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The reason why people love pay per click (PPC) advertising is that it allows every advertiser to have a fair crack at the whip and advertise their company online via a level playing field. This is the idea anyway, the small time service providers taking on and winning against the largest companies in the world. In actual fact, this is not always the case, like most things in life, money talks. This is certainly true for pay per click.

Speaking to some potential advertiser they do get put off by PPC as they feel they cannot compete with the big companies who have the big wallets and appear to have an unlimited marketing budget to attract clicks to their keywords. So whilst PPC does level the playing field, the usual rules of marketing apply.

It is important to remember that PPC is not a silver bullet, it is part of a wider strategy and the more planning, information gathering and research you put into your PPC campaign the better your results will be. For example, instead of using highly competitive keywords try using a series of phases known as a ‘long tail strategy’ enabling you to spread your budget over a longer period. Often you’ll find that if you’re found under a specific phrase the enquiry is a more serious enquiry so the conversion rate theoretically should be higher.

The trick to PPC is to encourage people to your site who are likely to be interested in your products and services. The general rule is that the more detailed the search phrase, the more targeted the user is. It is important if you are a new PPC advertiser to try different words and phrases and continually monitor your budget and success rate. I can not stress enough how important it is to research your keywords and phrases. You can find out the average traffic for your keywords and phrases by using the keyword traffic indicators when setting up your campaigns however these are only estimates and nothing beats the real thing. Don’t be afraid to use a thesaurus and definitely put yourselves in the mind of your customers who are doing the searches. Often the best place to find good keyword information is your web site statistics. (LINK THROUGH)

Another advantage with PPC is you can cap your budget, I am a PPC advertiser and limit my monthly budget to an amount my business can firstly afford and secondly what provides me with a return on my investment. You can use Google’s Budget Optimiser, which will automatically adjust your maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) according to your budget and will seek out the most clicks possible within your budget. If you’re new to PPC spend some time familiarising yourself with these types of tools and remember that ultimately Google want you to spend money with them, s don’t always do what they suggest.

Something that is often overlooked by inexperienced users of PPC is the effectiveness of their landing page. If you’re paying for people to visit your site, you have to work hard to ensure that they stay on your page and they convert to whatever objective you set for your PPC campaign. This sounds basic, yet we receive many calls a month from companies telling us they are spending thousands without a return, and when we look into it their landing page is their home page. If your PPC advertising is about green dishwashers, make sure the landing page is about green dishwashers and definitely make sure there is a click to action on that page.

PPC does work, especially in the case of an online publishing company who regularly spend £10,000 a month. This sounds like an awful lot of cash to be spending on PPC, however his returns are usually in the region of £20,000 per month, so to this company it makes absolute sense. Their focus is now on improving the conversation rate and capturing as much information about their visitors as possible, so that in future they can market to them directly via email, which is obviously less expensive.

This blog article referred to the beauty and the beast of PPC advertising. Hopefully it is clear what the beauty of PPC is by now? Just to recap, the beauty of PPC is the opportunity to quickly create targeted traffic to your web site. Now it is time to cover some of the beast elements of PPC.

In my mind, there are few areas of PPC to be cautious about… the beasts. One of these is to make sure that you do not have a beast of a landing page. We’ve covered that already in this article, more information can be found by clicking on creating a landing page. If your landing page does not convert then you are wasting your traffic and making Google (or whatever PPC engine you use) richer and yourself poorer.

Another beastly element of PPC is the potential for click fraud. This is when a user, a script or a computer programme clicks through on adverts in order to use up the advertisers budget quicker. An example of this might be your competitor clicking on your adds with no intention of buying your service. This problem does exist, you need to be aware that it exists. The major PPC providers do track the clicks, however it is very important that you monitor and analyse your own data and question any unusual click activities.

There’s also the problem of MFA (made for advertising) sites, these are web sites that have been created with the sole purpose of encouraging their users to click through on the ads their showing. The benefit for these sites is that they earn a fee every time an ad they show is clicked on. These types of sites have been in the spotlight for a few years now and I know that Google for one are doing everything to combat these types of sites. Unfortunately, the truth is that MFA sites are good for Google because they encourage clicks and therefore boost their profits. This is not always in the best interest of the advertiser though.

I’d be interested in hearing about your own pay per click experiences (bad and good) as there is some interesting anecdotal evidence that you receive a boost in the organic SERPs when you start using PPC. We’ve been testing this internally with a number of clients and there seems to be some truth in this rumour, however it is very difficult to prove.

As always, please feel free to post your comments below.