“During the past four years we’ve monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as ‘good traffic’ by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines.”

Click Forensics has found malware associated with the botnet in search results on Google for “Facebook Fan Check virus.” The malware behaves similarly to the advertising malware that the New York Times fell prey to last weekend. The Times inadvertently sold advertising to a “scareware” program that encouraged consumers to download malware-checking software. The software itself was actually malware.

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Pay per click marketing can be very effective for getting the word out about your blog. This is especially true if you have affiliate programs you promote there. Many bloggers know what pay-per-click is, of course, but they don’t have a full understanding of the various elements of it.

Following is a brief overview of pay-per-click, and three key factors that go into making up a successful pay-per-click ad.

Definition of Pay Per Click

Pay per click is simply a paid way of driving traffic to an online presence (blog, website). The marketer pays a fee every time a web surfer/visitor clicks on their ad.

The overriding goal of pay-per-click campaigns is to drive “qualified” traffic to a site. Once there the visitors are then asked to do something, ie, make a purchase, subscribe, call for more info, ask for a free quote, etc. You, the marketer, determine what action you want the visitor to take.

While these ads are small, they can be extremely difficult to write – if you don’t know what you’re doing. Following are three key areas every pay-per-click ad should pay attention to.

3 Key Elements of a Successful Pay Per Click Ad

Keywords: This is where you make or break your pay-per-click ad campaign. Your keywords should of course be highly relevant to your niche. This should be reflected in your landing page (the page visitors land on when they click on your ad).

You should spend a good amount of time doing extensive keyword research before you write your pay-per-click ad because what you think may be a popular keyword or keyword phrase may not be.

Headline: Your headline is what potential visitors see first, so it is yet another vital part of your pay-per-click ad. Some internet marketing experts say that you have less than three seconds to grab a prospect’s attention — and you have to do it in 25 characters or less (the headline of a pay-per-click can only be 25 characters (not words, characters)). Hence, each character is a precious space.

Pay Per Click Ad Writing Tip: If you don’t remember anything else, remember this – get your main keyword(s) in your headline. Remember the goal is “targeted” traffic. Your keywords drive targeted traffic.

URL: Your URL should also contain your keyword where possible. For example, if you have a site selling antique dolls, an excellent URL would be antique-dolls.com. This not only tells the potential visitor what your site is all about, it tells search engines too – and this is what pay per click is all about – making it easy for search engines to properly categorize your site so that they can deliver “targeted” traffic to your site.

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• PPC Ad Group Generator
• CPC ROI Calculator
• CPC ROAS Calculator
• A/B Split Test Calculator

This flowchart offers tips on how to set up a pay per click search engine marketing campaign.

• Many of the boxes are clickable, and link off to useful tools or content that add further explaination.
• This advice assumes you start with an account on Google.com, and then take the best parts and syndicate them to Yahoo! and Microsoft. In some cases you might have more profit margin on the other search engines than on Google.
• You do not need to do every option on each line, they are just tips and ideas that should work in many cases.
• Based on your feedback we are up for making further improvements to this flow chart.

PPC Blog

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