A Beginner’s Guide to using PPC
Understanding Pay Per Click Advertising
One of the biggest decisions facing most businesses when they are analyzing their online presence is how to advertise online and how to get their business noticed above the thousands of other websites that compete in their field. One popular method of doing this is to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.
Pay Per Click gives you a number of advantages in marketing terms and means your site will start to get noticed more. You will see an increase in click through rates to your site and the products you are selling and you should, if you plan your Pay Per Click campaign right, see an increase in sales conversions too. This is because one of the main advantages of Pay Per Click is that you are advertising only to those people who are clearly interested in checking out your products or business. They will only be coming to your site if they have already entered a specific search phrase that is relevant to your business, site or product. And this will have happened through one of two methods – either via organically made search engine results or through PPC results that you have spent money on.
The first question most businesses will ask is how difficult is it to buy your place at the head of the search results? And then it is necessary to work out how cost effective and how effective in marketing terms PPC will be for you. The quickest way to do this is to enter a search term for something you will be selling. Lets say your company will be selling hand made wooden toys. Start off by typing “wooden toys”, or “handmade wooden toys” into Bing, Yahoo and Google and then analyze the results you get back. On the screen you’ll see two different sets of results, the natural search results and the listings that are called ‘sponsored results’ or ‘sponsored links’ depending on the search engine you are using. These sponsored results are set aside for those companies that have paid for their wooden toy company to rank at the top of the front page, or at least close to it.
The sponsored results are ranked depending on the amount that each individual person or business is willing top spend on their advertising for that phrase. Therefore, the phrase ‘wooden toys’ might cost $35 per click for the top spot and $30 for the next place and so on. However Google does not tell you what companies are bidding for their listing, so you have to just set your own price and see where that gets you. There are many companies who prefer instead to concentrate their efforts completely on search engine optimization (SEO) and try to rank their business organically in the regular search results. This is a good way of doing things but can be time consuming. In addition there are certain particular scenarios where PPC is well worth investing in. Firstly, it is useful when you want to start ranking immediately for a search term, whilst you go about the slow process of growing your site on the organic natural search results using search engine optimization. Secondly, you might use it when you want to launch a particular promotion for your site outside of your normal search terms. Thirdly, it is useful for testing and measuring customer response and their click through and conversion rates. And lastly you might decide to use PPC in combination with your SEO strategy because you have calculated that the total amount you need to spend on PPC works out less than the money you will make from the click through customers that use it. In other words, you’ll use it if it is a profitable strategy for you.
Finally, the last thing to remember is that PPC will only cost you as much as you want to spend. You are able to set a limit with the search engines as to how much you are able to spend each month. One way of working out this limit is to work out how many people search for your phrase every month in your region and then calculate how much your competitors spend and how much you are ready to spend. Once you have done this you can build your strategy so that your outgoings on PPC will allow you to bring in more profits than the money you spend.
Alex is a freelance journalist and copywriter living in the UK. He likes to write about jazz and cricket but these days seems to be mostly writing about search engine optimisation .