Pay-per click: A Quick Guide
Know what it is
Essentially PPC advertising allows a business to bid against other businesses keywords to gain coverage on the top spots of the search engine, but you only pay should a user click on your ad. Ultimately if you bid a higher price than a competing firm then you’ll appear higher up than them – but only if your ads and keywords are relevant and the quality of your site is good.
Have a goal
It’s important to know what you want and why you want users to click on your site, if you’re clear about what you’re advertising, selecting keywords and writing adverts will come more easily.
Set a budget
Make a decision on what you are willing to pay; sometimes having a niche market is really beneficial as the chances are you’ll be able to set a lower budget compared with someone who works in an already very saturated market. Ultimately, you’ve got to decide how much you’d normally spend on marketing, or how much a conversion on your landing page is worth to you, and you can work back from there to see how much money is justifiable spending.
Understand your audience
You need to be clear about who you’re trying to target, if you understand who your target market is, you’ll understand what they search for. Similarly, it might be beneficial for small businesses (and big ones, too) to focus more specifically on certain locations, if you’re a small firm in Tunbridge Wells who gains most of their business from Kent, why target the whole of the UK if you can’t provide your products or services to the whole of the UK? You’d simply be wasting your budget on people in Scotland clicking on your ads!
Have a persuasive ad
This works in conjunction with understanding your audience, your ads need to be persuasive – if it’s poorly written and not aligning with your brand message, the chances are, people are unlikely to click on it… or even more unhelpful, someone who has no relevance to the ad will click on it.
Landing pages
It’s always important to consider where your ad will take the user to. If you’re a business offering a web design and SEO services, and your advert is speaking about purely web design, but it takes you to the SEO landing page, it’s not very relevant. Think about tailoring your ad to specific landing pages to result in a more relevant search and increased user experience.
Track track track
Tracking is key; often with PPC it can take on an element of trial and error to see what’s working and what’s not. Traffic isn’t always the goal, it’s the conversions that come after the traffic that’s usually most important, so it’s worth taking the time to study keywords to work out what’s generating conversions and what’s not. Ultimately the more knowledge you have about your campaign, the better, and a PPC campaign will often give great data and insights that you can consider, and then alter your strategy accordingly to maximise the efficiency of any PPC campaign.
If you need any help with PPC campaigns, get in contact!
