PPC

Pay Per Click, PPC or (Google Adwords) is the system of sponsored listings you see on Google, MSN or Yahoo. An advertiser pays every time a user clicks on an ad, a price determined by the search engine. The search engine determines the price on the basis of the competitiveness of the keywords. PPC is much like an auction, where each advertiser bids for chance to get the highest position for the most popular keywords. But how do you get the best out of your Pay Per Click Campaign?

Keywords: If your budget is limited it would be best to use a localized, long keyword search term. “Keywords” are the words or search term a user types into a Search Engine. If your base keywords are “Laptop Repair ” you should use some modifiers, such as location; “London” or type; “Sony”. Remember long tail keywords are buyers and short tail keywords are browsers. However watch out for the negatives, if you do not sell “Dell” Laptops you may want remove this from your campaign.

Main Advertisement: Would a user type in the keywords your ad uses? Is your ad text loud and punchy? Does it call out to the customer? The second most powerful keywords are the ones you should use for your main ad text. If you have used the singular in your title use the plural in your ad. If the title of your ad is “Laptop Repair London” and you can repair the same day, it is likely a high proportion of customers will be searching for “Same Day Laptop Repairs London”.

Landing Pages: Once the client has clicked through to your site make sure they stay on it - so you can convert your clicks to sales. Be certain your ad points to the page it relates to. Nobody likes to hunt for something they thought they had found.

Management: It can be very easy to loose track of your campaigns. Do you want to break your campaign into ads with different sub categories; brands, budget, geo-targeting? Grouping ads together not only makes them more manageable, but you will be able to assess the click through rates for different subcategories. Compare the CTR of “Sony Laptop £1000″ with “Sony Laptop £500″ and you will be able to assess which ads to use and which to disregard.

Conclusion: Were your adds successful? Were there a high proportion of click throughs on an ad you thought weak? Or was one not as successful as you thought it would be? Now is the time to tweak your ads for optimum performance.