How to Promote Your Business and Increase Sales Using Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

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Pay Per Click (PPC) is an internet advertising system meant to direct online traffic to particular websites where the advertiser pays the publisher a certain price when an ad is clicked. This is a brief tutorial that explains how you can use PPC to your advantage and promote your business.
Audience

This tutorial is primarily going to help all those readers who are into advertising and specifically those who aspire to make a career in Internet Marketing.
Prerequisites

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a good understanding of the fundamental concepts of marketing, advertising, and analyzing product and audience.


We have the Internet that provides a huge platform for advertising products and services online. Advertisers around the world have shown a keen interest in making good use of the Internet that is omnipresent these days to market various products and speed up their business activities by reaching out to numerous users.

You might be aware of the conventional methods of push marketing that involves the use of brochures, television ads, radio ads, banners, bills, balloons, etc. where people are driven to hear, listen, and view the product or service they can get.

Quite contrary to the traditional model, the recent methods of internet marketing involve innovative techniques to catch more eyeballs and pull online traffic to visit, listen, view, or buy a product or a service that is on offer. It is done through a model that is now being widely regarded as Pay Per Click (PPC). It is a successful model for internet advertising that directs online traffic to particular websites, where the advertisers pay the publishers a certain amount when their ad is clicked.

Here, in this introductory chapter, we will provide an overview of PPC as a concept and explain the role of its entities involved in the entire workflow of PPC advertising.
About PPC Ad

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is an internet marketing model where the advertisers use the publishers’ website to market their products or services through ads. The publisher gets paid by the particular advertisers when a user clicks on their ads. It is a pull-type internet marketing of buying user visits to a site.

Search Engine Advertising

One of the most popular forms of PPC marketing is Search Engine Advertising (SEA). It allows advertisers to bid for placement of ads in the search engine’s sponsored link, when a user searches for a keyword that is relevant to a product or a service.

Whenever a user clicks on an ad, the link directs the user to the product’s website. At the same time, the product or service provider needs to pay some amount to the search engine, such as Google.

Behind every successful PPC campaign lies a catchy ad that can attract the attention of online users. Advertisers focus on the following aspects while creating an online ad:

    Research for effective keywords related to a product or a service
    Choose the right keywords
    Group the keywords relevantly
    Arrange the keywords to create an advertise

More often than not, the ads that are useful and relevant are charged less fees per click by the search engines. This is rewarding for the advertisers, as they get more business in exchange of minimal fees.

Google AdWords is an example of a popular advertising system. It facilitates businesses to publish ads on Google’s search engine.
Entities Involved in PPC Advertising

The following entities are involved in PPC Advertising:

    Product or Service Seller
    PPC Advertiser
    Landing Page Provider
    Landing Page
    Viewer or the Visitor

Take a close look at the illustrations below that depict the general roles of the entities involved in PPC advertising:

Workflow of a PPC Ad

The workflow of a PPC ad is as follows:

    First of all, the advertiser creates an online account and loads her account with some money – say Rs 5000. Note that some organizations allocate their PPC budgets in hundreds, thousands, or even millions of rupees per month.

    The advertiser creates a small text ad. In some cases, a PPC ad can include images.

    The advertiser specifies a list of keywords associated with the ad.

    The advertiser determines how much she is ready to pay each time someone clicks on the ad.

    On the buyer’s side, a user visits the search engine – say Google.com, enters one of the keywords or keyword phrases - say “Kindle Paper white” and clicks the Search button.

    The search engine finds the matching ads and places them on the results page.

    If a user clicks on the ad, she is taken to the advertiser's website, and the advertiser is charged for the click.

History of PPC

PPC ads have been in existence over a decade now. The term PPC came into existence during the year 1990 when organizations started conducting their business on the Internet. One of the companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com. Yahoo took it over in 2003.

When Google launched its AdWords solution for PPC marketing, heavy activities started in the domain of PPC. In addition to Google, a number of search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, 7Search, ABCSearch, and Findology provide PPC ad hosting.
Properties of a Compelling PPC Ad

A compelling PPC ad has the following properties:

    It is a part of a closely-knit ad-groups.
    It can address the desired search queried by the users.
    It takes the user to an appropriate landing page.
    It drives the users to click on it and explore.

General Formula for Calculating PPC

The basic formula of calculating PPC is:

Pay per click ($) = Advertising cost ($) ÷ Number of ad clicks

Advantages of PPC

PPC helps in branding and creating leads as well, both in parallel. PPC provides quick results in contrast to SEO results that are equally important but may take months or even years to materialize.

    Quick Actions - PPC gives immense traffic, quick results, and more hype branding in a short span of time.

    Negligible Initial Investment - Search engines do not charge fees to insert a PPC ad or to set up an account. The user pays only when someone actually clicks on his ad.

    Business Gets Noticed Globally - A business can get global recognition, even if it has a small local setup.

    Instant Results - As compared to SEO methods, PPC ads can deliver faster response, if quality ads are posted. Read More

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How To Write a (Thesis / Dissertation) Proposal

1.   Know the area

a.   Read, read, read, …

b.   Average 10-15 papers per week

c.   Current Journals: at least read/scan abstracts

d.   Use reference management software! (e.g. ProCite and EndNote)

e.   Use search engines (MedLine, Ergo Abstracts, Psych Info, Compendex, ACM

Digital Library, etc.)

f.    Go to the source literature (don’t expect textbooks and other secondary sources to be either accurate or complete)

2.   Go outside your area

a.   Good source of new/different ideas

b.   Avoids embarrassing overlap (already done by others in another field)

3.   Pay attention to methods, analyses, motivations, applications

a.   We did this because …

b.   This work can be applied to …

4.   Tree-in; tree-out

a.   Look at paper citations, and who cited particular papers (ISI Citation Index)

b.   Note how others interpreted (or how cited) papers you’ve already read; they may

have a different interpretation

5.   Don’t get ‘paper-locked’

a.   Easy to get overwhelmed and biased by what has already been done

b.   Once familiar with an area, what has and hasn’t been done, start working on what you could do

6.   Look at proposals and documents generated by your predecessors

At this point, generate some initial ideas.  Be creative, flexible, novel.  Good idea to test them, if possible.

