When starting a new pay per click campaign, one of the most important decisions you will have to make is how much money you are willing to spend. This should be broken down into how much you are willing to spend per day, per month, and per year. This decision needs to be based off of a few main criteria. Ask yourself these questions when trying to figure out what budget makes sense for your site…

1)How many visitors per day are you hoping to drive to your site?

2)How many visitors does it take to start to see conversions take place?

3)How much money spent is too much to turn a positive ROI?

4)Is there a cap amount where anything over is not productive to your site?

5)How competitive is my market for the main keywords?

6)How much time/energy am I willing to spend setting up and editing these campaigns?

The answer to these questions will be different for every site. When we ask some of our clients these questions, we sometimes get blank stares in return. That is why it may make sense to start with a small budget and work your way to a larger budget, when you see great leads coming in. Some sites can see success with just about $20 dollars a day, while others need at least $500 a day to get a single conversion. Depending on how much money a single conversion earns you, this will help you decide if your advertising budget makes sense. There is a sweet spot for every advertiser that you need to find. This sweet spot is the range where your advertising budget turns a positive ROI. To find that sweet spot, don’t be scared to ask ppc professionals for help.

In contrast, some people advertise their site online hoping to raise awareness of their topic, but not looking to make money from conversions or sales. If you are not making “sales”, you need to ask yourself how much money per day you are willing to spend to generate awareness for your site. Generally these types of sites have smaller budgets, but are also paying less per click.

When trying to create a pay per click budget you need to understand that while the costs seems high, it is usually right on line with any sort of newspaper,radio, magazine ad you might place (per year). The great thing about spending on the Internet, over those types of print and audio ads, is that you know people are landing on your site. That is why ad agencies are placing more of their clients money into online advertising, than print/radio ads. If you are looking to generate sales, please do not be scared to place most of your overall advertising budget into a paid ad campaign. This is a new way of thinking that is scary to some site owners, but this is the way advertising is heading.

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• How Do Web Marketing Firms Charge for Pay Per Click Services?
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• Top 10 Pay Per Click Tips For Your Web Marketing Plan

This is a common question that gets tossed around in web marketing circuits. How does your firm charge clients for pay per click services? Since the search engine marketing industry is a fairly new one, there is not an industry standard, as of yet. Here are the two most common ways that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firms charge their clients for paid advertising services.

1) The firm will charge a percentage of their clients montly spending online. A common percentage is somewhere between 15%-20% of the total spending. They may tack on some fees here and there, but generally speaking the amount “out of pocket” can change depending on how much you are willing to spend each month.

2) The firm will charge a set fee to monitor your advertising spending per month. This fee will likely be dependent on your overall ad spending, but not change from month to month. This fee will generally range in the same 15%-20% ballpark range, but not change unless you significantly increase/decrease your budget.

These two options are very similar in the end, and there is not one that is better than the other. If you are a small advertiser, you may want to find a company that is willing to do a set price per month since you know exactly what your out of pocket will be from month to month. If you are a large advertiser, the percentage option may be a great one since you can give the firm the green light to increase your budget if the market is converting ads into sales, without jumping into another price bracket.

Domain to Design takes a different approach to pay per click services, one that many of our competitors may not be too fond of.  After talking with many current clients, we know that many advertisers out there would like to have control over their campaigns, and would do it themselves if they were trained how to. That is why we have started slightly different pricing models.  The models are linked below.

In our program we want to train you how to do the advertising yourself, once your campaigns are created and running smoothly. We would love to take your money month after month, like other firms do, but we also believe we can help more clients if we put the power into your hands once the campaigns are up and running. Also with these pricing models we know you may run into problems, that is why we will always be available for questions throughout the process, so there is no need to worry. The future of advertising is on the web, why not be trained how to do this yourself? This will be a lifelong skill we can give you for a reasonable price.

Check out our different PPC tracks…we can have you up and going quickly and for a low price.

