PPC marketing for the beginner will discuss  basically what PPC  is,   what it isn’t and how to avoid the common pitfalls faced by most beginners.

PPC marketing stands for pay per click this means that when a searcher clicks on your ad you will pay a fixed amount to the search engine advertising platform that you are advertising on. There are many networks large and small that will allow you to advertise using this format. For the sake of clarity we will confine our discussion at this point to the Google PPC platform which is called adwords.

Basically adwords revolves around keywords. You write a small four line advertisement which contains the keyword that you need to trigger your ad.  Your ad will appear at the top of the organic results for the keyword search performed by the searcher. In other words your ad will only show if your keyword matches the keyword entered by the searcher.  The visitor may see your ad but you will only be charged if they actually click on it.

When you set up your advertising campaign in adwords you will bid on the keywords that you want to use. The price of these keywords varies according to popularity, this popularity is usually directly proportional to the amount of money that the advertiser can potentially earn from being successful with that keyword. For instance, certain industries such as loans, insurance, mortgages and healthcare will command a higher bid price than underwater basket weaving.

When the searcher clicks on your ad they will be taken to a website of your choice, this could be directly to a merchant’s site that you are connected with as an affiliate or more commonly to an intermediate site or landing page that you are using to either pre-sell the prospect, collect their information or merely comply with Google’s rules.

Whether you are sending the prospect directly to the merchant or to a landing page, the contents of that page must be relevant to the search and more importantly the keywords used in your ad.  Google wants the experience for the searcher to be congruent with their expectations,  in other words if you ad is about “used black guitars” then the page that the searcher lands on must also be about “used black guitars.”

This is important for two reasons firstly if the visitor doesn’t immediately see what they were expecting they will leave the site without buying or clicking through to the merchant. This gives Google a bad name and not only do you have to to pay for the click, you didn’t make any money. When this happens Google will penalize the advertiser by reducing their quality score, this in turn raises the cost of each click for the keyword being bid on.

Basically despite what a lot of people think Google it is just trying to deliver the best experience for people searching and in return giving cheaper keywords to those advertisers who deliver this good experience and penalizing those who don’t.

So make sure that  you keep the end user in mind when advertising with PPC using Google adwords. If you keep the searcher  happy you will probably keep Google happy.  If you follow these guidelines then how to do PPC marketing for the beginner won’t be a costly experience.

Look out for information about other networks who accept PPC advertising.