have a bandit day

PPC (or pay per click) isn’t a drug. Well, okay, it might be a drug, but I’d compare it closer to anabolic steroids than what makes kids see 6 foot bunnies toting a message from the end of the world (a la Donnie Darko.)

As always, we begin with a hypothetical situation.

Imagine you’re an emerging business owner, proud operator of “Freddy’s Fantastic JellyBeans”. You’ve just opened shop with your mint jelly and banana-hammock flavored jelly beans (you’re a specialty shop) and you’re ready to begin your online marketing campaign. Your website is pristine, crafted with web standards in mind and now all you have to do is wait for the money to roll in.

Except when you check your Google analytics reports, you’re only fielding 5 visits a day. And you’re pretty sure it’s your Aunt Martha in Tupelo with the sweet tooth. You wonder how long she was sitting in front of her microwave before she realizes it’s not her computer.

You have product / service; you have a website; you need traffic. Relying on standard SEO methods will eventually provide you with traffic to the website, but you need traffic now.

Pay-Per-Click advertising, please report to the front desk.

Your brand new site doesn’t have the credentials to land you on the front page. Like any good solution to a problem, fix it by throwing money at the problem. When the search engines don’t trust you yet, pay them to trust you.

PPC campaigns employ the use of ad placement in SERPs (search engine results page), under “sponsored links”. You pay when someone clicks on the ad. You bid on keywords that you want to appear under, and the more money you bid, the more prominent your ad will be (maybe. We’ll talk more about this later). Use PPC to instantly boost traffic to your site.

With traffic coming regularly to your site, your battle is half over. The other half is making visitors into customers.