Pay Per Click Advertising

One of the best ways of ensuring your business appears right at the top of search engine results on search engines like Google or Bing is to use Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC for short.

One key mistake which businesses make is to build an amazing website, but failing to invest the money in advertising their website and bringing visitors to it. Competition in most markets is fierce, and it can be really difficult to make your website stand out from all your competitors. This increasingly crowded marketplace makes it more important than every to consider paid for advertising to complement your organic efforts. Here at 118 Business Directory, we have years of experience managing campaigns for small and medium sized businesses across the UK, with an enviable track record.

What Can PPC Do For Me?

The idea behind PPC is to bring customers to your website. The most successful technique is to use PPC alongside a professionally designed mobile site, as this is the best way of converting clicks into sales.

We’d also advise integrating your PPC campaign with both social media and display advertising. That means that visitors who don’t immediately click through to your website will continue to see adverts and messages promoting your business as they browse.

PPC – What Exactly Is It?

PPC adverts appear in the top slots on Google and other search engines and are often labelled as “sponsored results”. You bid against your competitors to place your adverts, putting your brand and website in front of potentially thousands of customers, who just need to click once and be taken immediately to your website.

How it Works

There are a number of factors which determine whether your PPC advert will appear on any given search. These factors include the search terms entered by the user, and the content and relevance of your page. If you have a well-written webpage with lots of relevant content, and the search engine thinks your content is more relevant than a competitor’s, your advert could appear higher up than theirs, even if they’ve paid more. You’ll only be charged for your ad if a user actually clicks onto it – hence the “pay per click” name.

Running A PPC Campaign

If you’re thinking about running a PPC campaign to bring traffic to your website, here are some of the things to think about:

• Keywords – what will the customer type to ensure the advert appears? This could be your company name, the generic name of the product you make, or a service provided. Frequently used keywords are usually more expensive.
• Budget – how much do you want to spend on each person who chooses to click through to your site? This is known as the cost per click, or CPC. You will set “bids” to put a maximum on the amount you wish to send.
• Message – most search engines will look at the quality of the messaging and text in your advert, and use this to decide how often it is show.

Using PPC Advertising

There are lots of benefits to using PPC advertising to bring customers to your website. Some of the most important of these are:

• Visibility – pay per click ads usually show up in some of the most visible places on a web page, making it more likely that customers click through into your site.
• Quick – PPC campaigns are quick to set up and start running, unlike organic methods to push your website up the rankings which can take months to have any effect.
• Cost effective – you only pay when someone clicks to visit your website, and the campaign is easily adjusted.
• Flexible – PPC works with a wide range of marketing budgets.
• Targeted – PPC lets you target specific geographic areas, locations, demographics or even times of day.
• Reporting – analytics packages give you lots of information about how your campaign is performing.

Jargon Associated with PPC

As with many things internet-related, there are lots of technical terms which are associated with PPC. Here’s a quick explanation of some of the most common terms:

• Ad Copy – Copy is the text you place in your advert.
• Ad Extensions – this is the terms for extra items you might include in an advert, like a phone number, link to a different page, or other information.
• Ad Group – this refers to grouping keywords together according to the topics they refer to, or the audience they are targeting.
• Auto Bidding – this is an automatic feature which adjusts your bids depending on your goals.
• Bid – the amount in pence you are prepared to pay for each person who clicks on your advert. This is also known as a keyword bid.
• Bid Modifiers – this tool allows you to adjust your bid according to factors such as time, location or device.
• Click Through Rate – expressed as a percentage, this is the percentage of people who click on your ad when they see it.
• Conversion – what do you want your customer to do on your site? A conversion could be a sale, joining an email list, or leaving their contact details for you to make an appointment.
• Conversion rate – expressed as a percentage, this expresses the number of visitors to your website who buy something, or complete another conversion action.
• Conversion tracking – this tool shows you which part of your website users visit once they have clicked through from your ad.
• Cost Per Conversion – how much, on average, have you paid in advertising for every conversion which your ad generates?
• Cost Per Click – the amount you pay for each click on your advertising.
• Display Network – Google calls these Google Display Ads. Rather than using static text, Display ads instead contain images or video.
• Geotargeting – the ability to target ads to people living in a specific geographic location.
• Impressions – the number of times your advert is shown on a search results page.
• Keyword – a phrase or term which you wish your advert to be shown for.
• Landing Page – the page which a visitor “lands” on when they click on an advert and are redirected to your page.
• Match type – this function allows you to specify closely related words to your targeted keyword, rather than manually identifying every term a customer might type in.
• Quality score – the search engine’s way of ranking the strength, relevance and credibility of your advert, used in prioritising which ads are shown.
• Remarketing list – also known as RLSA, this allows you to target people who have already visited your site.

If you are interested in PPC or want to see how it can help your business, then get in touch today.