In the last few months we’re seeing more and more of our customers turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) as a cost effective route to market. In these tough economic climates companies want measurable results and through the use of on-page analytics, understanding the conversions rates versus the investment has never been easier to measure.

PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature. The problem most businesses face when approaching PPC is knowing how much budget to use and what keywords will bring the best returns.

Understanding what budget to use really boils down to how much you’re willing to invest and how much you’re prepared to pay for a prospect to click on your advert. As a company we always advise an initial test budget so that we can understand what keywords are providing the best returns.

Of course each keywords and phrase costs money, how much money is dependant on how competitive those keywords are. Understanding each keyword’s KEI (keyword Effectiveness Indicator) is really important as this determines the cost versus competiveness.  KEI is a measurement of how many times a keyword is searched for against how many times the keyword appears in other websites.  Ideally you want to seek out the keywords that are obviously relevant to your business, that are highly searched for and do not appear too many times, therefore making the KEI high. A simple equation is normally to divide the number of searches i.e. 100 by the number of time the keyword appear i.e. 30 equals a KEI of 3.3. The higher the KEI the better!

Often or not we find that a company’s keywords are too generic and industry related rather than user related.  Employees can be caught up within their own corporate bubble and the way they normally search for related products or services are not the way their customers do.

Research shows that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one so categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them i.e. mechanic > motor mechanic > motor mechanic Swindon . This also avoids people clicking on a generic keyword i.e. mechanic only to find that they are after an air-conditioning mechanic wasting your valuable budget!

However keyword research only provides an ‘estimate figure’ and through understanding actual result through a trial period will allow you to drill down and hone in on the keywords that are providing the most amount of traffic and the returns you seek.

It’s really important to keep a close eye on your PPC accounts and the statistics it provides. Often people new to PPC waste money in the early stages of their campaigns as they do not understand the processes involved. We also advise, certainly in the early stages to cap a budget i.e. if your budget is £30 per day and the budget is reached then the account automatically turns itself off making sure your spend does not become out of control.

In terms of the advert and relevance, we always ask our clients to think about the advert itself and landing page in which you are driving people to. The reason is that you’ve worked hard to position your advert in front of a prospect you must make sure that your advert stands out from the crowd and that the content is relevant to the advert i.e. The ad is not just taking the prospect through to your home page.  Most annoying and you’ll find that the prospect won’t stay around for very long!

To summarise; I like to think of PPC as the game of Poker, as it always takes a while to learn the game and to understand the hands (keywords- KEI) and your competitors, often you may waste a little but the rewards can be great!