Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service.
When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown.
Most of the traffic you expect to get when advertising with PPC will come from Google Adwords, followed closely by Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter, therefore, the majority of PPC Professionals specialise and concentrate on these three.
Not saying that you should completely forget about the other PPC Advertising providers out there, in fact, I have found that the FaceBook PPC works wonders for Brand Awareness.
So who should include Pay Per Click in thier marketing plan?
PPC is for both established and large sized companies with big budgets and the small start-ups keeping their spend as low as they can.
For the ones with smaller budgets
For the start-ups among you, my initial reccommendation whilst you are still relatively new would be to invest in even as little as £50 on your ad spend, and my advice would be to start with Google Adwords.
If this is the case, it wouldn't be worth while for you to pay a specialist to manage it for you as it would probably cost you more in management fees than you spend for your clicks, but for those of you that are keen to learn and are on a tight budget, managing your own campaigns could be the way for you.
HOWEVER, although Google have made it very easy to sign up and to get to grips with everything, there are many things to consider and to learn, and managing your campaign can (and in some ways, should) become a full time job, if done correctly.
For the ones with bigger budgets
If you are planning on spending hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands on PPC, in my opinion... Either employ a full time, in house PPC specialist or hire the services of a Pay Per Click Specialist/Company.
Not only would you then have time on concentrating and performing well in your job, but you will then have confidence that your PPC campaign was being managed and optimised properly.
What Pay Per Click Specialists should do for you
Different people will manage your campaign slightly differently than others, and what I write here isn't and shouldn't be set in stone, but will hopefully get across two things... 1. How much PPC companies actually do and 2. You will now know the kind of questions you should be asking your providers.
The main campaign goal should be to get highly relevant clicks at the cheapest possible cost. By stream-lining and optimising your campaign for these two purposes you may see a drop of traffic however.
A lot of companies/clients that I have worked with in the PPC industry rate success by the amount of traffic they receive.
I believe that the key is not about the total traffic volumes one can achieve with their PPC campaign, but is rather the amount of leads/sales you get as a result from it.
If you receive and pay for 10,000 clicks and only one of them converts in to a sale, then there is something wrong. My best bet though would be down to your campaigns and ads relevancy.
Its better to receive and pay for 50 clicks and make one sale than to receive and pay for 250 clicks and receive the same amount of sales.
In my opinion, and depending on the amount you are spending with them (perhaps your provider has different PPC packages which includes different levels of service), the following should be included in your PPC campaign:
- Extensive Keyword Research
- Initial Campaign Set-Up
- Creation of Multiple Ads focussing on 1 (possibly 2) keyword batch(es)
- Individual Ad optimisation
- Split Testing
- Smart seperation between Google Search and Content Network
- National and Local Adword Creations
- Stats Reporting
- Landing Page Optimisation Consulting
Obviously there are many many more things that should be included, lots of tricks of the trade, playing with relevancy techniques such as 'Peel and Stick', Continuous Ad Optimisation and playing with the times your ads are shown.
Whether you are a small or large company, or a budding PPC specialist yourself, I am sure to add at least one article on here at some stage that will be of some help to you, and hopefully save/make you a lot of money.
