Is PPC really a quick and easy fix?
PPC (or pay per click) are adverts placed in search engines, they appear towards the top and right side of the search results page and look slightly different to the organic listings. The order in which these adverts appear is based on a combination of something called a quality score and the amount you are willing to pay for a click on your advert.
The idea is that you target your adverts to the things that people are searching for with a view to them clicking on that advert and being directed through to your website.
You set the budget, both in terms of how much you are willing to spend each day and also how much you are willing to pay per click (which is where the phrase pay per click comes from). The quality score is based on a number of different measures including, the existing click through rate (how many people click on your ad as a percentage of how many times it has been shown), how relevant the text in your advert is to the search that has been performed, the relevancy of the page you take them to, historical performance and many more.
So should I focus on PPC or SEO?
This will depend on a number of factors, if you have a brand new business and website then you may invest more in PPC initially whilst also working on increasing your search rankings. This allows you to eventually reduce your PPC budget because you are “getting found” organically. Another view might be that actually, if you are getting a return on your investment in PPC, why wouldn’t you continue? In fact, why wouldn’t you invest more? But if you find that your market online is extremely competitive then you may find that PPC ends up costing you money.
This is why research and testing is vitally important here. I have seen many companies lose a lot of money because they haven’t managed PPC properly. It is an incredibly complex process and whilst some may be able to successfully manage this themselves, the vast majority simply won’t.
So how do I get the most from a PPC campaign?
Research – As always, initial research is so important. You need to understand your online market, this will be different than it is in the offline world so it’s important to make assumptions.
Ad Copy – Your adverts need to reach out to the audience you are trying to attract. You can test different ad’s to see which ones are more successful, but I would advise continually tweaking what you are doing to see if you can keep improving further. You’re key metric here is click through rate (bearing ad position in mind)
Bid Management – It’s not always advisable to simply be the highest bidder, if you can improve your quality score then you will find you do no need to pay as much to gain better positions. Also, you might find that being in position 3 achieves a better result for you than being in position 1.
Landing Pages– I cannot stress how important it is to send people to relevant pages, if you are advertising yellow shoes and send someone to a page that is full of red shoes, they are very likely going to immediately leave your website and go elsewhere.
Call to Actions – The pages you send people to need to have clear call to actions, you need to help people do the things you want them to do easily. So if you are asking people to call, make your phone number large and easily visible. If you are asking for an online purchase, make the buy now button above the fold.
Quality Content – It is easy to get lazy here and just send people to an internal content page that is very text heavy and not particularly interesting. By having specific landing pages set up with quality content and strong call to actions that are relevant to the search that the user has made, your conversion rate will improve as a result. This has a knock on effect because an increased conversion rate will help your quality score, which in turn will help to reduce the amount you need to bid.
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