Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Web Promotion
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google AdWords, is a way to reach lots of potential new clients the moment they search or browse for just the type of products and services you offer. These ads what you see next to the right (and sometimes on top of) search results labeled "Sponsored Links."
As opposed to normal advertising or other outbound marketing where you broadcast your message to the masses, this is clearly an inbound marketing concept where you just sit back and relax and let new leads come to you instead of you having to chase them. Just like the name suggests, you only pay for PPC ads when someone clicks on them. It's like placing an advert in a large magazine and only pay when someone calls you on the telephone or enters your physical store. Sounds good? Well it really is. And this also explains how Google could become to profitable.
But PPC doesn't work in isolation. You should always do keyword analysis and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at the same time, and you must have developed a website that is worth the visit, preferably with PPC links going to very specific subpages or landing pages of your site depending on which keyword(s) you bid on, which you accomplish with SEO onpage optimization. PPC reporting and your web analytics package should be used for constant monitoring of what ads and keywords work the best, not just in terms of clicks but in terms of conversions, i.e. becoming leads and ultimately paying customers.
Five Questions to Master for a Successful PPC Campaign
While it is very easy for anybody to sign up for a Google AdWords account and start bidding on a few keywords, if you are not an expert you will soon have many questions about the whole process, and perhaps many things you haven't yet figured out, like:
- What is each click/visit worth for your business? You need to both look into your business model and analyze your web traffic to get the answer to this question. The answer sets the limit for what keywords you can afford to bid on.
- How does the bid process work? Why does the price change all the time? And why is my ad not showing for a specific keyword search? The relative position of your ad (first, second, third, etc. next to search results) depend both on how much you bid and how well your ad is performing, i.e. how many people click on it. And how much you have to pay to bid depends on your ad performance history, if any, how your ad looks like, how well it matches that particular keyword, how relevant the page you link to is for that keyword, as well as the competition for that particular keyword and market, i.e. how many bid on the same keyword in the same geographic location.
- What keywords to bid on? As with so many other things in nature and business, and explained in the keyword analysis section, what people search for on Google and other search engines follow a pareto distribution, where generic, popular and one to two word keywords are searched the most, which we call the "head." And the more specific/niche and wordy keywords the smaller the search volume for that particular search, which we call the "long tail." But the interesting thing is that there are so many specific and niche keywords that it almost never stops, and the total aggregated search volume for the whole long tail is often as big as, or bigger, than the head. Which keywords do you think have the most bids, the biggest competition, and will cost you the most? Naturally for instance "logistics" and "logistics management" will be much more expensive than "logistics management software case studies" or "logistics management software for fashion retailers". You will not get as many impressions/eyeballs (people that view the ads) for long tail keywords, but you may get as many clicks. And which ones do you think will convert (i.e. turn into leads and potential paying customers) the most? Of course the more specific keywords, since it matches more precisely what people search for.
- What happens when someone clicks my ad? You need a strategy for what your visitor is supposed to do once they reach your site. What part of the site should they see for what keyword(s)? Or maybe you have to create customized landing pages? How to lead this person into your sales process?
- How to improve this process? You need to do constant monitoring of the keywords you bid on and their ads. Which have the best Click Through Rates (CTR)? One ad using slightly different wordings can have a CTR twice as high as a similar one! What happens with this extra traffic to your site? How to make a bigger pie of your visitors convert into leads?
How can we help?
If you have tried out Google AdWords or some other PPC platform you noticed it was quick to get started, but quite difficult to keep it going, and was it worth it? We can provide knowledge, experience and a systematic thinking to help you masters the five questions above.
This not only means you have one thing less to think about, handling this well will also be rewarded by Google with better positions of your ads and lower costs per click. That is, we can get you more visitors for less money.
And we will put it into the bigger picture of your business strategy, marketing activities, especially inbound marketing and SEO, your web development and web analytics, maybe even to automatically feed your leads into your CRM system.
Regardless of your marketing budget, you should always try to get as many visitors as possible from your relevant keywords from non-paid natural search, and complement with PPC/paid search only where you need to.