Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, Setup and management

PPC advertising is an internet advertising model on which you pay the advertising network every time someone clicks on your advertisement. It is an extremely powerful mode of advertising as you can instantly show your ad to potentially hundreds of thousands of potential customers within less than an hour of campaign set-up.

PPC is mainly associated with search engines paid ads (text ads), which you normally see down the right side of a search page, although they can be in the form of banners or displayed as sponsored ads on various content websites (known as AdSense ads).

When done well, pay per click can be a very cost effective source of constant stream of targeted traffic and income, that can be turned on and off as required. If done poorly and left unchecked, it can be financially crippling.

How PPC Works

If your familiar with using the internet to make searches in Google, you will have seen the list of ‘sponsored links’ at the top and the right hand side of the page. These are PPC ads and if you’re willing to spend the money, you can get your site to appear in those lists of links.

The way PPC works is that you bid a certain amount of money (starting with as little as a few pence)  in order to get your add to appear whenever someone  searches for specific keywords. Keywords or key-phrases are whatever someone types into a search box on a search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN (3 largest search engines).

Putting together a PPC campaign with Google Adwords or one of the search engines is relatively straightforward, albeit quite time consuming. However, setting up a PPC campaign correctly is not so easy and involves consideration of quite a number of inter-related variables. Setting up a PPC campaign incorrectly will invariably result in higher cost per click, less traffic to your site and less targeted traffic i.e. a poor return on investment.

PPC Campaign SetUp

We can help your business with PPC campaign setup by first picking keywords phrases from the results of our keyword research to find out what they are likely to cost. Through trial and error we’ve worked out tactics for PPC keyword research that can help to streamline this task so that it doesn’t become a huge time sink, but the time involved is more or less relative to the size of the campaign.

Next comes writing effective ads. This is an interesting challenge, to pack a marketing wallop into a 25 character headline and two 35 character descriptive lines. Also, the way the ad is composed will affect how much a click will cost! Google has its own mathematically determined “opinions” about ad relevance, and not satisfying them can double the keyword price! It’s best to start out with 2 ads and see which one is most cost-effective and results-effective.

Now we set up the actual campaigns. The strategy here is to set up Campaigns and Ad Groups as a logical structure that will be easy to maintain over time. It needs to be granular enough to provide valuable feedback on the effectiveness of each ad and keyword. That will be essential to tuning the campaigns for maximum performance and minimum cost.

The most important part of setting up a PPC campaign is linking it in with Web Analytics so that we can analyse the quality of the traffic that comes from each individual ad / keyword. Concidentally, this also turns out to be *the* most effective means for researching keywords for organic SEO!

Campaign Management

After the campaigns are all set up and the ads begin to run, there is a phase of tuning the campaigns to peak performance. Some ads may be best confined to run in specific geographical areas. Some keywords should be run with “broad match” which will make the ads show up for a wide variety of related terms, while others should be forced to respond only to the specific phrase. For some keywords, targeting AdSense ads (the ads that go on websites) will be more cost-effective, while others will produce far better results if the ads are run only on actual search results pages. Finally there is the option of targeting ads to run on specific selected sites for a flat rate per thousand “impressions” rather than a per-click cost.

Tracking and monitoring what is working and what is not working is imperative to a successful PPC campaign, for without it you can not optimize your PPC campaign for maximum ROI (return on investment). We use both Google Analytics and our own proprietory software to track and monitor (down to the keyword level) where converting traffic is coming from and begin the process of optimizing for keyword phrases identified as buying keywords that brings you business and then scaling the campaign to ensure that your business ad gets maximum exposure for that buying keyword.

If you are on a tight budget you will want to learn how to do all of that so that you can set up and manage your pay-per-click campaigns yourself. For everyone else there’s ROI Web Solutions.

So how much will it cost to have all this done for you? The cost of setting up the actual campaigns could vary a great deal. We have proprietary software tools that make quick work of setting up individual keyword tracking for web analytics, and we know how to use the data from web analytics to tune your PPC campaigns for the best ROI. We recommend that you allocate a minimum of £2000.00 to spend over the first two to three months for campaign setup and monitoring. After that the cost goes down radically. Maintaining a really well set up campaign over time can is a far less time consuming aware as only minor adjustments and teaks may be required. If you’d like, we can teach you how to do it yourself.

Beyond that, you need to decide how much to allocate to the actual cost of advertising. If your budget is less than, say, £400/month to spend on clicks then we would question whether PPC is really right for you at all.

Regardless of your budget, it is crucial to have the feedback of Web Analytics that can show what people did after they clicked through to your sales landing page. That feedback will tell us what we need to know about keyword choice, ad effectiveness, geographic targeting, ad venue targeting, and matching strategies. Even more importantly it will tell you how effective the website itself is at converting visitors to customers.

If you believe that pay-per-click advertising may be right for your business, gives us a call on 0333 344 1107 for a free no obligation consultation.