Pay per Click (PPC) is a form of online advertising which directs traffic to the advertiser’s website once a user clicks on an advert. The advertiser pays each time his/her advert is clicked hence the name pay per click. However when starting out a pay per click campaign what are the key things to remember and look out for?

1 ) Pick a trusted easy to use platform. The industry favourites are Google adwords and Yahoo search marketing. Most advertisers use Google, this is because more users search on Google in comparison to other search engines.

2 ) Select a budget. Decide on an overall maximum daily budget, this will determine how many clicks you can afford, the more money the more clicks. Secondly decide on how much you want to bid for each click (Cost per Click). The average bid for a click is between 80p and £1.20. Remember that you can always increase you budget once you know what keywords are working for you. There is no need to go in guns blazing.

3 ) Select Key words that are relevant to the website you are trying to promote.  These are the words which users will search for. Think of what users will type into Google to find your products, make sure your key words match the description of what you are offering. If your advert is displayed for keywords that have no relevance to your website, you will be wasting money on clicks which will not convert to sales.

4 ) Create an Objective. If you’re looking for the result of a campaign to be a sale, then create a target objective within the platform so that you can trace how many clicks convert to sales. You’ll end up with a percentage of clicks that meets your objective. The higher the percentage the more successful your ad.

5 ) Watch and observe. Keep a close eye on your campaigns, preferably daily. Analyse which campaigns are doing well, what key words are working, what the click through rate is. This will help you re-direct your campaigns.

6 ) Select key words round two. If certain keywords have low click through rates it could mean that customers are looking for a different product to what you are offering. If Keywords aren’t performing then change them, this technique will overtime refine your campaign to optimise your success.

7 ) Look out for CTR. As mentioned above click trough rate is a ‘must’ to measure. You want a high CTR percentage as this shows that the users clicking your advert are finding what they were looking for. A low CTR means the keywords aren’t working and it’s time for change!

8 ) Move on and expand. As your campaign moves forward add more keywords. If you are using Google adwords, they can recommend some for you or try being more specific about certain products you’re offering. If your adverts are receiving a maximum amount of clicks for the budget you’ve set, why not increase your daily allowance to gain more traffic.

9 ) Keyword Quality. This is important to maximise your budget and results. Quality keywords will have a high click through rate, these are the keywords you want to focus your money on. Any keywords not relevant to your website and with a low CTR will be dead weight to you and a drain on your budget.

10 ) Get your ad ranked. You want your advert to be placed as high as possible. The three main areas to improve ranking are relevance, quality and maximum bid. By creating relevant keywords and a quality site you will defiantly help improve your ranking amongst other adverts. But remember a large factor is your keyword bid; companies that have a higher bid are more likely to have a higher ranking.

If you would like to learn more about PPC please get in contact, we would love to chat to you. Alternatively if you would like to add to our tips, why not post a comment below.

Before we go into the way Pay Per Click (PPC) works in the web advertisement world, let us understand what PPC is.

PPC is a model which is used for Internet marketing. It is a web advertising tool in which the payment is made to the host by the advertisers when their advertisement on the web receives a click. In the other case, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine and other Internet publishers when his advertisement receives one or more clicks which bring traffic to his website. This advertisement model is called Cost Per Click (CPC). As far as the search engines are concerned, keyword phrases become very important for advertisers to bid on, and these keyword phrases are more connected with the market that the PPC advertisers are targeting, which bring the visitors to the page displaying the advertisement.

PPC is a model which is called an affiliate model. This differs from the usual model of advertisements, where the intention of the advertisement is to drive traffic to the concerned website. PPC is an advertisement model which is placed on websites of several hosts, and this provides purchase opportunities for the surfers where-ever they may be surfing. PPC offers financial incentives to the advertiser’s affiliate partners in form of a percentage of the revenue earned. PPC is an accepted and popular model in affiliate programs. There are other programs other than PPC, and these include, banner exchange, revenue sharing programs, and others.

Surfers use keyword phrases in search engines to look for products or services they want to avail. When one of these keyword phrases matches the keyword list of an advertiser, the website having a relevant PPC advertisement is displayed to the visitor. These types of advertisements are termed as ’sponsored links’ or ’sponsored ads’, and are mostly found near or above the adjacent results produced by search engines. These advertisements may also appear in other places on the content page depending upon where the developer wishes to place them.

The Internet is browsed by millions of people looking for one thing or the other and this has set the growth in Internet marketing. Advertisement models are constantly evolving and PPC is one such model which has become very popular. There are several others using different kinds of models. However Pay Per Click Campaign (PPC) has become one of the best and effective way to market your products or services on the Internet.

