PPC Spending

Ok, by now and by looking at the title of this blog you’ve probably figured out that I am somewhat partial to SEO.  But I do think that PPC (Pay Per Click) whether it be Adwords, MSN Ad Center, or Yahoo’s PPC program, can be beneficial to your business…if used properly!  Its not hard to find a website owner who has lost a lot of money with PPC and in fact, you’ve probably lost a bit yourself!  So heres a couple quick tips for how NOT to get ripped of with PPC!

First of all, and probably most important is to track everything.  What is your Quality Score?  Do you even know?  What is your click through rate?  Do you even know how to find out?  I’ve run into way to many business owners that can’t answer those basic questions.  One way to prevent that is to install analytics, become familiar with it, and monitor it.  Now most people probably already have this covered, but if this is you, make this a priority!  I just talked to a business owner that had a monthly AdWords budget of $10,000.  But he had no way to track his ROI!  There was no way tot ell if this was working or not!  So he quit adwords.  When he quit, his opt-ins dropped by 70%!  Now I would say that was a fairly decent adwords campaign, but again, he had no way of knowing that!  So watching your conversions, paying attention to your tracking can save you a whole lot of money.  While that guy had a decent campaign going there, there was no way to know if he could have been doing better, so he just quit!

Second, and this is important for new business owners and if you are using PPC for Keyword Research, pick a budget…and stick to it!  The easiest thing to do is to blow through your budget, and then keep on spending!  Don’t spend more without seeing some conversion.  If you do you are just wasting more money!  If you are doing it for Keyword Research, you definitely don’t want to be blowing huge amounts of cash on just research!

PPC does not have to be hard.  Yes it may take some learning and experience, but its not the hardest thing to do.  But it can turn into a mess if you don’t follow some really basic principles in order to protect yourself, and your hard earned money!