What are the benefits of Pay-Per-Click advertising? Here are some answers to frequently asked questions for those who may be slightly reluctant to get started on a PPC campaign.
Looking to get the best results from your new site? Let’s answer your questions on Pay-Per-Click…
So… you’ve just launched your new website. The content is great, the site is fast, and it even looks good. Nothing to do but sit back and let the traffic roll in, right?
Even with the best SEO practices in place, it takes a little while for websites to start ranking for the terms that you’ve optimised for. The average figures range from 90 – 180 days. Yes, you read that correctly. Even a really thorough link building campaign takes around 10 weeks to increase your website rank by 1 position. So, what can be done to drive traffic to your website right from the get-go?
Speculate to accumulate
Pay-per-click is a really good way to support a new website, and allows for fairly instant results at a reasonable price (provided the campaign has been set up correctly).
With just a little bit of exploration, you can very quickly gather a list of reasonable search volume, low competition keywords that you want to target and start appearing at the TOP of Google searches for those keywords, without having to wait for your SEO efforts to kick in. If your business is local, you can even specify that the ads are shown in a specific location. If you operate over 9am-5pm hours and don’t want your ad to appear when you’re not at work, you can specify the times (and days of the week!) that your ad is shown.
The list of basic PPC filtering types includes:
- Location
- Language
- Daily budget
- Start date
- End date
- Ad rotation
- Frequency capping
- IP exclusions (useful for the following section)
You can even target your competitors’ names/services and appear above them in Google searches too…
“Wait… can I really do that?”
Absolutely! Although it’s only really recommended against competitors who aren’t running their own pay-per-click campaigns, otherwise you run the risk of paying through the nose to appear.
Every penny you spend on your business is to help attract customers to you instead of your competitors. Those flyers you just had printed? Their primary purpose is to raise awareness of your brand and attract customers. The website you just had built? It’s designed to attract customers to you over your competitors.
Why print off flyers, pay for them to be delivered, and then hope for more business, when you could potentially muscle in on any Google searches for your competitors, appear ABOVE them in the results AND (depending on the competitor) potentially get these benefits for pennies per click?
As mentioned further up, you might want to exclude your competitor’s IP address if you go down this route, as there is technically nothing to stop a competitor from clicking your ad and rinsing your budget.
“How do I get started?”
In order to get a PPC campaign up and running, you need to consider the following:
- The purpose of your campaign
- Brand awareness?
- Specific product advertising?
- Increase enquiries
- Keywords (ask your friendly neighbourhood marketing agency)
- Location/s to target
- Ad content (again, ask your friendly neighbourhood marketing agency)
- Language
Once you’ve got an idea for all of the elements above, your marketing agency will be able to suggest a daily budget, or to set up the campaign to work within the budget that you specify. Pro tip: standard agency commission for PPC work is 10%, so remember to factor that into your budget too.
You’re now ready to set up your website to receive the new traffic.
“I’ve just had a new website built, why should I do that?”
Okay, let’s say you’re looking to buy a fridge. Which of the following scenarios is most likely to result in you buying from a particular shop?
- You go into a shop and tell a sales person that you want to buy a fridge. They show you the front of the shop.
- You go into a shop and tell a sales person that you want to buy a fridge. They point to where the fridges are.
- You go into a shop and tell a sales person that you want to buy a fridge. They take you to the relevant section, and give you all of the information that you need in order to buy a fridge. They even take you to the till.
This is why you need to set up your website. When someone searches for something in Google, they’re demonstrating a desire. The trick to fulfilling their desire (as in shopping for fridges) is to make sure that the landing page they end up on allows them to really easily act on their desire. If you drop a potential customer at your home page, they have to find the information (that they’ve just searched for) themselves, even if your navigation is really easy to follow.
This is why it’s best to create or optimise a landing page specifically for the traffic from your PPC campaign. It’s the digital equivalent of walking your customer straight to the product they want and then making it as easy as possible for them to commit to buying it.
Don’t start thinking that pay-per-click will only work for websites that sell products though: a sale is just an easily understood example of a conversion. Conversion can also be as simple as an enquiry for your service, or a sign up to your mailing list.
“How should I optimise my landing page?”
This could easily be the subject of it’s own article, so we’ll tackle the basic recommendations regarding landing pages:
- Make sure the content is relevant to their search
- Make sure that there is a clear call to action on the page
- Occasionally recommended: remove all navigation from the landing page so that the visitor can’t be distracted from the action that you want them to take
- Occasionally recommended: add a mechanism that allows you to get in touch with the visitor and follow up on their enquiry (best done as an “opt-in” service
Hopefully, you should now be seeing the similarity between a good landing page and the fridge buying example above, which leads us to a good summary of pay-per-click:
- Target low competition, high quality keywords
- Aim to target as narrow an audience as possible
- Set your budget
- Create high quality ad content
- Drive the traffic as far down into your sales funnel as you can
- Enjoy the benefits of PPC
If you would like to know more about starting a pay-per-click campaign, get in touch with us on our contact page.