Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Search engines will allow websites to pay to appear along side the generically ranking sites at a ‘cost per click’ (CPC), this cost is dictated by the competitiveness of the search terms and operates much like an auction where you chose how much you’d like to pay for each click.

By paying either more or less than your competitors will decide whether you rank above them or below them on the search engine and your budget will dictate how frequently you appear.

There are tools that help you with the process but often it makes better financial sense to use another company.

You will often find companies claiming that they are an approved PPC management company, but be aware, they may be approved and/or certified but that doesn’t mean they are recommended by the search engines.

PPC Management companies

PPC management companies usually charge a proportion of your budget, as with anything it is usually negotiable and the charges will vary, there is no rule of thumb, but more expensive isn’t always better.  The best advice would be perhaps, not to enter into a fixed period contract and if you don’t feel that you are getting a good return then you can look to move. Ask for statistics that show how many impressions you received and for what search terms, also look at your conversion rate for those that click through.

Its worth noting that gaining certification to manage PPC campaigns is not difficult and the criteria is based on spending money with the search engines and answering questions where the answers have been supplied, so to this end certification is far from a legitimate measure of competence, be prepared to shop around and ask around.

Website statistics

By using a statistics program such as Google analytics, you will be able to follow these links from the point of entry (i.e. the advert) through to point of exit including the bounce rate, this in turn will allow you to calculate the actual return on the investment made.  It will also let you know the weakest point of your site, and perhaps information about the ease of navigation through your site.

Managing your own PPC campaign

If you attempt to try to manage your own PPC campaign (which could often be a false economy) the best practice is to enter large volumes of keywords, the more niche the term is then usually the cheaper the price.  If you only want to pay when that exact sequence of keywords is entered ensure that you select ‘exact match’ this ensures that the price remains low.  If you chose to allow any search terms that contain your keywords you are likely to waste a greater sum of money for unrelated searches. This is especially important as most words have many definitions take for example the word ‘bed’ which could refer to flowers, furniture, food preparation, rocks, Mollusks, in fact as the term suggests most thing that are arranged or placed in layers or in a heap, with this amount of ambiguity it is likely that much of your budget will be wasted on people clicking through to a website that has nothing to do with what they were looking for, and consequently exiting promptly.

The most common examples of PPC would be Adsense (Google), Overture/search marketing (Yahoo) or AdCentre (MSN), other websites may have private campaigns.