·       Set goals for your CPC campaign. If you offer a trial of your products and/or services determine your trial to full conversion rate and use this to determine the number of trials you’ll need in order to at least break even.

·       Be sure to have a means of collecting information from those who click through your ads. If you invite visitors to sign up for your email newsletter many who do not immediately sign up for a trial will subscribe to your newsletter to receive additional information on your offerings.

·       Use Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool to determine the number of times various keywords/phrases are searched on a monthly basis. Obviously the terms that are searched for more often will require a higher investment per click to raise your ad into a higher, more visible, ranking. Bid on specific phrases that are searched for around 1000 times per month and direct these visitors to the page that contains the relevant information connected to this phrase. For instance, if you sell shoes online perhaps bid on the phrase “blue and orange puma shoes” (searched for 756 times in December 2005) and link this ad to a search result on your website that contains a wide selection of blue and orange puma shoes.

·       Experiment with various landing pages. Don’t always send visitors directly to the homepage of your website. As mentioned above, be sure to send visitors directly to the page that contains the items/information in which they are searching. Taking this a step further, try various layouts for displaying this information and see which design yields the greatest number of sales.

 

I hope these tips help all of you on a budget make the most of your CPC campaigns.

This Web Marketing article was written by Brandon Milford on 4/3/2006

Brandon Milford is the Executive Director of Marketing for Broadwick Corporation, makers of IntelliContact (http://www.intellicontact.com). IntelliContact is an industry leading email marketing and surveying application. Brandon is considered a thought leader in web marketing and through Brandon’s Blog (http://www.brandonmilford.com), he shares his insight on marketing, design, and entrepreneurship.