Pay Per Click PPC

Many of our clients got to grips with Pay Per Click (PPC) in 2008 but it still surprises me to find how many still have very little understanding of a service which can be incredibly effective. What other form of advertising is as targetted, gives you such control of how much you spend and where creative costs are so low?

PPC is a form of internet advertising where an advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks on an ad to link to their website.

PPC refers to all advertising of this nature whether the ad appears on a website, blog or search engine such as Google. The ads on Google are referred to as ‘sponsored links’ and appear at the top and to the right of organic listings*. (Google’s AdWords program is the main source of its $17 billion income). You can manage Adword campaigns directly with Google – click on the ‘advertising programmes’ link on Google’s homepage for more information and to set up an account.

An Adwords campaign can provide immediate exposure to new customers and can be very useful if your website is not performing particularly well in natural listings* or if you want to be found by keywords that may not be cost effective to include in your Search Engine Optimisation SEO process. Always plan and review your PPC and SEO campaigns together. Financially Google’s Adwords campaigns are very flexible – you can choose how much to pay per click, how much to budget day by day and you can easily suspend and restart campaigns whenever you choose.

The actual ads, referred to as ‘creatives’, should be crafted to ensure they stand out from competitors ads but also to make sure you only get relevant clicks. Click fraud, where an individual/competitor or an automated script maliciously clicks on your ad, can potentially be a problem and although this type of internet fraud is not believed to be common the fact that it is covered under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 does provide some comfort. One further thing to consider, you will need to pay for you campaigns with a credit card if managing the service directly with Google.

So to get going with a PPC campaign:

Set up an Adwords account with Google
Research and plan your campaign
Establish you key words and creatives
Implement and monitor
Learn from successes and failures

If you haven’t got the time or resource to carry out your own PPC campaigns many companies like HMA Digital Marketing will provide a service to manage campaigns on your behalf. Most will recharge Google’s fees at cost and charge a fee for creatives and administration.

* Organic/natural listings are the results of searches that are not paid for.