An article by Gil Murray, guest of the Pay Per Click Blog.

If this is the first time you are venturing into Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, the following tips should help you develop an effective campaign.

Landing Page

You are likely to use more than one pay-per-click advertising company. Moreover, you're also likely to create a PPC ad for every product you're offering. Given the multiplicity of products you're offering your consumers, you'd have to have a landing page for every specific PPC ad you have.

This is necessary since if your ad says ‘diamond jewelry” and you directly lead your visitor to your home page that discusses your company, your visitor may get frustrated since he or she was looking for diamond jewelry, not your company's history.

Thus, for the above example, you must provide a landing page that maybe displays your diamond jewelry inventory or diamond jewelry classification (e.g. diamond engagement ring, diamond necklace, diamond bracelets, etc.). If you sell more than diamond jewelry, you can create a landing page that is a mild sales pitch about your products, but do not forget to provide prominent links towards your diamond jewelry or other products' pages.

Conversion Not Click-Throughs

It is easy to forget that you're in pay-per-click advertising not to increase your site traffic but to increase your site conversion rates. That is, PPC can only be cost-effective if you convert enough visitors into buyers.

This means that you have some tough decisions to make. For instance it can be very tempting to put your “free whatever” promo in your PPC ad. However, this can lead to high click-through rates or clicks that do not result in sales when people click your ads only because they want to see how they could take advantage of your free promotions. In this case, you will pay for clicks that did not bring you any profit.

On the other hand, you can remove the “free” term but place some other equally motivating term like “affordable” (use this only if your prices really are affordable). This may mean you'll get less site traffic, but the visitors you get are aware that you're selling. Since they clicked your site anyway, this means that they're more likely to buy.

Don't Try to Be First

Believe me, being one of the first PPC ads in search engine results pages are not the ideal place to be. You may not agree, but the reason behind this is rather simply understood. Some people are in the habit of clicking on PPC ads, either by accident or by design, say to test his bandwidth or just to explore the site provided.

Being one of the first ads, therefore, means that you will get a lot of nuisance clicks which you'll have to pay for anyway. These clicks just inflate the costs of PPC advertising without providing you the corresponding profit.

Contextual Advertising

One great way of getting ahead through your PPC campaign is by getting signed up with PPC companies that provide contextual advertising; that is, your ads get fed to member sites that have content relevant to your business or product. It is hoped that after reading informative content, the visitor may be more inclined to buy your products.

Signup for ExoClick Pay Per Click services to start some advertising campaigns at a low CPC!

I guess that's the 0.0001% in the "99.9999% uptime" :)
I'm wondering what would happen if Google was down for a full day!

A landing page is the first page a visitor to your website sees. Landing Pages used to be very important back in the days of email marketing, nevertheless, landing pages haven't lost any of their luster along the years and are still considered important. The reason why landing pages are important nowadays is because many affiliate marketers use them to sell their products that they have formerly advertised via programs such as ExoClick or AdWords. Why? Because landing pages are the new direct marketing technique, and anyone that owns a website can be a direct marketer. This might sound a big complicated, but it's much of a fuss really, a landing page is the page that the possible buyer, that 'landed there' via an ad he clicked, sees the first time. That page is going to be focused on the appraisal of one single product.

What makes landing pages so special

Studies have shown that landing pages can only create several actions, like:

* Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, possibly on your site or on someone else's).
* Get a visitor to buy (the ideal case).
* Get a user to register (works good if you plan on sending ads via email).
* Get a visitor to spread the word (tell his friends, family and so on).
* Get a visitor to implicate (this could include posting a comment, a suggestion or feedback, etc).

What makes landing pages really special is the fact that all the attention of that page is focused on one single product : the one you're selling (or offering for free). To make a landing page work properly, you have to ask yourselves if you were the visitor (possible buyer) of that page, what would the person that created the page want you to do.

Would he want you to:
a) Click on his ads, go to his page and afterwards leave, thus, making him loose money for nothing.
b) Click on his ads, go to his page and contribute, thus, giving him a heart warming sensation that he did something good.
c) Click on his ads, go to his page and possibly buy something that's worth the money.

First impression is something that matters the most for a first time visitor. If you are to cluster your pages with all sorts of ads and stuff like that, you will definitely have a low CR. If you are going to have a nice clean page, focusing on only one product, you're half way there, remember though, don't start your product description with the price, that might intimidate them. Remember that landing pages are not wandering generalities, they are specific measurable offers.