Can Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) really help your business? How does it work?
PPC advertising is a simple method of using search engines like Google to deliver qualified prospects to your website. It is cost effective, simple to use and can be started with a very small budget. This article is designed as a simple introduction to PPC advertising but if you would like more help in setting up your own PPC campaign, please check out our services page.
Pay per click advertising is an online advertising model where you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement and visits your site. It doesn’t matter how many times people see your ad or how often it is displayed – if nobody clicks on it, you pay nothing.
The most common PPC advertising example is Google Adwords. When you type something into Google it searches the web and then displays the pages it thinks are most relevant based on the terms you typed in (your keywords). For example, if you type in ‘tropical fish’ it will give you a list of pages that use the term ‘tropical fish’ in order of relevance and importance.
There are lots of thing that you can do to get your website to the top of the list for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business – you can find a good introduction to these in our free report on Search Engines in Plain English.
However, search engine optimization takes time and you might be up against some pretty big players.
Google’s PPC advertising lets you buy your way onto the first page of the results in the form of the small text advertisements that you see along the right hand side of the screen, and under the heading ‘sponsored results’.
Opening Your Account
To start a pay per click advertising campaign you will need to set up an account. With Google, you can do that at the Adwords Sign Up Page. Once your account is opened you can create a simple text based advertisement – usually a headline plus two additional short lines, using select keywords, of course.
This is the ad that will be displayed next to your chosen search terms. You will also be able to select which countries your ad will be displayed in. In fact, if you sell to a local market only you can even select a county or city.
Choosing Your Keywords
The next step is choosing the search terms that you want your ad to appear next to. Using our tropical fish example, you might want to show up when someone searches for ‘tropical fish’ or ‘Japanese fighting fish’ or any number of terms.
Before you start typing them in, do your homework and find out the terms that people are searching for – Google has tools to help you do this.
Setting a Budget
The next step is to set a budget – both for the total amount that you are prepared to spend and the amount you are prepared to spend per click. For example, there may be 10 businesses that would all like their ads displayed next to the term ‘tropical fish’. So whose ad does Google put first in the list? Google ranks the ads by combining two factors:
You can decide how much you are prepared to ‘bid’ for your terms starting from a few cents. Based on your business, select an amount that you are willing to pay – it can always to be changed later. At this stage Google will show you your estimated position and the average number of people you will attract each day. If you’ve ‘bid’ $0.10 per click for the term ‘tropical fish’ and attract 10 clicks per day, that’s means you will have spent $1 per day on your ads. If nobody clicks you will have spent nothing. Based on these estimates you can set the maximum amount that you want to spend in any day or month. Once you have reached your budget your ads will simply stop getting displayed.
You will be charged by credit card or direct debit each month for the number of clicks you had.
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Would you like more targeted traffic to your website? Contextual advertising could be the answer you’re looking for, especially if your business targets a specific niche.
It is an online advertising model where relevant ads are displayed on websites or other online media, based on the content that is on that web page. The advertising network searches the page for keywords and then delivers an advertisement that matches those keywords. For example, if you were reading a website about sports – and they use contextual advertisement – then you would only see ads related to sports.
For the advertiser it means that their ads are being displayed on pages related to their products or services. Chances are, if someone is reading that page, they may be interested in that topic – in this case, sports. That increases the chances that they will also be interested in your product or service.
No, pay per click is a model of how you pay for advertising, not how it is displayed. However, in many cases PPC is used alongside contextual ads – for example, Google Adwords and Adsense. When you type something into Google it searches the web and then displays the pages it thinks are most relevant based on the terms you typed in (your keywords). For example, if you type in ‘tropical fish’ it will give you a list of pages that use the term ‘tropical fish’ in order of relevance and importance.
On the right hand side of the results page Google also displays what it calls ‘sponsored results’ – this is Google Adwords and is a perfect example of a contextual ad. The ads that are displayed there are relevant to the keywords that you typed into Google. In this case you would expect to see advertisements related to ‘tropical fish’ – fish tanks, pet shops and the like. Each advertiser chooses the keywords that are appropriate to their advertisements and will only show up when those terms are searched for – i.e. contextual. They only pay however, when someone clicks on that ad – that is PPC.
