Pay Per Click (PPC)
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click (or PPC) is advertising that appears at the side (and sometimes top) or a web search. When you search or a word or phrase you will get two types or result displayed together.
In Google for example, the Paid listings are shown at the top (often in a coloured box) and down the right hand side of the page. The rest of the results are organic listings. These are not paid for, but there are many benefits to optimising your site for organic listings.
How does it work? Will I loose money?
Each time a visitor clicks on one of adverts, the account will be charged a certain amount, depending on how much they have set as their maximum cost per click. That sounds really vague. Can you explain what is going on?
Customer Difficulties
We often get customers saying that they don't really understand how Pay Per Click works or hear of stories that "Google spent all our budget up to the maximum we set". Both of these are familiar comments as PPC can be confusing, but as you can see it can also be costly when you make mistakes.
Preparing for Pay Per Click
With PPC, you are able to bid for any number of words or phrases. The more popular the word or phrase, the higher the cost will be for each click.
Understanding the Choice of Keywords
Think of a soemthing that you search for, for example 'laptops'. This would be a very competitive area and thus expensive for a PPC advert. It is also important to note that someone who is searching for 'laptops' may not necessarily be looking to buy a new laptop. They might for example be wanting to 'repair laptop' or 'selling laptops'. As we add more words to a search, and also to the PPC advert, we will more specific results. While the cost of each click may go down, the relevance of the search to your content will increase. With multiple word combinations, you may not get many click throughs, but those that do are key visitors to your site, so you need to be ready.
Preparing your website
We advise all our customers who want to utilise Pay Per Click to make sure that their sites have been designed properly and that they have made sure that they have seperated out their content using apropriate categories, so that each PPC advert has a page to go (or a landing page
Glossary - Learning the Lingo
Although a number of search engines have Pay Per Click schemes we focus mainly on Google AdWords, simply because Google is the most popular search engine. We have used Google AdWords for over 4 years and have enjoyed the experience.
- Budgete
- This is the amount you have chosen to spend for a given period
- Impressions
- This is the number of times your advert is displayed with the search results (no cost is incurred)
- Landing Page
- This is the specific web page that the advert takes you to
- Metric
- This is any type of statistics used to describe what is happening with a PPC advert
- Number of Click
- This is the total number of click during the specified period
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- This is the amount you expect to spend for each click on your advert
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- This is the number of amount you expect to spend for each click on your advert
The Process of Conversion
When someone clicks on your advert they will be taken to your landing page. This page will be shown to your visitor and should contain information that relates to your PPC advert. Once they arrive, you want them to have a call to action. This means that they have something specific to do, such as fill in a form, order a product or call the sales team. The more information you are able to collect from the visitor, the more likely you are to track them and turn them from a visitor into a customer.
At this point, you can start to look at the various metrics and see where you are wasting money and where money is better spent. These figures should be supplied by any company running a PPC advert for your and will give you the opportunity to calculate your Return On Investment (ROI).