How to Profit from PPC Advertising with Google Adwords - Marketing

Making Money with Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising:An easy way to make extra money online is to utilize pay per click advertising (PPC). Using PPC advertising will help you find companies or people that are interested in your product. It is an easy way to get your website to the top of Google search results without haveing to spend the time working on your organic SEO. Everytime a web browser clicks on your ad or keyword, you pay a PPC fee. This allows you to only pay when someone actually goes to your site, not each time they view your ad. However, in order to really make PPC advertising worth while, you need a certain percentage of these click-throughs to purchase your product to make a profit. A lot of PPC advertising is done through trial and error but after a certain amount of time it is possible to calculate break even points for PPC.

Success in PPC Advertising is determined by making more in sales that you pay for the ad clicks. To make money, you can either write ads that lead to an affiliate program sites (direct linking), or write ads that lead to your own web site that has a link to affiliate programs. Additionally, you have can ads that point to your own products and services for sale. Direct Linking is easy and fast to set up your own PPC advertising. However, issues evolve when another company outbids you and then your ad will not show up in Google.

How to Profit from Google Adwords PPC Advertising:Google Adwords is the biggest and easiest pay per click program to use. With this program, you can advertise in any country and not spend a large sum of money. Also, because Google Adwords is automated, you can put ads up almost instantly and you can advertise on websites relevent to your business and on the SERPs. However, this type of internet marketing is highly competitive, which can boost your minimum bid up, leading to the need to convert more visitors to purchasers to remain profitable. The amount of trafficking Google Adwords can provide proves that they are the best choice for PPC advertising.

Creating a PPC Advertising Profitability Calculation:Ok, so we have talked about making your PPC campaign profitable by generating more revenue from clicks then you pay out in PPC dollars. This is a simple form of PPC Management and it sounds easy in theory, but as we get into the guts of this we find that the calculation and more importantly, the tracking of this is more difficult to come by.

STEP 1 - You need an efficient means of tracking your spending:The good news here is that tracking of spending and click throughs is VERY simple with google adwords. This information is provided right on your account. You can see what ads were clicks, what was searched for, and how much each click costed you. Additionally, you can set bid maximum, budget maximums, placement, keywords, and all that jazz. Great tool, great information. Best of all, you can set this up to integrate with your google analytics account. This is a must for step 2.

STEP 2 - You need to track what happens to your PPC visitors:If you get 50% of your traffic from PPC and 50% from SEO and organic traffic, how are you to know what sales are from what source. It is NOT reasonable to assume that half of the sales came from PPC, therefor we need a way to track which visitors purchased and from what source did they come to your site. This is where google analytics integration with google adwords comes in. By linking these two you will be able to track which visitors came to the site via PPC, what they searched for, and with ecommerce analytics tracking, what they purchased and for how much.

STEP 3 - You need to calculate total sales via PPC traffic:Filter your google analytics to PPC traffic and go to your ecommerce tracking to find out the total purchase dollars for a given period of time (ex. month). Write this down.

STEP 4 - You need to calculate total PPC spend for the same time period:Go back to your google adwords and filter for the same time period as you did with google analytics. What was your total spend on PPC advertising? Write this down.

Where you profitable?

Other PPC Profitability calculations that are useful:This is only the tip of the iceburg when it comes to PPC profitability analysis. Here are a few other good statistics.

What is the average spend per PPC visitor?Go back to your google analytics, filter for a time period and for PPC traffic. What was your total number of visitors? Take the total PPC revenue figure you wrote down before and dividie it by this traffic number. You now have your average profitability per PPC visitor. Why is this important? SIMPLE! You now know what your MAXIMUM cost per click should be set to in your google adwords account. If the average visitor is only going to generate you $3.50 why would you ever bid more than $3.50 for a click?

What PPC placements are most profitable?The adwords PPC network has two forms of placements. Search placements, which is only in google search and your ad will be listed at the top or right sidebar of google SERPs. The second is the content network. These are other sites that have put google ADSENSE on their website. If someone with a site based around the same content as your ads has adsense, google will place your ad in their region and the PPC works the same way. This form of PPC network is often CHEAPER, but gets less quality results because you are not bidding on keywords but instead TOPICS.

You can filter your google analytics for these different networks. From there you will be able to look into your ecommerce analytics and get revenue numbers and total visitors via each network type. Do the same calculation as before, revenue divided by visitor count. You can see which network is more profitable PER VISITOR. From here you can use this information to adjust your spending (both max PPC bid and total budget) around these figures.

This can also be used all the way down to a keyword basis. Filter your analytics for different keywords you have bid on. You will be able to look into your ecommerce analytics and get revenue numbers and total visitors for each keyword. Again, do the same calculation as before, revenue divided by visitor count. You can see which keyword is more profitable PER VISITOR. From here you can use this information to adjust your spending (both max PPC bid and total budget) around these figures.

Make Google Adwords work for you:The bottom line is that pay per click advertising is not a sure fire way to success. Businesses have thrown thousands of dollars away on PPC without looking into the analytics of revenue to make sure it supports the spend. Another issue can be websites that sell services and are not ecommerce. Analytics cannot track a PPC visitor to a phone call and a sale that is done by a person, it can only track online purchases with internet marketing. This is where you would need to develop your own HUMAN tracking process to be able to calculate the same formulas.

However, if you are strategic in your PPC Advertising by choosing the right companies to advertise with, the right placement of your ads, and utilize relevant keywords, your business will reap the benefits of PPC Management . Remember, tracking is key, the formulas and number dont lie. Track your results and modify for profitability!

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