Google Adwords combines the two – contextual advert and PPC – to great effect and has become one of the world’s largest advertising networks. Adsense is based on the same concept. Adsense allows website publishers to put small bits of code onto their website that deliver Adwords-style ads based on the text that is on the website page. So a page about boxing would have small boxing-related text ads appear on the page. When someone clicks on these ads, the revenue generated is split between Google and the website owner.
Google is certainly not the only advertising network that uses contextual ads and contextual advert does not have to use PPC.
The purpose of contextual advert is simply to make any advertising more relevant to what is on the website. That should mean that advertisers get a better response (and more targeted leads) and customers are not annoyed by irrelevant ads.
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Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Business
If you want more leads for your business then pay per lead is an attractive choice. But is it the right one and how does it work?
It is exactly what it sounds like: You pay for leads instead of paying a flat rate for advertising or marketing. There are lots of ways that this can be organized but the main benefit to you is that you don’t have to pay for any marketing that doesn’t result in new leads.
To pay for leads means you get a fixed price for each lead, which eliminates a lot of the risk that is usually associated with marketing and advertising your business. So long as you can do a good enough job of closing sales, then it’s perfectly possible to adopt paying for leads as a strategy to grow your entire business.
The way it works depends on what kind of system you set up or use. Here are a few options that might be worth looking at:
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Every business with a website wants to make the best use of online marketing tools to help them attract new leads and visitors to their website. Of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of internet marketing tools that you could use. So how do you choose the best ones for your business?
Finding the right tools depends as much on your business and your goals as the tools themselves. But generally online marketing tools can be lumped into one or more groups, including but not limited to:
Advertising online is much like advertising offline – you need to choose the best places to advertise based on your target market. Once you’ve chosen the best places to advertise, you’ll also have a choice of advertising types – largely split into display advertising and pay per click advertising.
Display advertising is exactly what it sounds like. Your advertisement gets displayed on a page and if people are interested they can click through to your website. The amount you pay will either be based on a flat fee or on a cost per impression.
Cost per impression means that you will pay every time your ad is displayed to a website visitor. This is usually expressed as a cost per thousand (CPM). For example, if you agree to pay $10 CPM then you will pay $100 for every 10,000 times you advertisement is displayed on screen.
Pay per click can look identical to display advertising but you only pay when a person clicks on your ad to visit your website. If nobody clicks, you pay nothing. Google runs the most popular pay per click advertising network called Adwords.
Further Reading:
Online content comes in many forms but in most cases you will be talking about written content either on your own website or created for other websites but linking back to you. Good content helps you perform better with the search engines (read our free report on search engine optimization basics). It can also help demonstrate your expertise or the quality of your products.
Further Reading:
Email can be a very effective online marketing tool provided you use it in the right way – otherwise you run the risk of being classed as a spammer. The right way is based on permission marketing. Permission marketing starts with you asking potential customers to provide their contact details, usually in return for some kind of information or special offer. The prospective customer will know and accept that they will receive future marketing communications from you.
Email can be particularly useful as it can help you automate a lot of your marketing and lead generation systems. In particular, you can use auto-responders, small software programs that send pre-written emails at set times, to help you follow up with prospects and deliver useful content.
Further Reading:
The Internet allows even the smallest businesses to use a variety of media to market themselves. It is now easy for businesses to use everything from video to recorded audio to live webinars to market themselves. The possibilities are endless.
Further Reading:
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Do you want to develop leads online? The Internet can be a great place to develop and grow your business. In particular it offers a perfect opportunity to attract customers, build your prospect list and ultimately help you close new business. The good news is that internet lead generation is not all that different from traditional offline lead generation.
Yes, the Internet changes the way that people look for information. Yes, the Internet allows you to automate lead generation. But, ultimately the steps involved in good lead generation are the same:
Let’s take a look at each step:
Imagine your website as if it were a store. Your first job is to attract people to your store using effective marketing techniques. You can’t sell anybody anything until they’re in your store. Some of the marketing techniques to consider include:
It’s also worth remembering that you can still use effective offline strategies like direct mail to drive traffic to your website as well.
Once you have started to generate traffic to your website then the next step is to turn some of that traffic into a list of prospective new customers to follow up with. Usually this will involve you creating an incentive for them to provide their contact details, the first part of any good permission based marketing campaign. That incentive could be a special offer, or, more likely, further useful information.
