Archive for December, 2008

About pay-per-click advertising – what is PPC?

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Pay-per-click advertising is a very cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website with the unique benefit of producing instant results. Unlike traditional search engine results (the so-called natural listings) which usually take months to achieve, or press adverts where you have to wait for publication, pay-per-click adverts start to work as soon as you set them up. You can be up and running and sending traffic to your website in about 15 minutes or so!

The basic principle of pay-per-click (PPC) is that you create a short advert for the product or service that you want to promote and you choose a list of keywords that you want to associate with that advert. When people go to the search engines and search for things containing your keywords, your advert is displayed alongside the search results, usually on the right hand side of the natural listings.

A key benefit of pay-per-click  is that by definition your advert is hitting people at the point when they are actually looking for your product or service.

Your advert appears free of charge – you only pay when somebody clicks on it. The amount you pay depends upon several factors but is typically somewhere between 5p and 50p per click. Your advert doesn’t appear on it’s own (unless you are very lucky!) but amongst others who have also selected the same or similar keywords to trigger their adverts. The position of your advert amongst these other competing ads is determined by a number of factors, but the most prominent one is the amount you pay (or bid) each time somebody clicks on your ad. The more you pay, the higher up the list you will be. If you bid high enough you will be number one – it’s as simple as that! Usually you’re better off being in position 3 or 4 as this is usually much cheaper and therefore more profitable. The amount you have to pay is determined by how much everybody else is prepared to pay and how competitive the market is and the market finds it’s own level.

You can set a daily budget and can start and stop your adverts at will so you have total control over your expenditure. You can test different adverts and different keywords and see the results online.

To test the effectiveness of PPC advertising for your business, you could start with as little as £20. At 5p per click, that represents 400 visitors to your site – all of whom are interested in your offering. Where else can you run a campaign to bring in 400 qualified prospects for only £20? Of course that’s not really a sensible budget if you’re serious about your business but you get the point. A sensible starting point for many businesses would be a few hundred or so but your mileage may vary. We always work on establishing the profitability of any PPC click campaign first, so however much you spend it should always make you more than it costs once the initial parameters have been set.

Although the entry cost is very low and the return on investment can be huge, like everything else, in reality it takes a great deal of skill and expertise to run a successful pay-per-click campaign. This is where we come in as we can devise, setup and run the campaign for you and teach you how to do it yourself so that you can operate it yourself in future. Not only does this save you money in doing it yourself, but you will gain a huge amount of ongoing information about what your customers are looking for and what they respond to that will be of enormous value to you.

Typically we will spend half a day or so setting up your initial campaign and training you to then carry on yourself. Alternatively we can run the whole thing for you all the time as we do for several big clients. At the moment we are discounting our AdWords initial setup package to just £199 which is a great deal to get you started. Contact us or call me for a chat on (01372) 371041 and we can discuss how you can use pay-per-click advertising profitably in your business.

For more information about pay-per-click advertising and Google AdWords campaign management, please contact Tim Felmingham on 01372 371041 or contact us through this website.

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New AdWords options for iPhone

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Google have announced a new option to show your AdWords ads on the iPhone and other mobile devices with web browsers. The landing pages can be normal web pages, you don’t have to create special mobile landing pages or mobile format ads. What’s new is that Google have created new iPhone results pages pages that are specially formatted for the iPhone and you can select in your campaign settings whether you show your ads on normal desktop and laptop PCs or on iPhones. This means you can create campaigns exclusively for iPhone users so if that’s your market, or they fit your demographic that’s got to be good news.

You may have seen ads running on the iPhone and G1 already. That’s because Google Search on these devices used to show desktop results pages modified for these phones. Recently, the Google mobile team launched  formatted specifically for the iPhone. Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

More information from AdWords Help Center.

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Google’s new search-based Keyword Tool

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

Finding and testing new keywords is one of the most important parts of any AdWords campaign. There are a variety of tools and services (both free and paid-for) to help you in this task and Google have launched a new keyword tool which is currently in Beta testing in the UK and USA.

The difference with Google’s search-based Keyword Tool is that this one looks at your landing page and cross-references it with their vast amounts of search data to find out what keywords people are using to find your products and services. It looks at your landing page and any additional keywords that you enter and finds relevant user searches that have occurred on Google over the last year. It will then give an indication of search volume and the bid price for a top-three position.

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