Pay per Click explained
Pay Per Click or PPC advertising is a paid for listing on the search engines. If you enter a search term on to Google for example you will notice a list of results appear down the right hand side of the page. These are paid for; businesses buy advertising on specific search phrases, and are then charged each time a person clicks through to their website.
The ads are ranked, based on how much a business is willing to pay to advertise on each search phrase. (The ranking order in Google is a combination of the bid amount and the popularity of the ad.) For example, a search phrase might be priced at £0.56 per click for the top position and the number 2 advertiser might be paying a penny less. Very competitive search phrases will command higher prices and less competitive ones, a lower price per click.
This is where key phrase research is vitally important to setting up a good PPC campaign. You need to find the phrases that are not too competitive and therefore expensive, but not so obscure that no one uses them. Have a brainstorming session and write down the phrases that you think people are most likely to key in to find your product/business. Then using a tool like wordtracker you can assess each of these phrases and find out; how many people use them and which other sites compete for them.
It is worth knowing that Google allows you to use either broad, exact or phrase matches. When your keyword is broad-matched, it will trigger your ad whenever that keyword or similar term appears in a user's query. This means that your ad will still appear even if other words are included in the query. Broad matched keywords also don’t distinguish between plural and singular search terms so your ad will be shown regardless of the syntax used by the searcher. If for example your broad match keyword is book, users typing in terms such as used book or latest books will be shown your advert.
Now you have your phrases and your website is listed on the first page for the search terms you have chosen. It is very important that you now send visitors to the most appropriate page of your website. If you place an ad for a specific product within your online store, don't send visitors to your homepage and force them to dig for what they just searched. This will frustrate your visitors and more often than not they will give up and look else where.
It is also a good idea to build unique ads or pages for each search phrase that you are targeting. It might take a lot more time to do this but the extra work will definitely be rewarded. Ads that are aligned with the corresponding search term receive more clicks, which will mean more targeted traffic, and in some cases paying less per click (on Google Adwords) due to the intricacies of how the advertising is priced. Budgets for the campaigns can be set for a daily, weekly and monthly spend, so you can cap the spending within the period.
Finally, be sure to track your results. You need to be constantly measuring which terms are delivering results for your business. There are free tracking tools available through Google Adwords and Overture which will enable you to analyse your results. You will quickly see which phrases are working for you and you can make adjustments accordingly.
However diligently the campaign is set up, pay per click advertising is not an exact science. The dynamic nature of the internet, coupled with changing consumer behaviour, seasonal buying cycles and local factors such as stock availability and product popularity mean any campaign needs to be monitored and updated on a regular basis.
This is the beauty of PPC, it achieves instant results and you can control exactly how much you want to spend by capping the costs. You can change your keywords as often as you like. You are in complete control of the campaign from start to finish.
If you need help with pay per click advertising, we can help you. Call us now on 0117 9299150 or email us.