On Internet Business

Making Pay Per Click work for you

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Paid Search

There are good and bad sides to pay per click marketing. If you’re new to the PPC world or need a refresher in how to do it well, here are the good and bad parts of PPC.

PPC explained

It’s a simple concept – Google, Yahoo and other search engines and search services will offer listings on a bid basis. These listings appear either above, or to the right of, the ‘natural’ search results which are generated by a complicated blend of website keywords, link popularity and other elements. Each search engine has a algorithm that calculates natural search results but pay per click results always appear, regardless of the quality of your site or links, as long as you’ve bid enough for the keyword that generates the search results.

Depending on how much you pay, you will be the first ranking site in the paid listings or further down. Obviously, the big brands can pay more to make sure they always hog the top spot on popular words, so it’s worth finding search terms that are relevant to your business and used in searches.

When somebody clicks on a pay per click listing, they land at your site, and then you are charged the amount that you bid for your listing. So if you bid 10 pence per click on ‘shrubs’ and 100 people click on your pay per click listing, the search engine (or a PPC service that you’re using) will charge you £10.00

Obviously then, you need to ensure your bids generate enough income to cover their charges and then some! You don’t want to just be servicing a PPC campaign, you want it to generate substantial income.

Good reasons to use PPC

The good stuff is very good indeed:

1) It can drive a lot of traffic to your site
2) It happens in as little as a few minutes – unlike natural searches which can take a while and require you to do a lot of work on SEO and content to reach the top of the rankings, your bidding can put you top and drive traffic within half an hour of signing up
3) You have to write a good advert, but that’s easier than writing a similarly good website
4) PPC campaigns can be adjusted swiftly – it can take weeks for natural searches to adjust to new content, but a PPC campaign can be tweaked in a couple of minutes
5) If you are selling goods or services that people can buy the second they arrive, like insurance, gifts, an appointment with a therapist … anything that sells immediately out of an online storefront, PPC generates immediate income
6) Using PPC as a focused tool for a short term campaign can generate more income than anything else.

PPC goes wrong for reasons that are not always understood by businesses but the bad stuff is avoidable if you understand it:

1) PPC is a risk and should be treated as one, not as a guaranteed reward system
2) If you don’t manage it well, you can spend a lot of money on creating a high number of visitors but still end up without income generation
3) Getting involved in automatic bid management (as you can opt for with several systems) can mean that every time a competitor bids up, you do too, without necessarily knowing it’s happening, and that means you can end up paying a lot more than you intended
4) Return on investment can be hard to understand if you don’t devote enough time to exploring the analytics you get back, or if your service doesn’t provide good enough analytics to understand what works, when, and why
5) PPC doesn’t seem to drive long term brand recognition as well as natural search does.

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