Pay per click (PPC) marketing

Paid search engine placement via PPC advertising campaigns

Organizations are discovering that Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising works

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Read the 7 golden rules of Pay per click advertising here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay per Click (PPC)?

The majority of all online advertising is in PPC and it's growing fast. PPC is pretty much pure direct marketing. It is, very simply, paid search engine placement.

Google revenues have gone from $440 million in 2002 to $1.5 billion in 2003, then $3.2 billion in 2004, $6.1 billion in 2005 then $10.6 billion in 2006 and in 2007 $16.6 billion! If you have yet to invest in PPC marketing solutions you need seriously to think about it and presumably you are as you found this page!

Search engines list web sites relevant to a person's keyword search. Getting high rankings in the free search results - called search engine optimization - is extremely important but with millions of web sites all competing for a keyword or phrase ranking, it can be difficult to rank highly for many keywords and phrases.

PPC advertising on the other hand, allows you to get your web site listed on the results pages for hundreds of keyword phrases used by potential buyers. Nearly every other form of advertising can be blocked by, for example, switching channels. Web advertisers who use Flash, banner adverts, or image adverts are discovering that users can use browsers that block those adverts.

PPC works entirely differently. Users choose to search at their search engine. The adverts are context-related. If they search for holidays, they see only adverts about holidays. There is no clutter of irrelevant adverts. There is no incentive to block the adverts. There are three major PPC services: Google, Overture (Yahoo) and Espotting.

On Google, your adverts can appear in search engines and content sites that are affiliated with Google such as: Google, AOL, AskJeeves, About.com, Lycos, InfoSpace, Netscape. For Yahoo Overture the following affiliated sites include: Yahoo, MSN, InfoSpace, AltaVista, Excite. FindWhat is probably the third biggest PPC search engine. E-spotting is big in the UK, and MSN is getting ready to launch its own PPC engine to compete with Google and Yahoo.

With PPC the more you bid against your competitors, in general the higher your adverts will be placed - though with Google the response rate is also taken into account and it is a more complex placement algorithm. The wording of your advert is tricky because of the limited space you're given and the restriction on the wording you can use. When a user clicks on your advert, they come to your website and you pay for that click. PPC has good tracking tools. You can measure click and conversion rate. You can delete adverts and campaigns that don't work.

Google and Yahoo don't tell you how much you will actually pay-per-click though. So if you bid £1.50 per-click you can pay anywhere from £0.01 to £1.50 per-click. Google does not allow you to know how much your competitors are bidding per-click but you will rank higher if your click-through rate is better than your competitor, even if they bid more than you. Google's minimum bid is £0.01 and the maximum bid is £100.00.

PPC targeting is crucial

Google allows you to target the adverts to countries and in the US states, regions, cities, and even specific neighbourhoods. You can also target the adverts any of the major world languages. Google provides customizable reports. They will also EMail you your reports. If you want to be successful with PPC, you need to bid on keywords that attract clicks from "qualified" buyers (as opposed to "time wasters" who just drive your costs up) while keeping your bids as low as possible.

That means you have to know how much you can afford to bid. This might sound obvious, but not all businesses know the cost per lead they can afford and until you know that you don't know the maximum amount you can afford to pay per click. Work out the bid : rank : result ratio . You don't always need to be in the top 5 or 10 for certain keywords to attract visitors. It almost certainly helps if your advert appears in the top 10 results.

People do click on lower ranks too. So test. Change bids so that your listing appears higher and lower on the page and see what effect the ranking has on your results. Bid on low-cost variations and misspellings.

Some businesses bid as much as ££££s per click for popular keywords-whist there is little bidding on common misspellings and similar keywords that cost just pence per click. Think of keywords that relate to your business and are frequently searched by your market, but that none of your competitors are bidding on. Bid on highly targeted phrases with less traffic. Rather than bid on a handful of "general" keywords, which tend to be more expensive because they get the highest number of searches, bid on dozens-or even hundreds-of highly "targeted" keywords, which tend to be cheap. You're likely to see conversion rates on the more targeted keywords because they attract more qualified leads. And if no one is bidding on these keywords, your advertising costs associated with this traffic are extremely low.

Another benefit of this strategy is that you can direct these qualified visitors to a landing page that gives them exactly what they're looking for. Bid on keywords in the lesser-known PPC search engines. Overture and Google are the PPC industry leaders, but some of the smaller PPC search engines are worth checking out as well. You won't get the same exposure as with Overture and Google, but you can still generate a respectable amount of traffic and generally at a lower cost.

Create separate adverts for each product or service you sell. This is an extremely effective strategy, but very few businesses are using it: Write adverts specific to each keyword and phrase on which you bid.