Bidding for Keywords

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising all comes down to words. It all starts with bidding for certain words you think will best suit your campaign. It’s just like so many other things in business- bid too much and you’re going to be throwing money down the internet drain.

The more you pay for a keyword the better it will be positioned and it’s a common thought that if you aren’t in the first three pages of a search result you’re campaign won’t be a success. Think about your own search engine habits. When you’re looking at results, do you go past the first three or four pages? It’s very difficult and costly to get first place, but most people look for 2 or 3 options to compare prices, delivery times and other things.

Bidding for words is just like bidding for anything else. Bidding wars are common as competitors struggle to out-do each other and get an upper hand. Popular keywords are quite expensive and yet may not help your campaign at all.

Bidding for words is complex and can all come down to your margins. If you’re paying $1.50 per click for a certain word and it takes a hundred clicks for a sale to be converted, that’s a $150 you’ve paid just for one sale. A 10 cent word will only cost you $10, but that 10 cent word will probably not get near the same amount of clicks.

Positions are competitive and keywords that aren’t performing well are often put on pause. You’ll hear a lot of people talking about RIO, or return on investment. It is possible that a keyword in a lower position can be producing good sales, so a higher bid for that word will improve its position and maybe increase sales even more.

Your Pay Per Click campaign will need to be closely monitored, because it can quickly spin out of control if you just leave it to take on a life of its own. Remember that you’ve paid a price per click and a lot of clicks can occur in a week, or even an hour in some cases. Google Adwords and some other PPC engines allow you to set a daily limit and it’s probably advisable when you’re just starting out. Once you have a good knowledge of trends and dynamics involved with PPC and your own campaign, you can start to forget about those limits or set them higher.