Fundamentals of Pay Per Click Optimisation

The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) internet advertising compared with established techniques is just this: almost all traditional techniques are broadcast methods to consumers who have shown little interest in buying your service. Think flyers through doors etc. They are all broadcast ads. Sure there some targeted than others, if you are selling marketing services to companies, you put adverts in a marketing magazine, but that's a crude process these days.

Search Google for "marketing" and down the right hand side, you'll see ads by websites who are paying them to have their ad and site shown there on the main page of results. This is Paid Advertising on the Search Engines and this is why Google now dominates the search engines!

How about someone searching Google for " online advertising for lawyers"? That's a consumer that right at that moment in time is interested in finding out a very specific thing. If you expect to produce a product that can help, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of MSN or which ever Search Engine you prefer. What is it worth to you to have that consumer visit your site within five seconds of entering that into MSN?

Sure, you could search engine optimize your website to achieve Improved Search Engine Ranking for that term, but this takes time and effort and a reasonable investment of money. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really starts to shine, and is under used as far as I'm concerned. You will be on the first page of Google the same day for that search term for a bargain budget. In a few days you'd have some inclination of the amount of potential customers that will definitly look for that term, browse your website, and buy your product. This is right on the money, research into your targeted market for a low budget that you simply can't get any other way.

Let's say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your link making a total spend of 100. And say your conversion rate is a reasonable 1%, so you've got five new purchases and more importantly 5 additional customers that you can now sell to again. All for 100 spent! What is your typical consumer worth in total? Isn't this worth it?

One key thing to understand is how Google ranks the paid for Pay Per Click marketing ads. In essence it's an auction in real time. The highest bidder wins. If you bid 20p and some other company bids 25p, they will rank higher than yours. In truth it's considerably more complicated than that: if you have a superior quality Pay Per Click ad campaign, it is definitely possible for you to rank above the 25p ad because the search engine will give boosts to higher performing Pay Per Click ads. The point is that if your PPC Services Company knows what they're doing with Pay Per Click bid management, it is probably you will achieve higher rankings (i.e. additional traffic) for a lower budget. So your valuable online website promotion budget is stretched and you save cash. Conversely, if your AdWords advertising campaign is administered by someone who has no idea what they are doing, it will cost you real cash.

Here is a list of the things a competent Google Advertising Professional should perform (Such as Intrinsic-Marketing.co.uk who offer Website Optimisation Analysis) whilst administering your account, if yours isn't, we strongly advise you get a review of your Pay Per Click campaign today:

Bid or Don't Bother - The objective of PPC advertising administration is to get on the first page of your Google etc quickly. However, where there's in excess of eight (normally) even Pay Per Click Adverts can drop to the second page. Where there's competition like this, there is absolutely little point doing a Pay Per Click marketing campaign if you're not on the first page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) settings, or there's no point.

Tracking for Improved Website Return on Investment - This is innovative marketing, this is not conventional marketing, so you can use that to your benefit. The technology exists to monitor each and every sale and where it comes from. You will know definitely which ad converts to sales and which don't. Remember, it's one thing to get lots of people visiting your website, it is another to have lots of sales. Would you prefer to have for Pay Per Click internet advertising: an advert that generates one thousand clicks and 1% sales, or one that generates 100 leads but 10% sales? For both you get identical sales, but the first costs you 10x the price in Pay Per Click advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A common issue is not matching the webpage that people see when they click your ad, to the words found in your ad; which definitely should be aimed at what the consumer searched for. This just means that when the potential customer clicks your Advert, they get to see what they want to. Internet users are lazy! Would you believe that did you know that half of all internet searchers exit a website in less than 8 seconds because they don't find what they expected! This is even more crucial than Search Engine Optimisation Consulting

A/B Splt Testing Your Ads - This is good Pay Per Click technique and simply means having more than one ad and testing which one works best. Let me give you one example, we had 2 ads which were totally the same in every way except the start of the title. One started "Learn to Prevent . . ." and the other began with "Stop . . ." Split testing found that 5% of the potential customers who saw the "Learn to Prevent . . ." clicked it. BUT 8% of the consumers who saw the "Stop . . ." ad clicked that one. It will not surprise you to learn that, we dropped the first ad and got a better quality Ad which in due course Google promoted to the premium advertising slot on the page, for the same Cost Per Click!

Have Many Ad Groups - The elementary rookie mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single advert. This is very bad. Keywords must be divided into separate groups with advert text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Phrase/Broad/Exact Matching - Google AdWords allow three alternative ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but most advertisers just go for the default matching option. You could double your targeted traffic from clever use of the other options which most careless Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.