Avoiding Pay-per-Click Marketing Pitfalls

If you are somewhat of a newbie when it comes to the whole pay-per-click business it is highly recommended that you do some heavy research before you start your first PPC marketing campaign.  Today’s PPC business has gotten quite complex but it is still quite profitable, this is why many people have headed this way but found themselves on a dead end when they realized it is harder than they expected it to.

PPC marketing is more than just throwing a set of keywords at the engines and see which of those keywords will bring in the money, this is in theory what causes many to fail in this great business type.  If you have a business which would make you money by selling a product, gathering information from prospects (leads) or referring people to sites which expect to make sales (referrals) then PPC is the right tool for you, however you need to learn how to tame this beast before you see your money go down click after click.

The first step is to always do a complete research and comparison of the offer you are planning on running, there is nothing worse than trying to sell a bottle of wine at a certain price and then you realize someone else is selling the same bottle of wine at a lower price.  The web is highly competitive and you will see this a lot.  Once you have compared your offer to the ones online, it is now time to gather some information about the keywords which people are typing to find the product you are selling, it is important not to neglect this step, words you think sound good for your offer might under perform in the search engines so run a good keyword research in sites such as WordTracker and Wordze.  Once you have a good list of keywords (10-20K) then you need to group them, why? because grouping keywords will make your PPC campaign more relevant and your cost per click will decrease.

After grouping all the keywords and entering them in the search engine platform you want to run your campaign on, it is time to put a good tracking system in place, you can use your own custom PHP based script to find out exactly what words are turning into sales or you can use Google Analytics which can also give you a good idea about your visitors.  Make sure to fine-tune your campaign every day during the first few days by using common sense, then get more information about keyword replacement which can help you increase your CTR even further.  The key to success is research, test and never to give up.  People don’t realize that they quit at times when they are close to success.