Pay Per Click Marketing

Google lead the way in this – although other search engines (increasingly BING) offer a considerable exposure too.

PPC enables to client to choose a budget and choose key-phrases and literally dictate where a link to their site will appear within the search engines – albeit on the sponsored links. These sponsored links are paid for – with the highest bidder going to the top.

If you are in a niche market therefore, your choice of key phrases can be in pole-position for pennies and can start earning revenue straight away. The disadvantage with mainstream key-phrases is that conversely, good exposure may prove expensive.

Pay Per Click (Google)

When trying to get your web pages found, there are essentially two routes to go down within Google; the natural / organic listings which have no direct costs, or ‘Pay Per Click’, which as the name suggests is a paid for service. Common to both is the need for an understanding of the importance and use of keywords and the ‘optimisation’ of web pages, and the need to track the conversion rate i.e. how many visitors contact you as a direct result of your work on the PPC campaign. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of bringing greater numbers of ‘relevant’ visitors to your website via the natural or organic listings of the search engines, but optimisation will still need to take place to an extent in Pay Per Click advertising to ensure that the adverts you create and the pages that the adverts deliver visitors to are highly relevant to eachother.

What is Google Pay Par Click?

When you make an enquiry in the Google, the pages of search engine results it returns show the natural / organic search engine results on the left hand side of the page; this does not require payment to Google. On the right hand side of the page, and at the top of the page are the paid for Pay Per Click advertisements. Google’s Content Network also means that paid for adverts can appear certain web pages.

Why Google Pay Per Click?

There may be several good reasons why Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) is used including:

• As a controllable means of bringing highly relevant visitors to web pages / specially designed ‘landing pages’ regardless of the natural / organic listings.

• To gain visitors for a specific page within the website that isn’t ranking highly in the natural listings. The sheer number of web pages means that Google won’t be able to index, rank and list all the pages in a normal website.

• To supplement existing natural web listings.

• To bring visitors to new web pages which haven’t yet been listed in Google e.g. new pages.

The Benefits of Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is so popular because:

• Speed. Ability to impart offers/warnings etc VERY QUICKLY.

• Measurability. You can easily see which key phrases are working, how much you’ve paid and what the costs are. This, in conjunction with your web-stats and sales figures will allow you to calculate precisely how much each sale has cost you via the web.

• Reach. It has highly targeted reach e.g. adverts can be shown in countries / regions / cities / towns / locations, at certain times, certain days of the week, and between specified times on those days. It is also highly targeted in terms of long tail keywords (more precise multi word key phrases) that you can use to generate adverts.

• Flexibility. It is very flexible because adverts and keywords can be changed very quickly and easily, and new content can be added straight away. Also multiple adverts can be created, tested, and compared in terms of conversion. The results can allow you produce better adverts (and landing pages) based on your own real research.

• Control. Off and On-able! You can try a campaign for an hour a day, a month etc !Spending can be tightly controlled and measured. For example, there is no minimum spend, you can set and adjust the daily budget and the maximum cost per click, and you only actually pay when someone clicks on your advert, regardless of how many times your advert is displayed.

How Do You Use Google Pay Per Click?

As with any type of paid for advertising, you need to base your campaign on knowledge, research and profiling. This applies to the market, any particular niches or market segments, and your target customer.

Also as with all types of paid for advertising you should be trying to achieve the highest Return on Investment (ROI). Pay Per Click is highly measurable, so you are therefore be able to calculate your ROI using the following calculation:

ROI = net profit / Google Ad Words spend x 100

N.B. Net profit is your revenue minus total costs of the Google Adwords campaigns.

To get a really accurate figure of your ROI you will therefore need to know how many ‘conversions’ there were. Conversion tracking software can be used to help with this.

The Nuts and Bolts of Google Ad Words

The basic idea of Google Ad Words is that you choose keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your campaign and agree to pay a certain maximum amount every time there is a ‘click’. The clicks are on adverts that you create based around these keywords / key phrases, and by clicking on the advert a person is directed to a web page specified by you that relates to the keywords and advert. This page will ideally ask them to do something i.e. call you, sign up to something, give their contact details, maybe even purchase something.

Pay Per Click campaigns often work well in the stages before purchase i.e. building lists, or sending people a document (or download) that will help establish greater credibility, trust and anticipation which will later lead to a purchase. You will only pay when someone clicks on your advert.

