Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
Marketing in the recession – can we afford to advertise?
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Can you afford not to is more the question!
In any downturn, most people’s thoughts quite rightly turn firstly to cutting costs as a means of ensuring the security of their business. However, there is probably a limit to how far you can go with this unless you were previously wasting heaps of money on unnecessary expenditure. One of the first areas to come under scrutiny for cuts is marketing and particularly advertising. Should you continue to advertise in the current recession?
Somebody wise (I forget who) once said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”. This uncertainty about the effectiveness of some advertising makes it a worthy candidate for consideration at least, when it comes to getting the red pen out. If it isn’t making you money then you should cut it. The trouble is how can you tell if it will make you money or just cost you money until you’ve done it? And then it’s too late…
Tags: advertising, adwords, profitability, recession
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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.
Tags: advertising, adwords, pay per click, ppc
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