What is PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC)
A search engine result pages can be split in to two different types of listings. The natural or organic list is where sites are ranked using the search engine algorithms. Sponsored links or sponsored ads are based on Pay Per Click (PPC) model. These links are displayed at the top of the listing and on the right hand side of the Search results. There are two main contributing factors which determine pay per click position; these are, bid price and quality score.
The best place for companies to start with pay per click is to identify what they want the focus the account is going to be and what audience they are trying to target. Then extensive research can be done to determine the best keywords to bid on to draw the most qualified traffic to your website.
For example if you specialise in diamonds in London, the keyword you would bid for are diamonds, London, jewels etc. The pay per click costs occur when a user actually clicks on an ad and goes though to the site, hence pay per click. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft ad-Center are the programs offer by Google, Yahoo and MSN Search to run PPC campaigns. The advantages of pay per click campaigns are they can get you to the top of listing straight away for a targeted customer group based on keyword. Budgets can be closely monitored to fall in line with seasonal trends in your business.
In essence we bring your perfect customer to you.
The disadvantages are that if you target the wrong group or the right group at the wrong time of day, the money being spent on your campaign won’t bring you any extra revenue. These campaigns need to be monitored and adjusted regularly to be most effective, it can often be small changes to pay per click that makes the big differences.
Here at Click Consult we take care of the whole PPC process for you. There are some key areas during this process which impact greatly of the quality of the pay per click campaign. The first area is keyword research. It is very important to highlight the most relevant keywords specific to your site and the service or products you supply. This then brings a high quality of qualified traffic to your website. What is so important within this process is for in depth research of negative keywords. A negative keyword is a kind of matching option that allows you to prevent your ad from appearing when the specific terms are a part of the user’s search. Negative keywords can apply at two different levels: campaign-level and Ad Group-level So, for example, if a companies pay per click campaign is selling a product online they would not want any traffic for people using the word ‘rent’. This would create poor quality traffic for the website and thus have an effect on conversion rate.
One of the other most important areas that affect the performance of PPC is landing pages; visitors expect the content of the landing page to reflect the ad content. If not, you've wasted their time and your ad budget. Once we have the user clicking through from the pay per click ad, we need to draw them in further along the buying cycle by producing more selling points and a call to action.
Also, the PPC campaign must be monitored regularly to prevent click fraud; this is where a malicious user constantly clicks on your sponsored listing with no intention to purchase, just to destroy your campaign budget. PPC is considered one of the more reliable ways to generate revenue and branding quickly and effectively.