How much you pay depends on a number of things:

• The budget you set. You can set a daily budget which means that once the clicks in a day use up the budget, your adverts won’t be displayed for the rest of the that day.

• The competition. Lots of people wanting to pay for the same keyword pushes the price up for that keyword – you are essentially ‘bidding’.

• The relevance of your Ad Group. How relevant your advert and the page it directs people to (the landing page / squeeze page) are to eachother and the key phrases.

A Google Ad Words account allows you to operate a maximum 25 advertising ‘campaigns’. As with offline advertising campaigns these should have goals, and with experience, some realistic objectives. Within each of these campaigns you can operate up to 100 ‘Ad Groups’. An Ad Group consists of:

Keywords. You will have selected certain specific key phrases that are particularly relevant to your specific offer / product / service, and if there is real evidence to suggest that your target market are using these specific key phrases in the search engines.

A landing page. This could be an existing page in your web site or a page you’ve specifically set up for your particular campaign. The landing page (sometimes known as a squeeze page) is the page that people will be sent to if they click on your advert. To be more successful, your landing page should contain, and should be highly relevant to the key phrases you’ve selected. This is why optimisation is important in PPC as well as in the for the natural / organic side of the search engines.

Adverts. These are the adverts you ideally create that are then displayed in the search engine results (on the right hand side and very top of the pages) when your chosen key phrases are used in a search engine enquiry.

A good Ad Group therefore contains well researched, tightly related keywords / key phrases. The advert and landing page should contain these keywords, and the text content should be highly relevant to them. The adverts could contain a strong motivator to encourage people to click e.g. the offer of a free download. The landing page should load quickly, should accurately reflect any offers or statements made in the advert, and should have a clear and strong call to action.

Keywords

These are the basis of Google Ad Words, as it is these that you are ‘bidding’ on. Keyword Selector tools e.g. Word Tracker can be used to discover how many people are searching for specific keywords, and what the level of competition is on the web for those key phrases. Important guidelines to bear in mind when selecting keywords for PPC are:

• The shorter key phrases / individual keywords / single ‘generic’ terms / ‘short tail’ keywords tend to have the most competition, can often be less relevant, are likely to be the most expensive ones to bid on. It is often a good tactic to target a variety of related keywords rather than just the few individual ones.

• Medium and long tail key phrases i.e. 2, 3 or more words in a key phrase, by their nature are likely to be more specific. This allows for much tighter targeting and a higher degree of relevance. Higher relevance leads to higher clickthrough rate on your adverts (the % of the times an ad is shown, also know as ‘impressions’) that resulted in a click. Longer tail key phrases are also likely to be used by people in the later stages of their buying cycle i.e. in the consideration and purchase stages. In the earlier stages of research, people are likely to use very general, short tail keywords. In terms of numbers there are likely to be many more long tail key phrases, and therefore more scope for getting the most out of market segments and niches.

• To increase relevance, and hopefully clickthrough rate, it’s often important to select and make a list of key phrases that you ‘don’t’ want your adverts to be displayed for when people type them into the search engines. These are called ‘negative key phrases’ and identifying them within your Ad Groups can be another way to help Google to ensure that you’re getting just the right audience for your adverts.

How Adverts are Ranked

As with the natural listings, Google has to decide which listing comes above another, and which order they are shown on the search engine results page.

Google allocates a Quality Score of between 1 and 10. This is strongly related to how relevant an advert, landing page, and your keywords are to eachother – the greater the degree of relevance, the higher the Quality Score.

Taking into account this Quality Score, Google’s Ad Rank metric uses the following calculation to work out the ranking of adverts:

Ad Rank = Quality Score x Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) bid (the most you can pay for a click on your advert).

Higher rankings and lower cost per click (CPC) are therefore likely to be the rewards for a high degree of relevance. Better Quality Scores will lead to higher Ad Ranks, which will in turn lead to higher clickthrough rates on your adverts, and hopefully higher conversion.

Planning for Success with Google Ad Words

Successful advertising campaigns within Google Ad Words therefore depend upon several things including planning and research, the intelligent selection of a good number of long tail key phrases, a strong focus on achieving a high degree of relevance, testing measuring and changing of Ad Groups to achieve maximum optimisation, and keeping your eye on achieving maximum Return on Investment.