Search Engine Marketing

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
PPC is fast (a simple PPC campaign can be up and running in a few hours) and requires much less time and effort to get high Search Engine Rankings. In addition PPC also offers the ability to be found for a much wider range of keywords and phrases much more quickly than SEO. PPC also offers the opportunity to get your message over with much greater control than via SEO. This is because PPC enables you to control the text that appears in your mini adverts and this text can be modified according to the phrase the user has searched on. Taken to an extreme you can create an advert tailored to every single word or phrase that users might type in to a Search Engine to find your products. So if you sell "shiny black widgets", your advert can incorporate these words making it more likely that someone will click on your ad.

The ease with which changes can be made to PPC campaigns also means that they are much more flexible. This means that your PPC programme can keep right up to date with changing product lines including new product launches, special offers and events - something that is not always easy to achieve with SEO.

The downsides to PPC? The obvious potential disadvantage is the cost. Some online markets, notably Finance, attract fierce competition and this can result in click price inflation where the cost of clicks is so high that it is not possible to run a profitable campaign. However evidence suggests that in most markets reality is setting in and overall average click costs are falling slightly.

The key to any succesful PPC programme is making sure that the price you pay per click is not so high that your marketing costs do not exceed the profits you can make on the goods and services you sell through this channel. In other words, no different from any other kind of marketing. The good thing about PPC compared to many other marketing channels is that it is easy to measure your success (or failure) Statistics are provided to enable you to see what works and what doesn't and to track conversions and their costs. It is very simple to find out the cost of sale via PPC or if you like to think longer term, calculate the cost of new customer acquisition through this channel.

There are a number of ways that you can reduce the average cost per click and increase conversion rates but probably the most important is to do intensive keyword research. This is an in depth identification of all of the words and phrases that are relevant to your product or service and careful selection of these for your campaign. Typically, for any product or service, there are a few highly popular phrases that many people use. These also tend to be the most competitive and therefore the most expensive phrases. However there are often hundreds or even thousand of less popular phrases used by searchers that consequently attract much lower bid prices. A sensible approach to ensuring you get satisfactory Return on Investment from your PPC campaign is to bid sensibly (i.e. not aim for 1st position) on competitive phrases and also bid on as many other relevant but less competitive phrases as possible.

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