Pay per click (PPC)

Pay per click marketing is driving the online advertising revolution. As ad spend falls elsewhere, online advertising revenue has picked up the slack and to the point where it has now over taken terrestrial TV advertising spend in the UK.

This success is proof that the model works. Should your business be doing PPC?

What is PPC?

This involves placing short text ads on search engines and associated ad networks.

As an advertiser you select the keywords that you believe your target audience will enter into a search engine when they are looking for your offering. You write a short text advert for your offering. When a visitor to a search engine (the user) enters a search term, the search engine serves up adverts of advertisers whose keywords best match the search.

You are not charged when these ads are shown, as with most traditional media, but when someone clicks on your ad, hence pay per click.

The amount that you pay is determined by an on-going real-time auction in which advertisers bid for keywords. The more popular (or valuable) keywords are more expensive. The higher your bid, the nearer to the top of the listing your ad will appear.

The key to successful PPC

Like all good marketing, the key to successful pay per click advertising is set clear and realistic objectives and to put in place a structure campaign that will deliver against those objectives in a measurable way.

There are many elements to PPC and too many people focus on keywords, at the expense of everything else. This tends to deliver lower costs per click, but it does not necessarily deliver a good cost per acquisition. A thousand visitors to you site who do not by, no matter how low their cost per click, are worth less that one who does, even at a high cost per click.

The focus on PPC should be on conversion, not on clicks.

Alignment

Marketing is all about effectively targeting your message. So is pay per. In PPC there are 4 stages that need to be aligned - keywords, adverts, landing pages, conversion process. And this alignment needs to be set up for every element of your campaign.

Getting started

Google claim that you can have an Adwords campaign up and running in 15 minutes, which of course you can. But it is unlikely to be one that performs well.

If you would like to talk to us about how we would help you set up and manage a campaign, please give us a call - 0845 838 2328 / info@barnesgraham.com.