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. You usually pay a fixed fee per month for the banner ad and it’s then 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).

Some other options may include paying for a fixed number of impressions. E.g. Ten thousand impressions in theory would mean that your ad would be displayed for ten thousand 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.

Using a range of various tools it is a relatively simple matter to determine how relevant the site is in the search engines.

Many people claim to be experts in the area of free pay per click. 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 generally you don’t want just any type of traffic, rather, you want targeted qualified traffic.Which would you prefer 1,000,000 people arriving at your website with absolutely no interest in your product? Or one hundred people who have an interest in your exact products?

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.

Ensure 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’s probably 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 paid for the 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 absolutely love what this package has to offer 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.

If you have a particular interesting in making search engine company investors extremely happy by paying endless amounts of money to the search engines companies, then Pay Per Click (PPC) can be a great way to go.

Just joking guys, PPC is one of the staples in relation to web traffic on the Internet and is a very quick and easy way to get visitors to your site (though you do need to take care that you watch the amount you spend, and set daily limits, etc).

For those readers who are not familiar with PPC, essentially it’s the process whereby the search engines will present your short ad to people using the search engine (on the results page when the results of the users search are displayed).

Usually the ads are shown to the right hand side of the page, but in any event they are usually shown separate from the “normal” search engine results.

You pay for every click a user makes on your ad (no clicks means you have nothing to pay). Usually your ad when clicked would navigate to your website, but sometimes it may be to an affiliates website if you are selling other peoples products.

So in one sense, only paying per click is a good thing, because in theory people clicking your ad have some interest in your product or service, so they come to your website more qualified that a person who may just have happened to surf by.

You really need to think about what phrases people would use to get to your site.

You don’t want to be taking chances with this. You don’t want to assume you know which keyword phrases are used by people wanting your websites (or more correctly, the keyword phrases people are using to find solutions to the particular problem they are trying to solve). We really want to know for sure that the keyword phrases we use are correct for your particular market.

In fact I am constantly surprised by some of the phrases people use when searching. Spelling mistakes are common, abbreviations are often used, punctuation can be used inappropriately, etc. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do here.

Firstly you could do some experimentation with the search engines yourself and use all the keyword phrases you think should be used to find products in your niche. Just go to the search engine and and take a look at the results when you type them in. Are the sites that are returned relevant to your niche?

In other words if you positioned yourself in that area would people searching in those categories find your websites content relevant (it goes without saying that you have great content, right?).

If the answer is yes and you think you would find it relevant, jot down the keyword phrase.

Also take a note of the number of sponsored links (advertisers) usually listed on the right or top of the search engine results (usually it explicitly mentions they are sponsored links). The actual number is important because too few could mean that perhaps the keyword phrase is not commonly used (but it could also mean you have found a golden nugget, that is a particular keyword phrase that is being used but not being actively targeted by Advertisers).

When considering finding out more about pay per click marketing; it pays to do a little research first as a smart way to move forward fast!

Too many sponsored results may mean the keyword phrase is heavily used and it may be expensive to get your sponsored links working (but again this could be a golden opportunity for you).

In general the search engines put the sponsored link that has bid the most money at the top of the list, so a quick way to ensure your up front is to pay the most (and bid more than your opposition).

However bear in mind as well, that the search engines also sort-sponsored links by the click through rate (CTR), in other words the number of times a sponsored link is clicked versus the number of times it is shown on screen in search engine results.

A sponsored link with a higher CTR indicates that more people are clicking that link, and you will find a sponsored link with a high CTR will rank higher in many cases that other sponsored links even if they have bid less money. So it is possible to have your cake and eat it to (or in this case to bid a smaller amount and have you sponsored link appear higher than your competitors who are paying more for their ad’s than you are!).

Of course to do this (get a higher CTR than other sponsored links) you need to draw attention to your ad, so your content (ad) must be more compelling than your competitors. Given the lack of space in these ads you need to be really creative to get your link clicked on more often than your competitors (even if your happy paying more than your competitors per click).

