How PPC Fits into Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Pay per click advertising is a great way to get visitors when you need traffic right away. Building the SEO value of your site takes much longer.
But it’s PPC advertising is also risky. With poor management, you can spend a fortune, generate many visits, and end up with nothing to show for it. With careful management, this type of advertising becomes more efficient over time.
What is Pay Per Click Advertising?
Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is pretty simple: Search engines like Google and Bing allow businesses and individuals to buy listings in their search results. These listings appear along with the natural, non-paid search results.
In addition, both text ads and graphical ads can be shown on sites that offer ads along with content like online magazine articles.
Typically search page ads are more expensive, and ads on the content network cost less per click. Ads on the content network may get clicks from users who are still doing research are not ready to commit yet. However, those users can be marked so that Retargeting Ads are shown to them whenever they are surfing online.
How Do We Improve Your Odds with PPC Management?
We Track Conversions and ROI
What’s a ‘conversion’? It’s any time a visitor to your website takes a desired action. Examples of conversions might be:
- A visitor makes a purchase
- Visitor completes a sales inquiry form
- Visitor downloads a white paper and registers
A conversion doesn’t have to be a sale. But a conversion has to be worth something to you.
We Find Niche Keywords
A lot of folks aim their ads at the broadest possible terms, such as “shoes,” or “perfume,” or “search engine optimization.” Since the broader terms get far more searches, it’s a natural temptation. However, there is a big disadvantage. Since everyone bids on the broad terms, the cost per click is generally quite high. And the chances of conversion, even if someone clicks on your ad, is lower.
Proper keyword research using sophisticated tools can yield a list of terms that are searched on by users, but without so much competition from bidders. This information changes over time, so keyword research and bidding strategies have to be monitored on a regular basis.
We Know Google’s Writing Standards
Most pay per click advertising requires that you write a couple of short descriptive phrases about your service. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. At a minimum, grammar, spelling and overall language must be correct and appropriate for your audience. In addition, language and punctuation must adhere to the rules enforced by the pay per click service – Google, for example, won’t allow ads with superlatives (“the best,” “the greatest,” etc.), with repeated keywords, or with excessive capitalization.
We Monitor and Improve Quality Scores
Google and Bing both rate your ads and landing pages with a Quality Score. They examine:
- The ad quality
- Ad performance
- The quality of the page to which the ad points (landing page)
Based on various factors in all three areas, search engines will either increase or decrease the bid price necessary for you to gain a specific position.
A high-quality score can reduce costs significantly. A bad quality score raises pay per click costs and might even keep your ad from running at all.
To ensure higher quality scores, SDM must:
- Build your campaign history. As long as a specific campaign, ad group, and ads run without changes, the performance is kept in the account history. If you move to a new account, your entire history goes POOF and you have to start over. Good history means less expensive clicks, bad history can mean more expensive clicks.
- Constantly test ad copy best clickthrough rate. A higher clickthrough rate increases the ad’s quality score.
- Coordinate the Ad Campaigns, Adgroups, and Ads, with appropriate landing pages. If the ad’s landing page is written according to the current best practices used by the search engine (Google, Bing), your quality score is higher.
- Split good keywords from bad ones. Put high-performing ads and keywords in their own campaign. Otherwise, the bad performers will drag down the good ones.
To find out more about improving your pay per click ROI or building a new account, Call us at (972) 638-7361, or fill out the contact form on this page.