Pay Per Click
Online advertising for your services or products is both extremely effective, competitive and not to mention costly (deadly) if it’s not well executed by your selected agency. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the first options you should embark on, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign.
Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed at the optimal position (not always the top) of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months or even years for a good SEO campaign to show its effectiveness.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid search engine advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click promotion campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier and more effective – the process will be. In order to determine if pay-per-click service is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth.
You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 unique visitors, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click. Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.
Having personally used paid search, I can tell you it’s a combination of factors you need to manage in order to profit from it. As with anything search, keyword research, good adcopy, matching landing page coded with analytics and most importantly determining what is your ultimate outcome you are seeking are all crucial.
Please understand the purpose of a good adcopy is not to attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. Finding a proven marketing copy for your campaign is all about testing and ensuring your adcopy is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidate to your site.
It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit (fortunaately, not so in Singapore as yet).
You gotta have a plan in place to help you closely track the effectiveness of your campaign through conversion on a regular basis. Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends.
Recommended PPC Platforms
Google Adwords is the defacto PPC search king for now and will be for a long time to come. Though more expensive (still recommended to start any ppc with Adwords first), it’s the easiest to use. The last I checked Google commands at least 80% of the search market share. Because of it’s strong brand, most ppc companies like to pitch Adwords more than Yahoo and MSN. You will often need to pay a monthly management fee for them to maintain your account. Personally, I manage Adwords in-house and I do use an external agency for the less precise campaigns via the Content Network for Branding exercise.
Yahoo Sponsored Search though a distant second to Google Adwords, will still drive a good amount of traffic to your website. If you business is targeting those who in their late 30s and above, you should not ignore Yahoo. They have a scheme where they can help you set up your campaign for a small fee. If you trying to manage this in-house, just know that it’s not as intuitive as Adwords but the PPC fees can be significantly much lesser.
MSN Adcenter is the third most popular paid search engines, and you should consider them if you are selling to a younger crowd. In Singapore and most part of Asia, you need to purchase the service through their appointed agency (no true anymore – sign up here directly with Microsoft AdCenter – Singapore, just $10 to get started). But if you are selling to the other parts of the world, consider signing up the USA package. Again less intuitive than Adwords, but cheaper PPC and it can surprise you with some nice returns.
Ask is small but traffic is cheap, learn from my experience.
If you are using PPC firms, and I have nothing against them, but you need to have very clear understanding of your objectives before you jump on the bandwagon. Because your campaigns are only as strong as the person designated to manage your account, don’t fall for good brand name alone, dig deep into the background and experience of the account person handling your account.
