The Demo Site

Aswith any SEO strategy, there are limitations. Bidding for keywords can be fierce, with eachcompetitor bidding higher and higher to reach and maintain the top search results position. Many organizations have a person or team that’s responsible for monitoring the company’s position in search results and amending bids accordingly. Monitoring positions is crucial to maintaining good placement however, because you do have to fight for your ranking, and PPC programs can become prohibitively expensive. The competitiveness of the keywords or phrases and the aggressiveness of the competitiondetermine how much you’ll ultimately end up spending to rank well.

NOTE
One issue with PPC programs is that many search engines recognize PPC ads as just that — paid advertisements. Therefore, although your ranking with the search engine for which you’re urchasing placement might be good, that doesn’t mean your ranking in other search engines will be good. Sometimes, it’s necessary to run multiple PPC campaigns if you want to rank high in multiple search engines.

Before you even begin to use a PPC program, you should consider some basics. A very important
point to keep in mind is that just because you’re paying for placement or advertising space associ-ated with your keywords, you’re not necessarily going to get the best results with all of the keywords or phrases that you choose. With PPC services you must test, test, and test some more. Begin small,with a minimum number of keywords, to see how the search engine you’ve selected performs in terms of the amount of traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on investment. For example, if your goal is to bring new subscribers to your newsletter, you’ll want totrack conversions, perhaps by directing the visitors funneled to your site by your PPC link to a sub-scription page set up just for them. You can then monitor how many clicks actually result in a goalconversion (in this case a new subscription). This helps you to quickly track your return on invest-ment and to determine how much you’re paying for each new subscriber.
Before investing in a PPC service, you may want to review a few different services to determine
which is the best one for you. When doing your preliminary research, take the time to ask the
following questions:

• How many searches are conducted each month through the search engine for which you’re considering a PPC program?
• Does the search engine have major partners or affiliates that could contribute to the volume of traffic you’re likely to receive through the PPC program?
• How many searches are generated each month by those partners and affiliates?
• What exactly are the terms of service for search partners or affiliates?
• How does the search engine or PPC program prevent fraudulent activity?
• How difficult is it to file a report about fraudulent activity and how quickly is the issueaddressed (and by whom)?
• What recourse do you have if fraudulent activity is discovered?
• Do you have control over where our listing does appear? For example, can you choosenot to have your listing appear in search results for other countries where your site is not relevant? Or can you choose to have your listing withheld from affiliate searches?

When you’re looking at different PPC programs, look for those that have strict guidelines about
how sites appear in listings, how partners and affiliates calculate visits, and how fraud is handled.
These are important issues, because in each case, you could be stuck paying for clicks that didn’t
actually happen. Be sure to monitor any service that you decide to use to ensure that your PPC
advertisements are both working properly and that they seem to be targeted well.It often takes a lot of testing, monitoring, and redirection to find the PPC program that works wellfor you. on’t be discouraged or surprised if you find that you must try several different programsor many different keywords before you find the right combination. But through a system of trial band error and diligent effort, you’ll find that PPC programs can help build your site traffic and goal conversions faster than you could without the program.