The number one sponsored link is not always going to be clicked more often than other ads, especially if it does not give the person more of a reason to want to click it, than the ads near it.

Whatever you do, don’t just set-up a PPC campaign and leave it unchecked. Even if your having some success, make sure you go into the campaign details by logging into the search engine website for PPC marketers, and then check out the stats regularly to see how you are going because things can change very quickly as new competitors come into the marketplace.

You need to be continually checking your keywords, CTR’s of your ads, and fine tuning and tweaking to run things optimally. I am not suggesting this needs to be on a daily basis, but it just depends on your particular campaign and your market.

This is probably a good place to discuss link tracking on your website.

You can purchase software that gets installed onto your website that makes it really quite easy to see the traffic coming to your website and where it originates. It’s a good idea to do this to work out how much traffic your getting from your various sources (PPC, free Google search, press releases, etc).

The other reason you want to check your ads often is that over time you will certainly find some ads performing better than others. You can see at one glance the CTR of your various ads, but also with link tracking it’s possible to work out the ads that are actually making you money (people are actually buying off the ad in higher proportions to other ads).

PPC is a fantastic way to get instant traffic to your website, just make sure you are doing your sums and keeping track of your expenditure and of course checking your ads regularly as well as what your competitors are doing and offering.

When running a PPC campaign, you want to know that you’re doing everything you can to maximize sales and minimize lost investment. Though PPC advertising is known to be one of the best advertising solutions for small businesses, a campaign can become expensive if it is not carefully maintained and implemented. This is especially true of first-time PPC users. Technology such as phone number tracking and web analytics can act as a great aid to begin and maintain your PPC success. To help you further your PPC proficiency, here are five helpful tips in making sure your PPC campaign is running at its highest level of efficiency:

Structure your Campaign: Planning and structuring your PPC campaign will ensure that your advertising investment is well spent. The PPC ad won’t tell a potential customer much about what you do, and what you sell. Therefore, be as specific as one has to be, that’s all; you will lose valuable investment through the time it takes to correct or rectify the problem of an ineffectual PPC ad. An example of how to avoid this would be to label and outline your ads before they go live as part of a PPC campaign.

Landing Page Position: It almost goes without saying, but customers are more likely to respond to a PPC ad if it the ad is positioned in where it can draw the most relevant traffic. Choose a page relevant to the PPC ad you are implementing.

Test Ad Copy Regularly: If you find that a particular PPC campaign isn’t working as it should, think about each word in the ad copy. Tweaking and adjusting the copy to get the most specific phrase relevant to what you’re offering takes practise, but after some careful experimentation, there should be a correlative pattern in which copy seems to work best. It may be worthwhile to keep a log of which copy worked and which failed, for easy reference, and to avoid re-using bad copy.

Choose Keywords Carefully: For some businesses, there can be no budging on which keywords are necessary to the success of a worthwhile PPC campaign; the definition is sometimes simply not flexible enough. But there is an advantage if your product or service is known by many different or varying names. For example, would it be wiser to opt for the keyword ‘adventure breaks’ for $0.31, thought you did have your heart set on ‘adventure holidays’, at $2.31? Balancing this takes a little intuition, and the help of a PPC calculator, many of which are available to use for free.

Keep Your Investment In Mind: If you know that a high ranking keyword could be potentially crippling to the rest of your marketing investment, don’t pursue it. Though the risk may pay off, you will be much safer and will profit better from strategizing and opting for a different keyword with a lower ranking, or to spread over two keywords with the investment on your PPC ad, than to gamble on a $5.00 ad and hope for the best.

Use Call Tracking For Powerful Research: Call tracking solutions provide invaluable data on all aspects of your PPC campaign, giving you an insight into the inner workings of the campaign and to increase conversions. Phone number tracking can allow you to determine exactly which PPC ads are generating traffic, and whether or not this trafficis contributing to your overall ROI or not. This allows you a much more confident control over the management of your PPC campaign, as you are able get a much better picture of the PPC ads generating revenue.