Manor Quarry Blog

Pay per Click (PPC)

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is simply where you pay the host of the site you are advertising on (normally search engines) a fee each time your advert is clicked, and traffic is directed to your site.

In a similar way to getting your site high in the organic search results, you select keywords relevant to your product/service, and your advert is shown when these words are searched.

The fee you pay is dependant on the keyword/s that you are targeting, and how popular they are with other advertisers, and the target market. It is a dynamic marketplace – the higher you bid, the higher your advert will be displayed.

PPC allows you to get maximum exposure, for whatever budget you choose. You can specify a set amount to spend per day or per month, and when enough clicks have gone through to your site that you reach your budget, your advert is simply removed until the next day/month where it starts again, meaning you don’t spend more money than you want to. People ask how much they should spend on PPC. However there is no straight forward answer other than spend what you can afford, based on your value per lead.

Google Adwords

One of the most common and popular places to advertise via PPC is in the Google search results. Found on the right hand side and sometimes the top of the page, the most relevant adverts to the search term are shown.

The advert itself is broken down into 5 parts.

Headline: Max 25 characters

Description line 1: Max 35 characters

Description line 2: Max 35 characters

Display URL: Max 35 characters

Destination URL: Max 1024 characters

The aim of a PPC click is the same as your site being shown in the organic results: you want the viewer to click it and go to your site. To do this, you need to entice people to click.

Points to consider include:

• Test different words/phrases and see which are more successful, then alter accordingly.
• Explain your product/service in a way that it entices the viewer to click.
• Use your keywords, preferably in prominent places, such as the heading.
• Test certain words like ‘free’ and ‘download’ as these invite people to click.
• Look at your competitors’ adverts and see how they word and structure them.
• Test. Refine. Repeat.

After completing your advert, the next stage to consider is where it leads if someone clicks it. This is called the landing page. Someone has clicked your advert because they like what you are promoting or saying, so this next page must be relevant and specific to the advert. Similar wording and phrases should be used to tie them together.

Other points to consider:

• Keep it short and simple.
• Try and limit navigation away from the page, as other messages or pages may distract the reader and take them away from the page.
• Have prominent calls to action: contact us now / get started / forms etc.
• Align it with your keywords.

PPC is a good way of getting fast feedback on what you are doing and how you are marketing yourself. It is useful to promote short term events and a good way of testing new products and markets, as it is easy to track the amount of times your advert has been viewed, and the amount of times it has been clicked, and from that, you can monitor how successful it is. However, to make the most of SEO, you should not rely solely on PPC. If not used correctly it can be an expensive way to promote your site, so is best used in conjunction with other marketing techniques such as implementing keywords in your site for search engines to index you organically and linking to your site from elsewhere.

Explore posts in the same categories: Web Site Optimisation

This entry was posted on June 18, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Web Site Optimisation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: advert, advertsing, calls to action, Google, Google AdWords, Keywords, landing page, organic search results, Pay Per Click, PPC, Search Engines, search term, target market, traffic

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