About Pay Per Click PPC Advertising

Following the redesign of the GMtee website and the release of our new collection, my focus has been on increasing traffic.

Traffic is not free and the bottom line is that a successful website must make a profit greater than the cost of it's traffic. In the jargon it's called "return on investment" or ROI. Ultimately internet marketing is all about generating "positive ROI" and getting the biggest bang for your buck.

If you spend $100 on traffic and make $50 in profit, you're on the road to ruin. A large company with deep pockets might sustain a negative ROI as a strategy to acquire long term repeat customers, but I would prefer to at least break even!

However, if you spend $100 on traffic and make a profit of $150, truly you have attained marketing nirvana. You can quickly increase your spending on advertising and watch your business blossom. It's not difficult to get traffic to a website, if you can afford it.

The most immediate and direct source of traffic is pay-per-click advertising. For example, GMtee advertises with Google Adwords. A Google search returns both natural search results (in the main body of the page) and sponsored search results (in a column on the right and sometimes also at the top of the page). With our Adwords account we bid against other advertisers to have our ads shown on search results for our specified keywords.

When somebody clicks on our ad they are taken to our home page and we pay a fee to Adwords. The cost per click varies for different keywords and we currently pay an average cost per click of US$0.24. If we bid higher for the most popular keywords our traffic would increase and so would our average cost per click.

It would be easy to write an ad to generate traffic. If GMtee advertised "Everything free: Today only!" and paid for top placement, I'm confident we'd have plenty of visitors. But the object of the exercise is not just to generate traffic, it is to generate qualified traffic. GMtee shirts are high-end so it would be wasteful to attract very price-conscious consumers. A good PPC ad accurately describes exactly what is on offer.