Pay-Per Click, or PPC, is an online advertising strategy offered by the major search engines. Basically the premise is to have a sponsored link that you only “pay” for when somebody “clicks” your ad. In this post I’ll discuss how to tell if PPC is right for you and/or your company.
As with most marketing and advertising, your intended results will greatly influence whether a particular type of advertising is right for you. Let’s take a look at the typical goals your business might hope to achieve when adding a PPC campaign to your online marketing plans.
- Increase Your Clicks and Traffic
- Improve Your ROI
- Promote Brand Awareness
- Improve Your CTR
Increase Your Clicks and Traffic
Lets say your aren’t ranking high for one of your key terms in the organic SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). What you can do with PPC is pay for that top spot. How much you pay is determined by how competitive the keyword term is. The cost will also be affected by how well the landing page for your ad is organically optimized.
One way to increase clicks and traffic is to run your campaign on broad keywords (i.e. web design or rv dealer). These are also known as short tail keywords, and they tend to be highly searched. You must be careful though, by running on broad keywords you might actually pay more per click. Plus, these short tails tend to be expensive, and the website visitors you generate might not yet be highly motivated to buy.
Another way to boost clicks and traffic is to run campaigns on multiple long tail keywords – highly specific, three or more word phrases. Although a typical long tail term might have lower search volume than a related short tail term, the combined search volume of all the possible long tails usually dwarfs short tails. Plus, long tails cost less, and tend to be the terms used by highly qualified buyers.
Improve Your Return on Investment
If you are looking for people to buy a product or service, then your best bet is to run your campaign based on gaining a higher ROI. Your main goal here is to get people to click your ad, and then to sign up or buy something (make a conversions). That means you’ll need to think through the landing pages for your ads, as well as the text you use in your PPC ad.
One thing you must be conscious about is the fact that you have to pay for somebody to buy something. Not every click will generate a conversion, so mainly you don’t want to pay $2.00 per click if your product cost only $2.00. As you run your campaign, you’ll want to continuously look at your conversion rates and make modifications to your landing page and ads to help increase conversion rates and improve your ROI.
Promote Brand Awareness
If you want to increase traffic to your website and enable customers to interact or learn about your company’s brand, then using a cost-per-impression (CPM) campaign in addition to a CPC (cost-per-click) campaign is your best bet.
With a CPM campaign, you will be paying per a set amount of impressions your keywords receive. Sometimes this is cheaper to run than a normal CPC campaign.
Improve Your CTR
CTR stands for Click Through Rate. Your CTR is determined by how many impressions you receive divided by the clicks you receive. CTR improvement is really about making your ads more relevant to your customers. When setting up and optimizing your account, you should focus on creating more compelling and relevant ads to help target more traffic to your website. Mainly you will be using long-tail keywords, negative keywords, and phrased or exact matched keywords instead of using broad and irrelevant keywords.
Conclusion
There are many ways to optimize your PPC campaigns, the way your choose to optimize will determine how your campaign will be set-up. If you have any more questions or would like for us to set up and manage your campaign please contact us.