Today, we examine one last misconception related to the use of your ad space and a final mistaken belief for the whole existence of pay-per-click.
 
Misconception#4: A company should include their name in the ad so people know who they are.

A pay-per-click ad allows for 25 characters in the headline and two lines consisting of 35 characters each. That’s not a lot of room to get your message across to qualified prospects while using your budget wisely. People often waste their characters repeating information.

For example, an ad will read “Great discounts at shoes.com” and the last line is the URL www.shoes.com

What I’ve learned: Every word counts in the pay-per-click ad space. Don’t waste your characters.

Google allows you to insert your website at the bottom of each ad, yet people still find it necessary to include it in the body.  With such limited space, the body of a ppc ad must be used as efficiently as possible. Convey your message well and interest in your website will follow.
 
That’s right. I said convey your message to generate interest in your website. This brings us to my final misconception.

Misconception #5: Pay-per-click ads should be designed to sell the product.

People often fall into the belief that they need to sell their product with their ppc ads similar to the way they would with traditional advertising.
 
What I’ve learned: Sell your website and the product sales will follow.

Pay-per-click ads offer such limited space to convey a message which makes it very difficult to truly sell your product or service. Use your ad to create interest in your website and then set your website up to convert the people who come in via your ppc ads.
 
Overall, generating success with ppc advertising campaigns is a process that is built one component at a time. A successful campaign must be built on a deep understanding of your customer, well-researched keywords, a well-managed budget and thoughtful messaging. I hope that you walk away having learned something new about this subject. After all, I got to learn these lessons the hard way. Here’s hoping you don’t have to stumble through these same mistakes.
 
My next series will tackle usability practices and the common misconceptions about how people use websites. You’ll be surprised how common assumptions result in big losses of consumer traffic.

This blog discusses search engine marketing and the most common misconceptions associated with creating paid search ads (pay-per-click ads).

When I first became acquainted with search marketing, I naturally assumed that anything that was “free and open to the public,” like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing was easy and could be done by practically anyone. And, so my first misconception about SEM was born.

Misconception #1: SEM is something anyone can do, previous skills and search marketing expertise not required.
 
It seems so simple. Pay-per-click advertising has so many tools that are free, and the giant of them all, Google AdWords offers plenty of “how-to” guidance on the site. If you need more help, there are books for that, right?

The illusion of these tools is their simplicity. The instructions for Google AdWords basically tell you to just create an account, pick keywords, write an ad and go!

What I’ve learned: Creating effective pay-per-click ads that affect your bottom line is a discipline and must be managed with an experienced and diligent eye, just like search engine optimization.

In my last blog series,  I made the same mistake with SEO, assuming it was easy to learn. Though services like Google AdWords are free and come with basic instructions, it takes time, dedication and experience to effectively execute pay-per-click ads.

My own experience with AdWords was, dare I say, a failed attempt (and I’m not picking on Google, it’s just the first place most people start). In addition to my own missteps, I often see businesses become frustrated with search marketing because they think it doesn’t work.

The truth of the matter is, a large portion of the people who use Google AdWords operate under this exact misconception, that search marketing is something everyone can do. They are not experienced enough to amass successful results from AdWords and, unfortunately don’t understand that SEM is a professional discipline.

So, if people misinterpret the actual complexity of Google AdWords, is it possible that there may be a few other misconceptions associated with SEM? I’m thinking of a word. A keyword, that is.

For the many people trying out the search engine marketing arena, a keyword may be a simple choice of words related to their business. My next blog will tell you why that just won’t do.

This blog series is all about Search Engine Marketing

The purpose of this series on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to reveal the truths behind the misconceptions and to clear up some of the confusion regarding digital marketing and its practices.
 
So let’s define search engine marketing…

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, search engine optimization and paid inclusion.

It is important to know that SEM is the larger umbrella under which many elements of digital marketing are placed, but is also the term most commonly used when referring to the pay-per-click ads found at the top and right hand side of SERPs.

For the sake of this blog series, SEM will refer to pay-per-click ads or paid search listings.

Users can access pay-per-click services, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing Search to create, manage and distribute paid search campaigns. Armed with the overall definition of SEM and free tools, can’t we simply move on and begin creating paid search ads? Stay tuned for the answer in my next blog.