What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising?
10 April 2007 | info@mcwebs.com.au | 
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Printable PageIn Australia each of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) provide opportunity to have Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising served alongside their "natural" search results.
Natural | Pay Per Click | |
Cost | Free | Pay when someone clicks on your ad (hence the name) |
Get to highest ranking by | Developing relevant and useful content for your website (and other techniques) | Bidding more than rivals and (also) writing ads that more people click on |
Timing | Long term strategy | Effective immediately |
How Can PPC Help Make Money?
By attracting more visitors to your website which results in more sales or leads.
- Advertisement Costs Nothing to be Shown: Just imagine if the Yellow Pages sales representative came to your business and said you don't have to pay be listed, you only pay if someone calls because of the advertisement. This is precisely what happens in a PPC advertising.
- Advertisements Are Only Shown To Interested People: Most people watching TV have no interest in the products advertised. In PPC, ads are targeted to users based on their searches and so they are likely to be interested in your product or service.
- You Pay Only If Someone Is Interested: With PPC advertising you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. You don't even have to pay money up front. You only pay for results.
- Other advantages:
- More chances for people to visit your website: You could have multiple listings (natural and paid) on the first page of search results.
- Advertise only to customers you can service: Advertising can be set up to reflect geographic areas of operation (eg Australia or Victoria only) or languages that customers speak (eg English, Greek, Italian).
- Weak competition: Only a small percentage of searches are competitive, or even advertised against at all. Potentially, traffic to your site can be bought cheaply.
- Instantly Changed: Advertisements can be easily changed to reflect a new promotion/product/event.
How to Setup a Pay Per Click Campaign
In Australia Google is the largest search engine with the most traffic. Google Adwords (its PPC service) doesn't have any setup charges and allows you to set a monthly budget that you are comfortable with. You can signup here with your credit card.
Perhaps later
Once you have positive results from the Google Adwords, then you might like to try Yahoo Search Marketing (which places ads on Yahoo and MSN) and Sensis Bid Smart which owns Yellow Pages Australia.
Simple Strategies for Success
To maximise the effectiveness of your online advertising, you should make sure you put together a good list of keywords to advertise against and make sure you continually refine your ads.
Gather keywords
Brainstorm search terms
Ask yourself what would someone search for to find my business? Suppose you are an acupuncture practitioner who wants to find attract more target visitors to their website.You might want to advertise against searches like
- acupuncture
- alternative medicine
- doctor
- Chinese medicine
Use many keywords
A common mistake many people make when setting up PPC is to focus only on a few phrases. People have learnt to search for very specific things and, as the graph below shows, the searches for all variations can be significantly more than the most popular search.
These small searches can add up to a lot of "cheap" traffic (known as the long tail).
A tool such as Google Keywords can help out with this keyword research process.
Analyse past search traffic
If someone has visited your site via a search engine then it is likely that other people who do the same search will be interested in you.
Your website statistics package should show what people are typing into search engines to find your website. Make sure these words are included in the search terms you advertise against.
Advertise against misspellings
Do clients have to pass a spelling test before they buy from you? If not, then you should advertise against common misspellings of keywords. As the following graph demonstrates, 1/4 to 1/3 as many people misspell the term acupuncture.
Advertise against local searches
When looking for a local provider, people often modify their search terms with a geographic term. For example, an acupuncturist in Hoppers Crossing may look to target people in the surrounding suburbs (Wyndham Vale, Werribee, Hoppers Crossing, Altona etc).
You can follow the simple formula [category] + [location].
- acupuncture melbourne
- acupuncture werribee
- acupuncture hoppers crossing
- acupuncture altona
- acupuncture wyndham vale
- ...
Continual Improvement
For best results your PPC should be constantly monitored to increase performance, test new keywords, test new ads etc.
You will also find that you are paying for traffic that you don't really want. By monitoring your PPC advertising you can make sure you eliminate certain searchers looking for:
- discounts eg “free acupuncture”, “cheap acupuncture”
- other solutions eg “acupuncture for dog”, “horse acupuncture”
- to study eg “acupuncture course”
- other products eg "acupunture resources", "acupunture needle", "acupuncture chart".
The basic premise here is if you don't do something related to their query, you don't want to pay for someone to visit you.
Conclusion
Hopefully now you have an idea of what PPC is and how it may benefit your business. If you are looking for someone to manage PPC for your business or just want some more information about PPC please drop me an email.