What form this information takes is up to you. You could consider a blog that people can subscribe to, a free newsletter, or a webinar that people can take part in, for example.
Once you start building a list the next question becomes, ‘what do I do with this list?’. The goal has to be to move people from being interested to being willing to buy your product or service. Of course not every prospective customer on your list will end up becoming a customer.
That’s fine.
However, it is important for you to find ways of separating those with a genuine interest from the ‘tire kickers’. Tools like newsletters and autoresponders can help you automate much of this process.
Of course the final step is to close the sale. You can create online marketing tools that will encourage customers to buy from you. But unless you are actually selling a product via your website, you will almost always have to close the sale through direct contact with your prospective customer or client.
However, if you set your lead generation program up effectively; the advertising you use, how you build your list and what you do with that list can all help ensure that the people you actually spend time selling to are the most qualified prospects you could hope for.
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Low Cost Lead Generation
Would you like to generate more leads for your business but don’t have the budget to make it work? Think again. There are plenty of low cost strategies available once you know what you’re looking for.
Effective lead generation is a three-stage process:
Each of these three steps can cost money but if you’re putting together a low cost marketing strategy you can make simple decisions to keep the budget in check.
The first step in any lead generation strategy is to attract people to your business – and more particularly your website – with good marketing. For many businesses marketing means advertising, but advertising can be an expensive way to promote your business.
Marketing is bigger than just advertising and here are three simple marketing methods you can use:
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making your website and content easy for the search engines to find and more likely to turn up in the search engine results of your target customers. Do your SEO homework well and you can attract people who are searching for solutions – solutions that you provide – at no cost to you.
Good SEO comes down to five simple ideas;
You can find more detail about SEO in our free report.
PR (public relations) is traditionally about encouraging the media to write about you and your business – usually by issuing press releases and building relationships with journalists. More recently, online press release services have made it possible for businesses to create ‘direct to consumer’ releases (news releases as opposed to press releases).
These releases are designed to be SEO friendly and get picked up in the search results. If you’re writing for news releases try including a call to action that encourages people to visit your website. Either way, PR can be an effective way to attract leads without spending a fortune.
PPC (pay per click) is advertising. But it’s also one of the most focused and cost effective forms of advertising. A good example of PPC ads is Google Adwords. Adwords ads are the ones you see to the right of your normal search results. You can create an ad, decide what search terms the ad will appear next to, bid on how much you are willing to pay and then set a monthly budget. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad – meaning you can create very specific advertising campaigns on very limited budgets.
Once you have attracted people to your lead generation system the next step is to develop those leads and identify the ones who are ready to buy. This can often be a time consuming process if you try to do it manually – and the more time consuming it is the more expensive it is too.
Perhaps the best way to ensure that a low cost lead generation strategy is to automate as much of the process as possible, using:
The majority of your lead generation program is much more cost effective in the long run than relying entirely on paid staff (or your own time) to accomplish it. In short, if you need a low cost lead generation strategy, focus on using low cost marketing strategies and automate as much of the process as you can.
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Online or offline, an advertising network (or ad network) is a business that connects advertisers with media owners. They help advertisers place ads in a variety of relevant media. They help media owners earn money from the readers, viewers, visitors and listeners they attract.
Online networks work mostly with websites but also they place advertising on blogs, in software applications and in email for example. The advertising itself can range from text links to banner ads to rich media like audio and video.
If you are an advertiser, placing your ads with an ad network can be a great way of distributing your advertising across a wide range of different websites and media. This can help gain you exposure in less competitive places.
Usually you will be able to decide what kind of websites and blogs that your advertisements will appear next to. If, for example, you want to advertise to teachers then it may be possible to arrange through an ad network to have your ad displayed in places that fall into their ‘education’ category.
In most cases big media companies sell only their remnant space through adv networks – i.e.the advertising space that they have been unable to sell themselves. Occasionally this will mean lower rates for the advertiser but this is not guaranteed.
In most cases advertising networks can be lumped into two groups:
Throughout both groups you will also find representative, blind and targeted adv networks.
Whatever kind of network you choose to work with, always do small test runs of your online advertising first. If these tests are successful, you can increase your advertising budget in confidence. If they are unsuccessful, you can choose to move your budget to a better use.
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