Pay per click advertising is a fast-growing industry supported by a number of different parties. First, you have businesses hoping to reach more customers through paid online advertisements. Next, you have advertising platforms (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Advertising, etc.) that want to connect these businesses to their customers.
Finally, there’s a third group. These are people that partner with pay per click platforms or find other ways to get in on the action and make money on advertisers.
This means that there are multiple ways to make money with PPC sites. It all depends on how your business operates. On this page, you can learn how the PPC model works and how each of these parties makes money on sites like Google Ads.
Understanding The PPC Model
The pay per click advertising model can be a little confusing, especially if you aren’t familiar with the concept. If you’re already a PPC professional, feel free to skip down to the next section.
Wordstream.com offers a simple definition:
“PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.”
Let’s unpack this definition a little more. The first piece of this definition is the pay element. This is a unique approach compared to other types of advertising, where advertisers pay for placements. In PPC, ad placements are on search engines and partnered websites (more on this later) and targeted by customer profiles and keywords.
How much do you pay? Well, most Pay Per Click platforms use an auction-style bidding system. You enter how much you’re willing to pay for your ad to appear after a keyword search or display on a certain type of website, which acts as your bid. If you bid higher than the competition, then you’ll have the best ad placement. Naturally, some keywords have more competition than others.
The next part to unpack is why. Why is it beneficial for businesses to buy site visits? And, how does this make them money? Well, if you’re selling products or services through your website, then every new visitor is an opportunity to make a new customer or client.
When you can convert clicks into conversions at a steady rate, then you can turn that small bid amount into a lot of revenue for your business! For businesses, this is how to make money with pay per click sites.
How To Make Money With Pay Per Click Sites As A Business
Now that the basic principles behind the PPC model have been explained, we can now extrapolate on the concepts behind businesses using PPC sites to make money.
As previously mentioned, when you can use ads to generate traffic, which then purchases, subscribes or otherwise converts on your website, then you can generate positive returns for your advertising. Basically, the fees associated with PPC marketing become incidental when you are generating multiple times more value from those that convert.
To maximize how much money your business generates, here are a few simple rules and strategies to keep in mind:
- Understand the intent behind keywords. Ideally, you want to find people that are searching with the intent to convert. For instance, a customer searching for “buy new mattress” is more likely to make a purchase than someone searching “what mattress type is best for lower back problems?”
- Look for short and long keywords. Short keywords have more search volume, but also higher competition and costs. Longer phrases, however, can still be fairly popular but face much lower competition and bid costs.
- Advertise for the right products. Not all of your products have profit margins large enough to allow for profitable advertising!
- Track, monitor, analyze and adjust your strategies! If you aren’t paying attention to your campaign data, then you’re more likely to lose money than to make money with pay per click sites!
- Focus on the quality of your ad experience. This experience includes the ad message itself, your landing page, ad placement and conversion process. If any part of this ad experience is lacking, your likelihood of turning clicks into conversions is very low. Google even rewards advertisers with great ad experiences by offering lower costs!
How To Make Money With Pay Per Click Sites As A Site Owner
The majority of pay per click success stories come from businesses using this channel to effectively connect with more customers and increase their sales/revenue. That said, this is not the only way to make money with PPC sites. You can also partner with advertising networks through programs like Google AdSense.
AdSense is a program where website owners partner with Google and allow advertisements to run on their pages. Each time a “click” occurs on one of these ads, Google pays the website owner a portion of the cost of that click.
The tradeoff is simple. Through the AdSense program, Google is able to extend its already-large advertising network to include millions of sites across the Internet. In return, those sites make some extra money for allowing Google to place ads.
Google also ensures that the content of both the website and the ad are aligned with one another. This ensures that advertisers target relevant audiences and AdSense partners don’t upset their audiences by including irrelevant ads on the page.
There are other programs aside from AdSense that website owners can use to make money from ad content. Options regarding how many ads on the page and where these messages display will take some getting used to. You want to start small and see how users react to ads.
Conclusions
Whether you run a business, a website or both, there are easy ways to make money on pay per click sites. The biggest hurdle is understanding how different ad networks work and what sort of strategies you need to utilize in order to maximize your returns.
While it is very easy to make money with these sites, you can also lose money if you are too aggressive or don’t know what you’re doing! Thus, it’s always best to test out some ads, see what the result is and then make adjustments.
