How PPC Can Help You And Your Business

Why Paid Search Advertising is the Most Cost Effective form of Advertising

Peter Van Zelst

Joe Wanamaker Would Have Loved It

An Introduction to Pay Per Click (PPC) Paid Search Marketing

John Wanamaker, a Philadelphia department store retailer and US Postmaster General, is famously quoted as saying "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." If you've been in business for any length of time you'll know the feeling. Advertising is about committing money, an often considerable amount of money, to one or a series of advertisements, doing your best to ensure they hit the mark and then sitting nervously and hoping.

The trouble is that a lot of the time that's all you've got to show for your money, hope. Hope that it did some good, hope it built your brand, hope it spread awareness and hope, one day, that it may bear fruit. How many times can you say, well I know when I spend £1000, I'm going to get x sales and when I spend £2,000 I'm going to get 2 times x sales? Well, that's what PPC is all about. If you want to know how you can get advertising that delivers results that you can measure and takes the guesswork/gambling out of advertising spending then read on....
My background is in business. For many years in my career, I avoided Newspaper, Television, Magazine and Radio advertising because it just didn't deliver results. When I set up an online business, however, I realised pretty quickly that you have to advertise because, sure as eggs is eggs, no-one will find you by accident. I spent large amounts of money on Newspaper, Magazine and Radio advertising and guess what? It still didn't deliver results.

So, I learnt about online marketing:- natural search, developing links with other websites, directories, online banner advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing and a number of other things. All great ways of developing business and all measurable.

And then I discovered Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Marketing. PPC was a way of taking the gamble out of getting to the top of the search engines. You could guarantee to come at the top of the page if you paid a few pennies for each click that you got. Suddenly, rather than the famine or flood type of traffic surges that many of the other activities produced, you could regulate the amount of traffic and business to your website. Absolutely amazing! PPC has moved on somewhat from those early days but, in essence, its benefits remain the same. It is:-

So if your firm needs a regular flow of business, or you have people and facilities to keep busy, or you have overheads to cover and don't want to rely on pot luck, then PPC provides it.

The Search Engines

Advertise Only to Your Customers

Search Engines are an online resource that gather, sort and report information from the Internet, based on your topic of interest. There are hundreds of different search engines, but, according to who you believe, Google, the largest, now accounts for between 43% and 90% of the world's searches.

Most of the larger search engines finance their activities through offering advertising. The largest element of this advertising is the sponsored links or search results that appear at the top of the page, which are traditionally, sold on a Pay Per Click (PPC) Basis, i.e. the advertiser only pays when someone clicks through to their website. Because of its dominance, particularly in the UK, I mainly talk about Google's PPC offer, called AdWords, and this is what I tend to initially recommend to clients. Yahoo, Windows Live Search, Ask, Miva and a number of others all offer PPC services which can and should be used as a business's PPC advertising model is developed.

What Is Google?

For the benefit of anyone that has been buried under a large object for the past 10 years Google is a search engine that gathers, sorts and reports information from the Internet, based on your topic of interest.

Advertise to Your Target Customers

What is Google Advertising?
Next to the search results, adverts can appear both on the right hand side of the page and occasionally above the search results. These are put there by Google's online advertising product, called Google AdWords. These Adverts are triggered by the user query - this is called keyword advertising.
Google adverts are also displayed on partner network sites like the Times, Telegraph, Conde Naste websites next to content on related topics, e.g. an advert for Designer Menswear may appear on the GQ magazine site on a page that is talking about designer menswear.
The Google Network reaches over 85% of Internet Users worldwide, so one way or another you can reach most of your potential customers.

Keyword Advertising

Because keyword advertising is highly targeted, you only ever advertise to people who are looking for what you have. And because you only pay per click, you only ever pay for people who are actually interested enough in your offer to visit your website. How many other advertising mediums do that?

If you get your profiling and targeting right then you are advertising directly to people who are using search engines to look for specific items. They are in the market for what you have and are indicating that they are close to the buying decision. And what's even better you can see exactly what those people do and how they react to your advertising and offer. So if your advertising works you can do more of it and if it doesn't you can change it or stop it.

Benefits of Paid Search Marketing

I think you can summarise the main benefits of PPC as that:-

Targeted

The Targeting in the above is crucial and you can target:-

So how do you prepare a campaign?

Well, there are two ways. You can either throw a lot of money and PPC advertising in hope and then moan that it doesn't work (which a lot of people do at first) or you can employ professionals like ourselves who do the boring preparation work…....

How do we prepare a campaign?

Basically, we prepare a Strategic Marketing Analysis which focuses on a company's:

From this we then develop

We then actively manage the campaign

Sounds complicated? Well, yes it is a little but to get the most out of your PPC campaign you need to do this and because of the huge volume of searches there are, if you don't get it right you can end up with an awful lot of poorly targeted traffic and wasted spending.

Benefits of AdWords

With AdWords there is absolutely no minimum spend. You can spend as little or as much as you want. The only maximums are the amount of people searching for the keywords you choose and deciding to click through to your adverts. You choose your own maximum daily spending limit (daily budget). You choose how much you want to spend per click for every keyword and then pay Google for users who click on to your ad. Minimum ‘bid' or click prices for a lot of terms start from as little as 1p, and many clicks can be bought for pennies.

Because it is so targeted, it is significantly more cost-effective than Yellow Pages, Banner Ads & Direct Mail and when you get leads, they are warm leads because they have already demonstrated they are in the market for your products or services.

By using Conversion tracking you can see your real-time return-on-investment data and adjust your advertising accordingly. If your order book's full you can stop advertising, if you need more business you can up your campaign.

In a nutshell, PPC Search Advertising is cheap and effective versus any other advertising method, which is why it is so fast growing. It can be used in most business sectors and contexts, to achieve a variety of objectives, from generating sales, leads or enquiries, to making people aware of a key message. Search is now, by far, the Largest Share of Online Ads and Google will soon overtake ITV as the biggest UK advertising medium.

Are you exploiting this fast growing media and using PPC for precise, targeted, low cost and highly cost effective marketing?

If you want to know more about PPC advertising and how it could help your business, Contact Us Now or download this FREE PowerPoint Presentation.

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