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.

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!

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.

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We’re having a pay per click week this week on the Generate UK blog. Feel free to look back on our previous posts about the importance of landing pages and the Beauty and the Beast of PPC. This post is about providing further details about optimising your campaign and where your thoughts should be in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.

In our opinion, the first thing that your visitor should see after they click your ad and go through to your landing page is the keyword or phrase they used. It’s well documented that your page should have a title for SEO and usability reasons, however from a PPC perspective it is a little more important because you have paid for that visitor to be there. So whatever it was that they were searching for and whatever it was that encouraged them to click your ad, you have to make sure that your landing page delivers this.

So let’s think about the heading. The easiest way to do this would be to use an example and walk through the process. Let’s use a driving instructor business for our example, obviously they offer driving lessons as part of their service. Upon completion of their keyword research and analysis, they quickly understand that locality is important to show their ads at the right time. After all, it would be a waste of money if a driving instructor from Cornwall was showing up in searches for “Driving lessons Glasgow”.

In our example, the heading should include the words driving lessons and the locality. Let’s be as specific as possible and assume our driving instructor is based in Winchester. Let’s also assume that our friendly driving instructor has a special incentive for people to click his ads. Our page title or header now becomes -

Driving Lessons in Winchester – First lesson Free

You can change the details of the offer to whatever suits you or your market. The point is that you should think about something compelling to keep your visitor on the page. If they clicked your ad and it only had “Driving Lessons”, our experience tells us that this will not be as successful a campaign as if it was ran with the headline above.

The next step is general marketing, make the offer time dependent. How do you encourage your visitor to act as quickly as possible? You could also mention that the offer is subject to space, so they need to act quickly to secure a spot.

As part of the page copy, you should include your main keyword phrase (”driving lessons Winchester”). Winchester is a big place, so you might want to consider doing the same exercise for smaller suburbs and villages that surround Winchester that you’re happy to service.

Think about what the action is on your landing page, for our driving instructor the ultimate goal is to increase his driving lesson bookings. This objective is made up of smaller goals, if people are clicking his ad then they’re interested in driving lessons in Winchester, right? So how else can they be leveraged once they are there? In this example, the instructor offered vouchers via the site as he knew that parents were often searching on behalf of their children. He also had an incentive for his visitors to sign up and receive a paper about study tips for the theory test and free mock tests.

In summary, your landing page should be as sticky as you can possibly make it, without it looking like spam. You should be relevant to the search term that you’re optimising for and provide a solution or a service that offers a benefit to your visitor. During your planning process, be conscious of the fact that you’re paying for these visitors, so give yourself every advantage to get the most from each click.

We always welcome your feedback and thoughts, please feel free to comment via the comments section below. Or you can find our details on the Contact Generate UK page.