Jumping ahead, what does a faculty member look for in a proposal?

1.   It should be well-written

a.   Organized, with a logical flow

b.   Concise, but also complete c.   Good grammar

d.   It’s usually a good idea to have a colleague read it before giving it to the advisor, especially if they have already submitted their first draft or successfully defended their proposal.  Often little errors or small changes will be identified and addressed.  They can also be some the best sources of information for “why” or “how”.

2.   General structure is typically followed, but there is flexibility in the details a.   Introduction (Background, Motivations, Literature review)

b.   Objective/Purposes/Hypothesis (need not be a separate section, but often is)

c.   Methods

d.   Preliminary Results

3.   Introduction

a.   Start broad (e.g. injuries, need for ergonomics, etc.), become increasingly specific

b.   End with a review, and broaden out to discuss potential applications (importance)

of the proposed work

c.   Topics to be addressed:  what’s been done; what hasn’t; what is needed and why;

indicate your part or contribution (scoping your domain)

d.   Intro should contain some statements of objectives, purposes, and hypothesis.

Placement is flexible, though, and these could be in a separate sections between Intro and Methods, or even part of the Methods.  Depending on the specifics, not all of these (objective, purposes, and hypotheses) will always been relevant.

More important that it be clear and readable.

e.   How long should it be?  Long enough to satisfy the above goals.  Typically 10-30 pages for an MS, longer for a PhD proposal.

f.   When summarizing existing literature, it is not enough just to describe what

authors X, Y, and Z did.  Results should be interpreted, in the context of the overall review and study objectives.

g.   In particular, discuss contrasting evidence, possible sources for discrepancies (experimental design, lack of controls, sensitivity of measures, etc.), and the importance of resolving the differences.

4.   Objectives/Purposes

a.   Non-quantitative, but specific and clearly filling some hole/need addressed in the

Introduction.

b.   The Intro should have motivated and ‘scoped’ the stated objectives and purposes.

5.   Hypotheses

a.   Non-quantitative, but again specific and clear.

b.   There should be obvious connections to the objectives, and clear (though not stated here) indications of how statistical methods would be used to evaluate the hypotheses.  In the methods, your statistical tests should make reference to these hypotheses.

c.   Not every statistical test should have an associate hypotheses (otherwise it would

be unwieldy); instead, the hypotheses can be general (e.g. there will be an association among several variables; factors A and B will have effects on several measures of performance).

d.   Don’t use words like ‘significant’, save this for the description of statistical methods.

6.   Methods

a.   What will be done, how, and why

b.   With respect to how and why, there is typically more than one way to do something, and you must explain (and sometimes justify) your choice.

c.   The methods should have clear connections to the hypotheses.

d.   The Methods tends to be a difficult and sometimes complicated section.  In general, proceed from broad to specific, but also ensure that a context is provided

before specific details are raised.  For example, don’t describe specific

experimental treatments before you’ve even explained the overall approach and the different independent and dependent variables.

e.   Note that ‘repeated measures’ refers to a study design, while within- and between- subjects refers to specific independent measures (or treatments).  Crossed and nested factors are synomymous.

f.   The reader should be able to understand what you’re talking about, given what

was provided before (use of a colleague again helps here).

g.   Subsections are often used such as: Overview; Subjects; Procedures; Instrumentation; Experimental Design; Data Reduction; Analysis (stats)

h.   The specific ordering of the sections in g., should achieve the goals of d. and f. i.   Somewhere (typically in Experimental Design), there should be an explicit

statement of the independent and dependent variables (or factors, or measures)

So how do I get there?  Unfortunately, this is as much an art as a science, but here are some things to consider:

1.   Some General Tips:

a.   Each paragraph proceeds from general to specific.

b.   Some have suggested that reading the first sentence of every paragraph in the document should convey the essential meaning of the whole.

c.   Vary the structure of your sentences and paragraphs.

d.   Use transitions between paragraphs (either the last sentence of the proceeding one or the first sentence of the subsequent one, should tie the two together).

e.   Avoid one-sentence paragraphs (generally at least 3 sentences comprise a paragraph)

f.    Consider optional presentation methods (always using good HF knowledge and practice).  Often the same thing can be conveyed by text, graphs, tables, diagrams, etc.  Pick what is the most effective, but avoid duplication.

2.   Some common mistakes to avoid:

a.   Repetitive sentence structure (The…  The… The… or However, … Additionally,

… Therefore, …)

b.   Avoid complex words and convoluted sentence constructions, where simpler ones

will convey the information (like utilize vs. use; cognizant vs. aware; though personal style always has a role).  Eschew obfuscation!

c.   There is no advantage to be gained by making something obscure.  The scientific value is not enhanced by complicated words and prose, and to someone that knows the field, you don’t sound any more knowledgeable.  If you look at some of the best journals, they are typically written in a very dry, boring, direct, and terse style.  It tends to be the weaker journals where creative writing flourishes!

October 24, 2002

M. Nussbaum

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