Well what is pay per click?? This is a way of advertising on a search engine, where you only pay for the advertising if someone clicks on your advert.
Why all the fuss? Pay per click or PPC for those that like the acronyms allows you to try advertising on the web for next to nothing, with the option to spend as little or as much as you like without committing to future spend. It also has the added bonus of being easy to measure return on investment unlike some more traditional forms of advertising.
What do I get? If you perform a search on Google for a formal shirt you will notice that there are up to 3 listings at the top of the page and a number down the side that are titled sponsored links. These adverts have been "paid for", or at least they will be if you click on them. You don't get much for your money, a title of 25 characters and two lines of 35 characters, plus your URL (only up to 35 chars). Based on this you need to think carefully about your wording which I will cover soon.
How much will it cost? It depends. Unfortunately if you are in a competitive industry it could be quite expensive, take car insurance, rumour has it each click costs the company something like £10. If you are selling bottle widgets you may find it is as little as 5p. You will need to set up an account on Google (about £5) and run a few tests. You can bid on as many keywords and phrases as you like and you can set a maximum budget for a day. So if you have a budget of £1 a day and this gets you 5 clicks at 20p a click Google will then take down your ad. No massive bills to pay and if it isn't working for you, switch it off tomorrow.
You mentioned return on investment? Because Google tracks who clicks what in its search engine, you have a report on how many times your advert has been displayed and how many people have clicked through to your site. If you combine this with an analytics package there is a wealth of information that can be reviewed.
So with not much wording to work with you need to try a few variations to see what works best. At the end of the day you want to qualify your leads so that you are not wasting money, but on the other hand scaring people off before they get started isn't good either. You need to get your customer hat on and decide for what they search for. The great things is though, if it isn't working then change it.
I am just starting some PPC work for a small clothing company in Guildford. With a website that isn't built with SEO in mind this is a way to traffic. It doesn't require vast amounts of effort to get in place and once I have them setup they can do most of the work themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment