Pay Per Click Beginners: Where Do I Start?

Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 19 of February , 2008 at 2:15 pm

The lingo can be confusing: Click fraud, arbitrage, Pay Per Click, PPV, PPA, pay per this, pay per that, click bid, click through, CTR, landing page, blah blah blah. I know, I know.

There is a lot to learn about pay per click. Where I do you start?

I recommend first learning the lingo and once you understand what things are called then you can dig in a little deeper. I DO NOT recommend just jumping in and learning by trial and error. You could lose a lot of money that way. Some advertisers have done just that.

It’s easy to get lost in Google AdWords, or one of the other Pay Per Click company’s system, if you don’t know your way around. That’s why I recommend that you take it slow. Is your site even ready for pay per click?

One mistake many beginners make is to start advertising through Pay Per Click before they are ready. The landing page isn’t optimized, they don’t know their budget, and they haven’t done their keyword research. Don’t do it until you are ready!

Here is a short list of key terms that you need to be familiar with before you start advertising:

• Keyword - You’ve likely heard of keywords. They mean the same thing for PPC as they do for SEO. Keywords are the words that are important to your advertising campaign and which you want to be ranked for when searchers input them into a search engine query. Usually, your Pay Per Click keywords will correspond with your SEO keywords.
• Landing Page - Your landing page is the page that you send people to through your Pay Per Click ads. When they click the destination URL in your ad they will land on your landing page.
• Click Bid - You are allowed to bid on each click when you set up a Pay Per Click campaign. How much you bid on the click is your click bid.
• CTR - Called Click Through Rate. This is how often searchers click on your ad. Calculated by dividing the number of clicks for your ad by the number of times it is shown.
• CPM - Click Per Thousand Impressions. With this advertising model, you pay for every thousand impressions of your ad and that’s what you base your bid on.
• Conversion - A conversion is a sale, sign up, or some other desired action that you want to occur as a result of someone clicking on your ad.
• Match Type - A keyword match type is a way you can specify when you ad will be displayed for certain keywords. There are three different match types and a negative keyword match type. Broad match is your keyword or keyword phrase in its broadest sense. Phrase match is putting your keyword phrase in quotation marks and narrows the scope of your keyword phrase to any search query that uses that exact phrase along with any words before or after it. Exact match is denoted with brackets instead of quotation marks and is used to tell the search engine to display your ad only for search queries that match your exact phrase and nothing more. The negative keyword match is used to tell the search engine NOT to show your ad for specific keywords.

These are basic terms and definitions you should be familiar with. There are other terms you can know, but many of them are more advanced. I’d recommend you open up a Google AdWords account and go into their help feature to learn more about Google AdWords Pay Per Click advertising. Don’t start any campaigns until you have studied for a few weeks.

Category: Google Adwords, PPC Launch

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