PPC is a way in which you advertise your business on the web with your advertisement appearing on the top and side of search engine results. They also appear on the web pages of the network of advertisers, where the advertisements are displayed at appropriate places on the pages. When keyword phrases match that of the advertiser’s list of keywords, the visitors are brought to the page displaying the advertisement.

The three other largest network operators are, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCente, and they co-exist along with several PPC providers. All of the network operators work on the basis of a bid based advertisement model. There has been known click fraud in case of PPC advertisement models. However, Google and others have devised automated systems to prevent such frauds. The abuse of PPC advertisement model mostly comes from clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.

DIY Pest Control has been actively involved in urban and rural pest control since qualifying through the British Pest Control Association in 1991. In 2009 diy-pest-control.co.uk was launched, its aim is to provide the best advice and latest technology to help you to control pests in your home or office.

DIY Pest Control have noticed an increase in natural and organic pest control solutions, and alongside traditional pest control products wanted to support the new site launch by targeting traffic via Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is Google’s flagship advertising product; it offers pay per click (PPC) advertising and site-targeting advertising for customers. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger and present their adverts and specify the maximum amount that they are prepared on a cost per click basis.

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 objective of DIY Pest Controls campaign was to raise awareness, increase traffic and increase sales. It was also a great opportunity to learn and analyse the traffic trends and customer behaviour, as unfortunately this information was not available due to the website only just recently launching.

Initially, Generate UK worked with DIY Pest Control to establish the target keywords; these would be the keywords/phrases that would be bid for in order to attract targeted traffic. Once the keywords had been identified, they were put into relevant keyword families, each family focused on a small number of keywords/key phrases.

The campaign contributed to a huge increase in visits to the site, accounting for as much as 69% of total visits. The increased traffic also contributed to a growth in the number of sales of products, which in turn helped grow the DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk database. Using Google’s own Goals Overview system, it was possible to see how the sales funnel was performing and make informed improvements on the fly.

Rowland Park, Director at DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk stated “I approached Generate UK to help me understand and make sense of PPC as a whole and especially the keywords I needed to target, as I didn’t want to waste any of my PPC budget on words that weren’t going to deliver results. Generate UK showed me that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one. They helped me categorise my keywords into groups and structure my PPC approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them. The results were fantastic and the service and insight they provided helped me not only understand the whole process but also delivered me some well needed business, many thanks!”

Click to view the DIY Pest Control website

If you would like to discuss how Generate UK can help you achieve more from your next Pay Per Click campaign, please do not hesitate to  contact us on 01635 550431.

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!

Before reading this post, we recommend that you get Generate UK - Digital Marketing Blog delivered directly to your email inbox

We try to keep the blog free of obvious advertising and use it more as a source of information for our readers and customers. However in the case of this post, we thought it made sense for us to provide you with more details about our pay per click campaign management solution. We’ve done this because we know there are many companies out there who are considering running a pay per click campaign for the first time. Whilst we would obviously like to have the opportunity to work with them, we would also like to provide them with information that we think would be useful to them, especially if they have never worked in this area before. The guide below is an overview of what we offer, it is also (in our opinion) a guide that companies can use to benchmark against.

Dedicated and Professional PPC Campaign Managers

The success of a PPC campaign is dependent on being able to analyse data and quickly act upon this information. This is why it is very important to have a dedicated and experienced account manager who works with you to understand your campaign objectives. Your account manager will then work within the campaign team to research and identify the right keywords and phrases to bid on, they will also create the right PPC Ad copy designed to compel people to click.

Specialist PPC Software for Accurate Tracking

We have our own in house PPC software that allows us to run multiple campaigns across multiple platforms via one console. This is very important for larger scale campaigns as it allows us to analyse and track across the different search engines and consolidate this information. This level of information means that we can measure the success of your campaign at any time of day or night; therefore you know the impact of every pound that you spend.

Campaign Management Consulting

We work with you to understand your campaign objectives from the very beginning to the end result. This means that the campaign solution we provide you is completely optimised towards your individual company goals.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management Services Include:

Bid management

• Budget management
• Bid management
• Keyword and key phrase research
• Copywriting and landing page improvements
• Tracking and measurement reporting
• Click fraud appraisals
• Dedicated and professional account managers
• Specialist inhouse software
• Analysis of competition

Summary

The intention of this blog post was to help people understand what type of service they should expect when they outsource their PPC campaign management. There’s lots of additional information and related blog posts if you would like to learn more. Alternatively, we’d be happy to hear from you, even if it is just for a quick chat about the types of things you should be wary of when you do PPC for the first time.

So whatever stage you are at with your own PPC efforts, we wish you luck. If you think there is something missing from our services, post a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.