PPC Advertising
Pay per Click advertising has never been more crucial to the marketing mix of online activities. Many myths surround PPC advertising such as ‘Isn’t it really expensive?’ and ‘You have to get No1 to get noticed at all!’ and the best one of all ‘I’m doing SEO, why on earth should I waste my time with PPC?’. Any decent marketer will tell you honestly, it’s not about being No1 with PPC because you could (there are exceptions) end up paying more for your advertising than for the traffic and eventual conversions you make. Put simply, you want to be in view of as many customers as possible for words related to your industry.
PPC however, is NOT SEO. They are two very different forms of marketing online with the intended outcome of driving more traffic to your website. PPC works for a variety of industries to drive traffic to your site very quickly, using specially chosen keywords, geographic location and carefully bidding against your competition to be in sight of potential customers. SEO is a long term method of getting seen in the natural search listings and staying there. Through various online marketing channels SEO fine tunes your website both on the site and around the web so Google sees your site as search gold.
Facebook advertising has become popular as it’s cost effective and higly targetted. For example, Postcode, Hobbies & Interests, and Age are just a few examples of how finely tuned your advertising can be made. Google allows some areas to be defined (geography, keywords) but it’s not aimed at such a laser targeted audience, only through the keywords you put in place. You also have a higher competition for certain keywords with Google.
Just like SEO keyword research is essential with PPC. They will decide where your advert appears in Google and the potential click throughs depend on them. The keyword should reflect what you are selling , be highly searched but have little to no other companies competing with those keywords. This will keep you inside your budget, keep your cost-per-click low and you will get more exposure as there are less companies to bid against.
Finally, make sure you closely monitor your ad words campaign to see where possible keyword opportunities might be and what campaigns have little click through rates. It may be an idea to play around with different keywords in your advert. If the campaign works well increase your budget for individual ad groups slightly and decrease for those not perform as well.
Pay per Click is a great way of obtaining traffic quickly and if you look after your adverts in terms of keyword targeting and careful bidding against the competition the results speak for themselves.
