Most business owners that we meet are not aware of Per-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, those who do often have a stigma that PPC is expensive and generally quite useless.

Pay Per Click?

Perform any search on Google and sometimes you see “sponsored listings” on the top and right side, which are the PPC advertisements.  Like its namesake, an advertiser pays Google whenever someone clicks on the ad and gets directed to the advertiser’s website.

For most of our campaigns, we’ve included PPC in our Internet marketing toolset.  It’s not something that you would want to depend on for a steady stream of new visitors (we have organic search or SEO for that) but its still a good source of traffic and fast too, especially if you have a new website.

How it Works

Most PPC campaigns start with the advertiser deciding on a daily budget (you could start for as little as $1 a day if you wanted to).  Rest assured that you will not be charged for anything more than the daily budget you’ve set.  The next thing would be to decide the keywords that you want to advertise for (”pet supplies”, “accounting services”) and place a bid for them.  Your bid price is the amount you will pay each time a user clicks on your ad, up to your daily budget.

An Example:

Suppose your budget is $10 and you bid for “pet supplies” at $1.  Each time a user searches for “pet supplies” on your ad network (Google, Yahoo, etc) your ad will be shown.  It doesn’t matter how many times your ad is shown (the more the merrier of course) since you don’t get charged for it.  If the user is interested in your ad and wants to find out more, he clicks your website.  Then, you will be charged $1 for this referral.  After 10 users have clicked through your ad to your website, your advertising budget for the day will be spent and then your ads will stop showing until the next day.  Oh, and don’t worry about someone clicking your ad for the heck of it.

Since your competitors may be bidding for the same keywords, your bid price will determine the position of your advertisement.  Unlike natural search (non-paid results), our experience is that you don’t need to be in the top 3 positions for best click-through results.  What matters most is a well phrased, good value proposition.

Web Analytics & PPC

Web analytics, or the lack of it, is the single most-common for PPC campaign failure.  There has to be some form of tracking in place to see how ads perform.  Things to track would include the change in traffic before and after the campaign, conversion rates and sales volume.  With analytics, you should be able to tell if your ad spending is bringing you a positive return.  If the ads are performing badly, analytics will also tell you if something is wrong with the ad copy, or if you have to optimise your landing page for more conversions.

Once you have established a correlation between your ad spending and returns, you will be able to adjust your daily budget and forecast the effect it would have on your conversions.

Most of the time, when you hear about PPC campaigns not performing,  it’s due to the lack of tracking and analytics.  A PPC campaign properly deployed can be a very cheap source of targeted leads to your website!