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Ensure top results through Pay Per Click marketing
Pay Per Click marketing is the practice of ‘purchasing’ visitors to your website, based on the keywords they type into Google or other search engines.
Effective use of Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing can guarantee your company first or second page placement for relevant searches, and a corresponding stream of potential customers visiting your Internet site.
But what’s the secret of getting full value for your money? Brett Porter of Strike Designs, one of Spiral’s approved suppliers, offers some tips to bear in mind when planning a PPC campaign.
Pay Per Click marketing can be seen for a search on almost every given subject or combination of keywords. Depending on which search engine you use, more often than not the Pay Per Click adverts will be displayed along the top and/or down the right-hand side of the search results, usually entitled ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Sites’.
The process is simple - you create an advert then effectively bid on keywords or phrases that are relevant to your page or site. The more you bid, the higher your advert will appear, and each time your advert is clicked you pay the amount you have bid.
Sign up varies with each PPC organisation but is normally very straightforward. All you do is create a small textual advert, choose the keywords for that advert, then set your daily budget and the amount you’d like to pay for each click.
Job done! Or is it?
A well thought out campaign will drive a steady stream of traffic to your site for a proportionally very small amount of money (compared to many other marketing campaigns). A poorly conceived or researched Pay Per Click campaign can quite simply mean you are throwing your money away.
Here are my top five tips to ensure you’re not wasting your money.
Don’t aim to be number one
Competition for the top spot can be fierce and the click costs can be high. Dropping your cost per keyword will mean that you may come lower down in the rank but the cost per traffic will be disproportionate, a fifty percent reduction in cost may only mean a twenty percent reduction in traffic. I have seen reductions of 75% of keyword cost that led to only a 25% reduction in traffic.
Ensure the visitors coming to your site are interested in your products or services
Unbelievably obvious maybe, yet extremely common. I did some work recently for a business networking company. Their Pay Per Click keywords included the word ‘networking’ and a cross reference of their website log files revealed that traffic was coming to their site from people looking for computer networking, dating and a wealth of completely non-related subjects.
For the first few weeks that you run your campaign it is worth continually cross referencing it with the terms that people are actually using within the search engines. Most, if not all Pay Per Click companies include a ‘Not’ field which therefore allows you to block irrelevant searches. In the above example we blocked the word ‘computer’ from the search and immediately reduced the irrelevant traffic by 30%.
Create one advert per keyword and use the keyword in the title
It might seem a laborious task but the results should speak for themselves. When a browser enters a keyword into a search engine, it’s obvious they are looking for results based on that keyword/phrase.
Most search engines highlight the browser’s search term on the results page by making the text bold, so their search term will immediately stand out to them. If this happens to be the title of your advert, you increase the number of times your advert is clicked and thus the number of relevant visitors to your site.
Research peripheral keywords
If your competitors have forced up the price of your core keywords, seek out peripheral keywords and specific phrases. With some research it’s often feasible to produce a set of phrases that drive a moderate amount of traffic to the site for a potentially very low price.
If you’re a local business a good peripheral key-phrase may include your geographic location e.g. ’
Ensure your site is professional, easy to use and builds trust in the visitor
No matter how good your campaign is, if your site looks poor, is frustrating to use and doesn’t inspire a sense of trust in the visitor, your conversion rates will be low. Not only that, the likely outcome is that your potential customer or client will be clicking the Back button and moving on to your competitor!
Brett Porter is a director of Strike Designs Ltd and has been building commercial websites since 1999. He has a BSc in Information Systems Development, an MSc in E-commerce and owns and runs a small portfolio of Internet businesses.
Strike Designs are an approved Spiral supplier. If you would like more information about the services they offer, then contact us at Spiral.
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