Intrinsic Marketing Expert Article

Pay Per Click Optimisation Introduction

The benefits of Pay Per Click internet advertising compared with traditional advertising methods is simply this: almost all traditional methods are broadcast methods to people who have shown little interest in buying your product. Think bill board posters, TV ads, radio ads, flyers through doors, magazine ads etc etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure there some targeted than others, if you are selling marketing services to businesses, you advertise in a Marketing magazine, but that's a crude method these days.

Search Google for "Software" and down the right hand side, you'll see links by websites who are paying Google to have their advert and site listed there on the first page of results. This is Pay Per Click Advertising and this is why Google now turns over more than $6 Billion per year!

Compare that to someone searching Google for "how to do online marketing for lawyers"? That's a person that right at that precise moment in time is interested in learning how to do online marketing for lawyers! If you expect to sell a product or service that can help them, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Google. How much is it worth to you to have that user visit your site within 5 seconds of typing that into their search engine? 5p? 10p? 50p?

Sure, you could search engine optimise your website to make sure you have first page rankings for that term, but this takes time and a reasonable investment in cash. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really comes into it's own, and is under used in my opinion. You could be on the first page of google the same day for that search term for a very small budget. In a week you'd have some indication of how many people are really prepared to search for that term, visit your site, and buy your product. And it could even cost you less than £100 say. This is real time, right on the money, market research for a tiny budget that you simply can't get any other way.

What's more, let's say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your advert making a total spend of £100. Let's say your conversion rate is a modest 1%, so you've got 5 new orders and more importantly 5 new customers that you can now up sell to. All for £100 spend! How much is your average customer worth to you? It's attractive isn't it?

One important thing to know is how Google ranks the sponsored Pay Per Click marketing Adverts. In essence it's a real time auction. The highest bidder wins. If you bid 20p and someone else bids 25p, they will rank above your. Actually it's a lot more complicated than that, as if you have a better quality Pay Per Click advertising, it's possible for you to rank higher than the 25p advert because Google will give boosts to higher performing Pay Per Click Adverts. What this means is that if your advertising professional knows what (s)he's doing with Pay Per Click bid management, it's possible to get higher rankings (read more traffic) for less money. So your valuable online website promotion budget goes further and you save money. Conversely, if your online advertising campaign is managed by someone who doesn't know what they are doing, it will cost you more.

Here are some of the things an expert Google Advertising Professional should be doing whilst managing your account, and if yours isn't, we strongly recommend you get a Pay Per Click review of your online marketing campaign as soon as possible:

Bid or Don't Bother - The whole point of Pay Per Click bid management is to get on the first page of your search engine fast. However, where there's more than 8 (normally) even Pay Per Click Adverts can drop to the second page. Where there's competition like this, there's absolutely no point doing a Pay Per Click marketing campaign if you're not on the first page, so either boost your Cost Per Click settings, or forget it.

Track Your Conversions for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not traditional marketing, so use that to your advantage. The technology exists to track each and every sale and where it comes from. You can know exactly which advert converts to sales and which don't. Remember, it's one thing to have lots if traffic, it's another to have a lot of sales. What would you rather have for Pay Per Click internet advertising: an advert that generates 1,000 leads (clicks) and 1% sales, or one that generates 100 leads but 10% sales? For both you get the same sales, but the first costs you 10x as much in Pay Per Click advertising budget.

Match the Landing Page - A very common mistake is not matching the page that people see when they click your advert, to the content of your advert; which if you followed the advice on Many Ad Groups, should be targeted at what the user searched for. This simple means that when the user clicks your Ad, they see what they expect. Did you know that internet users are lazy? Did you know that half of all internet searches leave a website in less than 8 seconds because they don't find what they expected!

A/B Split Testing your Ads - This is good Pay Per Click management and simply means having more than one advert and testing which one works best. Let me give you one personal example, we had 2 adverts which were identical in every way except the start of the title. One started "Learn to Prevent..." and the other started with "Stop...". Split testing determined that 5% of the people who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8% of the people who saw the "Stop..." ad clicked that one. Guess what, we dropped the first one and got a better quality Ad which ultimately Google promoted to the premium advertising slot on the page, for the same Price Per Click !

Many Ad Groups - The first amateur mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single advert. This is usually bad. Keywords should be split up into groups with advert text that reflects the keywords searched for.

Phrase / Broad / Exact Matching - Google Adwords allow 3 different ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but most advertisers just go for the default matching option. You could double your traffic from intelligent use of the other options which most lazy Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.

Click these links if you would like to talk to a Google Certified Advertising Professional about a Pay Per Click review of your existing Pay Per Click Advertising campaign or you're simple interested in outsourcing the whole setup and running of your Pay Per Click campaign with our Pay Per Click Management services.