What is PPC?
When you search on your preferred search engine for a product or service, you're shown results for that search, at the top and down the right hand side of the page are shaded boxes and in the top of the box are the words 'Sponsored Ads', the rest of the pages are what are called the organic listings or map listings, the 'Sponsored Ads' section are the PPC section where advertisers have 'bid' for the ad to show, I say bid because advertisers ads enter into an auction to be shown when someone searches for their product or service and depending where they come in the bidding depends where the ad gets shown.
Keywords
when setting ads, advertisers need to set some keywords, words that are relevant to the business that someone searching for a product or service will type into the search engine, every word has a different cost per click depending roughly how many advertisers there are and how much they are bidding for it therefore where you set your bid can make your keyword show or not be shown in the ads. The people bidding the highest will win the auction and so have their ad shown first.
Setting a budget
When setting up your ad, you are asked to set a budget, you may set a budget of £10 per day and let's say you set a bid of £1, once your ad has been shown and clicked on 10 times your ad will stop being shown for that day.Lets say your competitor sets a budget of £10 also and and set a bid of £1, your ads will stop being shown around the same time, If however you set your budget at £15 your ads will be shown longer so you should get more business than your competitor. If however you set your budget at £10 but your bid at 75 pence once your competitor's budget has been used up your ad will start showing at the top later in the day once your competitors budget has been used up. The one thing with PPC is that once your set budget runs out it's like saying right I'm closing the shop - no more sales today. one benefit is that if you become busy you can turn it off and when you need more business turn it back on again. One tip is to set your ads so they show all the time at the start and see when you get the most clicks, then re set the times your ads show to only the times you get the most clicks.
The Ad
The ads that you create are limited to a certain amount of characters and you need to make it compelling to the searcher to click on it, It also needs to have relevant keyword(s) that searchers are looking for, a relevant ad has more chance of being shown over a competitors and more chance of being clicked on by the searcher. When starting your campaign you should create around 10 Ads and test them to see which gets clicked on the most and then you take the best performing ad and create variations and pretty much repeat that all the time.
Your website
I'm going to keep this short, If your website is not good your prospective customer will bounce ie leave your website, in other words you'd have wasted your money on PPC, make sure you have a good and well designed website before initiating a PPC campaign.
The networks
The three main networks for advertising your site are Google Adwords (the most used) Microsoft advertising and Yahoo Advertising Solutions, Google has more people using it for searching therefore it has more people advertising on it, the other two have less people using them so less advertisers which can mean you spend less or get more for your budget.
Conclusion
This has been a simplified overview of using Pay Per Click Marketing and PPC can be great for getting new business, however it can take time to tweak it to get it right, the right ad, the right budget, the right bid etc. It really is a science or art, whichever way you want to look at it. PPC done well means you can get more business than your competitors and spend less than them, this is when it's done well!
To your PPC marketing success
Paul
*Except for when you Pay Per Impressions
PS If you run a business in Hertfordshire or don't mind travelling to Hertfordshire then you may be interested in my Google Adwords marketing 121 training
Thanks Paul, this is really thorough! I understand that you can set a budget but I think the thing that worries me slightly is spending that budget wrongly, if you know what I mean...although I suppose you would find out quite quickly if that were the case.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the website is the key - what happens when they arrive there - does the potential customer know what to do?
Thanks Sarah, yes a budget can be spent very quickly, especially when you first start a campaign. I've written a post on that which will be published on Thursday, which will help you minimise your spend and help you get a better return.
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