Pay per click advertising – and why it's essential for any business with a website
Google AdWords is not just for the cyber-space business
Pay per click advertising is one of the greatest and most successful direct marketing tools on the planet. And the PPC giant in the UK is Google “AdWords”.
Yes, pay per click is ideal for direct selling online. But, as internet marketing goes, it’s also perfect for a whole load of other sales and marketing goals. In fact, every business with a website that’s serious about growth should use PPC, especially AdWords. And that applies even if your business is bricks and mortar.
What PPC advertising can do for your business
Your business can be off-line, online – or both. You can have a simple “brochure” website. An informational site. A catalogue site. Or a full-blown e-commerce site. None of this changes the value to you of PPC advertising. No matter what market you are in, pay-per-click serves all sites. By delivering a variety of goals or actions, all of which can ultimately boost your sales and grow your business:
- Increase direct product or service sales online
- Increase sales for products or services delivered off-line
- Drive traffic, especially new visitors to your website
- Build your brand and with it brand recognition and customer loyalty
- Help you launch new products or services or penetrate new markets
- Get prospects to view specific web pages
- Create a mailing list you can use to promote and sell your goods and services
- Get you leads that you can follow up and turn into sales
Pay per click search results are measurable and ROI driven
When you use any other advertising medium it can be difficult if not impossible to tell precisely what is working for you. Not so with PPC advertising. You can test and measure the success of many aspects of your campaign: keywords, ads and types of ads, landing pages on your site, the networks you choose, and so on. Almost instantly.
You can also measure and track “conversions”. These occur when someone takes the action on your site that you’re seeking. See the list above. You can track your conversion rate. And you can track the sources of your conversions right down to the individual keyword, ads, landing page, network, and even, in some cases, the demographics of the visitors.
In other words, you can measure the return on every pound you invest in pay-per-click advertising (ROI). You can discover quickly how much each sale costs you to get; the cost of each lead, sign-up, and so on.
Pay per click advertising is flexible, targeted, international or local
- You can turn it on and off at will, so you can easily manage your costs
- From the UK, you can target most countries in the world – in most languages
- Narrow down to regions or even cities within those countries
- Target only the UK or parts of it
- Draw maps of the areas you want to target or create a radius around a selected place
- Target only your local region or city
- Target by demographics – e.g. aim at specific genders or at specific age groups
How pay per click search works
When someone types in a keyword, the search engines display their results on the left of the page. This is called organic search. On Google, at the top of each page, and down the right column, you’ll also see “Sponsored Links”. This is PPC (sometimes called “paid search”), because these are ads. They can be your ads. And you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. No clicks – no cost to you, but visitors can still view your ad.
Of course, the aim is to get clicks. Payment for clicks is keyword driven and on a bid basis. The amount you have to bid for each keyword on Google AdWords depends on a number of factors. These include what position you want for your ads, how much competition there is for your keyword, and what Google calls your “Quality Score” (QS). The QS is a measure of “relevance”, i.e. how relevant your keyword, ads and web page is to the visitor’s search query.
All this may sound very complicated, and it’s true that you need good skills and knowledge to get the best out of pay per click search. But that’s where we come in. We offer you ppc management, ppc search set up, and ppc training that will teach you how to do it all yourself, and ppc mentoring.
Pay per click advertising or search engine optimisation (SEO)?
When deciding your online marketing strategy, this is a good question. But it’s too big to deal with here, so I’ve written a separate article on this subject: "Search Engine Marketing".
