With Pay Per Click (PPC - Google Ad-words for example) your advert only costs you money when it is clicked on by a visitor (potential customer!), so it will be shown for as long as the budget remains.
For example, if you have a budget of £1000 per month, and each click costs £1, your advert can drive 1000 people to your website. It may use the entire budget in a few days if it’s very popular, it may last all month, or you may never reach the limit.
Your adverts have to be written creatively with good, targeted copy as space is limited in which to promote yourself. These adverts are then linked to keywords that will need to be “matched” correctly to trigger them for the correct searching audience. You must also make sure that your advert isn’t shown to the wrong searchers by defining the key phrases that you don’t want your advert to be triggered by.
For example, good key phrase triggers for your advert may be "widget dealership", "widget dealer", "widgets South Wales" etc. However, you may not want searchers looking for "widget images", "widget Clubs", "widget reviews" as these people aren't looking to buy yet!
One of the advantages of online advertising is that it is easily adaptable. Adverts can be made more efficient over a number of weeks or months as there is a great deal of feedback from the PPC account and your website analytics. Over time poorer adverts are removed and replaced with better ones, a ‘survival of the fittest’ for adverts.
Advert performance can be easily tracked and the return on investment can be high, with profit from conversion exceeding the PPC management cost and click spend by hundreds or thousands of percent.
It’s all about offering as many routes to your website from the first page of results and this is where using PPC can be effective as a reinforcement to a natural search engine optimisation campaign; the more opportunities there are to click through to your website, the more chances there are of your link being clicked on.
Many people prefer to use the natural results in the main column, some will click the map listings and others like to click on adverts and all these preferences should be considered; we consistently work at maintaining some adverts in particular positions as sometimes its better to be half way down the pages instead of first position!
Results page saturation is vital and offering a natural link, a map listing and a PPC advert on the first page of results can greatly enhance your chances of more traffic.
Pay per Click is all about return on investment, therefore you must assess your website and determine whether it will do the business for those who click through to it – but that’s a different news article all together!