Chapter 1: Buying Traffic through Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
If you’ve ever advertised a website, you probably used pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising.
A pay-per-click search engine is an advertising solution that allows you to place ads on a search engine results page. Your placement in these listings is determined by an auction style format, in which advertisers bid on specific keywords and phrases. The higher an advertiser’s bid, the higher their position for that particular keyword or phrase.
For a time, eBay had a very similar solution they called eBay Keywords. This allowed sellers to place ads for their listings on eBay’s search results page. The ads would be displayed at the top of the search results page (as shown in the image below) and sellers only paid when an ad was actually clicked on. In other words, sellers only paid for actual traffic to their listings.
eBay ended the eBay Keywords program however, leaving sellers to find other sources of paid traffic.
If you are subscribed to eBay Stores, then I highly recommend using pay-per-click (PPC) search engines to drive traffic to your Store. It’s a great way to advertise your listings and get traffic that you normally never would.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
Conversion Rates
Make sure that you’re converting at a rate that will allow you to recoup the cost of keyword advertising. If you’re sending lots of traffic to your listings, but are failing to convert that traffic into sales, then you’ll simply be throwing money down the drain.
Keyword Focus
Depending on what you’re selling, it is usually better to have tightly focused keywords rather than keywords that attract a broad range of traffic. For example, if you are selling books, bidding on the word “books” is probably not a great strategy. It is likely to get you a lot of untargeted traffic. Instead, you’ll probably want to focus your keywords on specific titles or authors.
For more detailed information about PPC search engines, visit the following my PPC Search Engine Guide.
Next: Getting Listed in Search Engines
Subchapters:
Optimizing Your Auction Title
Make Your Auction Listing Stand Out
Cross Promotion
Bait and Hook (NOT bait and switch!)
Buying Traffic Through Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Getting Listed in Search Engines
Chapter 1 Summary & Takeaways
Jump to another chapter:
Chapter 1: Driving Traffic to Your Auction Listing
Chapter 2: Listing for Higher Profits
Chapter 3: Does Any of this Stuff Work?
Chapter 4: eBay Stores
Chapter 5: Auction Management
Chapter 6: Doing Market Research
Chapter 7: Finding Products to Sell on eBay
Chapter 8: Mining eBay's Traffic
Chapter 9: HTML Tutorial
Chapter 10: Acting Like a PowerSeller
Chapter 11: Final Words