Buying Traffic - PPC pay-per-click campaigns

Part 2 of a 3-part article on lead generation and how to buy traffic. We discuss 3 ways of getting traffic directly to our site, and share our findings here.

Perhaps not a surprise, but our research has led us to believe that PPC is the "safest" way to get targeted traffic, as you have a high level of control and accountability.

Part 2 PPC Pay-per-Click ad campaigns

This is the revolution created by the internet - that you only pay for visitors who actually click through to your site. This remains a very attractive way of generating leads, due to the accountability factor. You build your own campaign, target your visitors with keywords, and budget yourself by bidding on keywords. We started with a wide range of campaigns spread out over a range of companies; findwhat, kanoodle, epilot, enhance, looksmart, etc., and ended up narrowing our focus to one or two well-honed campaigns. We are now back with the few sources that have consistently brought us well targeted traffic, i.e. Google, & Overture. We have written about this subject in another article located here.

Our site statistics are open to the public, so you can login and take a look for yourself.

The strategy we use is to identify successful keywords, using our statistics reports to show which words bring us the most visitors, and what these visitors do. We bid on these words, and drop the lesser-performing words. Google and Overture have well-built administration systems that allow you to manage campaigns. Both systems allow you to customize the URLs, meaning that you can see exactly who comes in on each individual advertisement. Both systems also show you:

a) how many times each specific keyword ad was clicked, and
b) how many times each ad was seen (impressions)

These are the two most important variables.

We would recommend that you periodically review your campaigns. In other words, don't just set them up and forget about them. They need regular updating. The two part strategy involves using the PPC campaign to get traffic, and a statistics or tracking program to see what the traffic does.

next: Part 3 Purchasing bulk leads / traffic / clicks
previous: Part 1 Buying Traffic - paid newsletter inclusion