Pay Per Click Services and Training

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• The Cost of Clicks Are Rising… But Don’t Complain

Recent statistics show that the number of paid clicks (on Google) is going down, but the prices for those clicks are going up.  The numbers show that paid clicks were down by 5% from last year but advertiser spend on Google was actually up about 7%. The overall click through rate (CTR) was up by 10%.  What to make of these numbers?  Lets try to put them into perspective for you…

Google has made some changes to their ad serving techniques that has decreased the overall numbers of clicks, while web surfers are also becoming desensitized to sponsored advertising on many websites.  This seems like a negative for Google, but realize this was most likely their plan.

This is Googles way of being able to charge more per click, but give their advertisers better conversion rates and sales.  So while clicks are down overall, Google has managed to improve their ad serving technologies.  Now more then ever, you are likley to see ads that pertain to your searches.  They know if you see a relevant ad, you are likely to click on it.

For many years Google has been critised for a lack of quality ads on their search engines.  They have heard all to many complaints of people saying their ads are not showing in the right places.  This has lead them to refine their engine to serve up what the viewers want.  Their overall theory follows this example…

Which model is better

Model A- 

Spend $100

Receive 50 clicks

Achive 1 sale

Model  B

Spend $100

Receive 15 clicks

Achieve 5 sales 

Obviously Model B is better.  The overall number of clicks is becoming irrelevant in search, while people  are focusing on overall ad quality and campaign ROI.  This is how it should be, and Google is the first search engine to realize this and make it happen.  So when you see that clicks are down and spend is up, just be happy that this is due to a recent increase in quality advertising.  If you are having trouble with your campaigns and spending more and getting less, you may want to look into a SEM firm to help optimize your campaigns.

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For all you adwords advertisers, Adwords has finally announced changes to their display URL policy.  What exactly does this mean for you all out there? You can no longer try and trick people into thinking you are somebody you are not. Google’s sponsored advertising is moving away from the trickery, and more towards legitimacy.On April 1st, Google will require your display URL (the www.____.com you see in green) and your landing page URL (the address the advertisement actually takes you to) to match.  The adwords blog says “This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs,”.  If you were making money by confusing web surfers, and pretending to be somebody else… you will need to find new tricks.

This has been an issue with adwords that has ALWAYS bothered me, so the fact Google is requiring these changes is long overdue in my mind.  In past adwords advertising, you could pretend you are somebody you are not… how does that build credibility among advertisers and web surfers?  Also, Google was never willing to remove ads that blatantly use trademarked company names, even if you have already proved you own the trademark.  I guess this online giant got tired of hearing complaints, and finally decided to take action.

I would like to personally thank Google for making these changes (not that they really care what I think), and also personally apologize for being “that guy” who always complained about this policy via email and web chat with their staff.  It is really nice to see that the adwords staff is finally taking some steps to benefit the legitimate and ethical advertisers out there.  This change will benefit google advertising and advertisers in the long wrong.

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If you are advertising on Google Adwords, you need to start using the adwords preview tool, which is available for free at the link location below.  This tool will allow you to see where your ad falls into search queries, but does not count your search as an impression (therefore this does not hurt your CTR).

If you are doing a normal google search to see how high your ads are showing, you may notice that most of the time your ads are nowhere to be found. This does not mean your ads are not being displayed.  The reason for this is that google knows the IP address/addresses from which you monitor your account, and won’t display your own ads on those computers.  Google does this so that you don’t click on your own ads and charge yourself for a worthless click.

The google adwords preview tool will allow you to do a search, but it will not let you click on any of the links to be redirected to another site.  If you do try and click on an ad, it will remind you that links are not available on the preview tool.  Google does this to keep people from preforming that dreading “click fraud”.  A really valuable feature of this tool is it allows you to change your geography placement.  For example, you can see what somebody searching for “San Jose Widgets” sees in California, even if you are sitting in Arizona.  Talk about a helpful tool for geotargeting your adwords ads across the world.

Learn to use this tool and you will find adwords placement becomes much easier to master.

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

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