What is Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising?
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine advertising involves placing text ads in search engines that display when certain keywords or keyword phrases are searched for. The advertiser agrees to pay a certain amount for every click that occurs on their ad. As with organic search results, which are determined by the search engine algorithms (see our Search Engine Optimization section), positions higher up on the page result in more clicks and thus are more valuable. Therefore, advertisers typically have to pay more per-click to get their text ad higher on the page for a particular keyword search. With the pay-per-click model, advertisers place a bid for how much they are willing to pay per click on their ad for a certain keyword search. It is a dynamic bidding marketplace where you are constantly competing with other advertisers for position on the page.
It’s important to differentiate between the organic or natural search results that are listed for a search engine query versus the paid results that are listed. The natural search results are typically in the center of the search engine results page, and the paid or sponsored ads are usually the first couple of listings at the top, and the listings in a column on the right side of the page.
How to Implement Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising
Pay-per-click campaigns can be up and running very quickly (really in a matter of minutes), but before you start spending money it makes sense to spend some time planning your campaign and setting objectives. Otherwise, you’ll be flying blind and you won’t be able to measure whether your campaign is worth continuing or not.
Steps that should be taken to set up any pay-per-click campaign include:
How to NOT Implement Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising
Here are some tips on how to NOT implement a pay-per-click marketing campaign:
The Chair 10 Marketing Pay-Per-Click Approach
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine advertising involves placing text ads in search engines that display when certain keywords or keyword phrases are searched for. The advertiser agrees to pay a certain amount for every click that occurs on their ad. As with organic search results, which are determined by the search engine algorithms (see our Search Engine Optimization section), positions higher up on the page result in more clicks and thus are more valuable. Therefore, advertisers typically have to pay more per-click to get their text ad higher on the page for a particular keyword search. With the pay-per-click model, advertisers place a bid for how much they are willing to pay per click on their ad for a certain keyword search. It is a dynamic bidding marketplace where you are constantly competing with other advertisers for position on the page.
It’s important to differentiate between the organic or natural search results that are listed for a search engine query versus the paid results that are listed. The natural search results are typically in the center of the search engine results page, and the paid or sponsored ads are usually the first couple of listings at the top, and the listings in a column on the right side of the page.
How to Implement Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising
Pay-per-click campaigns can be up and running very quickly (really in a matter of minutes), but before you start spending money it makes sense to spend some time planning your campaign and setting objectives. Otherwise, you’ll be flying blind and you won’t be able to measure whether your campaign is worth continuing or not.
Steps that should be taken to set up any pay-per-click campaign include:
- Cost Targets: You need to have an understanding of what you can spend to acquire a customer (Cost Per Acquisition) to meet your profit targets for your business.
- Offer Determination: What is the key action you want consumers who click on your ad to take once they arrive on your Web landing page. Fill out a contact form? Download a free trial of your software? Buy your product? Download a free white paper? All of these are viable – it just depends on your particular business model.
- Keyword List Creation: You initially want to place ads against a large variety of keywords related to your product. That way you can tell what works for your product and what doesn’t.
- Ad Copy Creation: Ad copy for search engine ads is much different than ad copy for print ads or radio ads. It tends to be very straightforward and targeted to the particular keyword search a user has done.
- Landing Page Creation: To maximize the ROI on your ads, you need to design a custom Web landing page for each or you keyword groups.
- Tracking Tag Implementation: It is essential that you implement tracking on your site so that you can measure the effectiveness of your pay-per-click ads.
How to NOT Implement Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising
Here are some tips on how to NOT implement a pay-per-click marketing campaign:
- Don’t spend too little time coming up with too small of a keyword list consisting mostly of broad, general terms. You need to create a large list with both broad and specific keywords and keyword phrases in order to test what is effective.
- Don’t fail to research which keywords people search on the most when you are forming your keyword list. Use tools like Google's free keyword search volume tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to tell you how many people are searching on a particular keyword each month.
- Don’t just put all of your keywords into one group. You need to break your keywords into related groups so that you can write targeted ad copy for each group, and track and measure the effectiveness of each group to understand what is working and what isn’t.
- Don’t only write one set of ad copy for each keyword group. Google Adwords, the dominant and most effective pay-per-click service, lets you create as many versions of ad copy for a keyword group as you want, and over time will automatically display the ad that gets the highest click-through.
- Don’t use the same landing page on your Web site for all of your keywords. In order to maximize your ROI, each landing page must be specifically customized to each keyword group. So if you run pay-per-click ads for
- Don’t set your initial bid prices too low – some search engine bidding systems have a “memory” and if your ads initially get a very low click-through rate, it can take a lot of time and effort to recover.
- Don’t start off running your ads in countries other than your own or within Google’s content network of sites. You need to first optimize your ads to perform with positive ROI in your own native country and in Google’s search engine itself before expanding your campaign further.
- Don’t forget to set daily budget limits for each campaign group. You don’t want to end up spending too much in the first week of your campaign before you can analyze and make sure the campaign is performing.
- Don’t run your ads for a week, decide that they aren’t performing and never try pay-per-click advertising again. It often takes several weeks to tune a campaign so that it is performing well. Yes, there are some businesses where pay-per-click advertising doesn’t end up making sense – but you need longer than a week to figure that out and you need someone with past experience running pay-per-click campaigns to give you advice or assistance.
- Don’t be overwhelmed by all this advice. Call Chair 10 Marketing and let us help you navigate the pay-per-click marketing world.
The Chair 10 Marketing Pay-Per-Click Approach
- Analyze your product and market
- Understand your Cost Per Acquisition or help you come up with it
- Build out a thorough target keyword list to run ads against and review and refine this list with your team
- Break your keyword list into related groups
- Write a variety of ad copy for each keyword group
- Create targeted landing pages on your Web site for each keyword group
- Embed tracking tags on appropriate Web pages of your site to measure ad effectiveness (a critical step many companies don’t take the time to implement – and it isn’t hard to do!)
- Set initial bid prices for each keyword based on competition
- Launch campaign
- Monitor it frequently in the early stages and adjust ad copy and bid strategy
- Create weekly detailed reports on keyword group and overall campaign performance
- Refine campaign frequently to respond to competitive changes in bidding strategy, changes in product features, promotions, etc.
Pay-per-click advertising seems relatively simple on the surface, but with increased bid competition across the board and frequent policy changes by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter, it is critical to get guidance or assistance from someone who has implemented successful pay-per-click programs in the past. Chair 10 Marketing can provide this trusted advice and implementation expertise.
