This article is aimed at the small business owner that has heard of Pay Per Click and wonders if it is suitable for them. I will not be using any technical terms and will try to help you understand the principles and what to watch out for.
What is Pay Per Click Advertising?
Pay Per Click (PPC) can be a very powerful and quick method to get visitors to your website. If you do a search on Google you will often see “sponsored links” - these are generated by the Google version of PPC called Adwords. These “sponsored links” can also be seen on other sites that allow Google to display adverts.
How does it work?
You bid a maximum amount that you are willing to pay to have someone click on your link (25p for example) - this is called the Cost Per Click (CPC) and the list of words or (more helpfully) phrases that you would like the advert to appear on when someone searches for that phrase.
Eash time someone searches for the phrase (or something close to the phrase depending on the settings on your advert) it is displayed – at this point it has not cost you anything. However as soon as someone clicks on your advert it costs you the amount of money that you have bid.
How do I know what phrases to bid on?
If you are using an agency to run your campaign they may talk to you about your site and then come up with the list of phrases – alternatively there is a Google Adwords tool-kit which you can use to enter word or phrases and see what Google suggests. This tool tellsyou the approximate number of searches made in a month and the average CPC, this can vary dramatically for example looking at the tool today for a random phrase (related to a previous blog post) shows that the following average CPCs for phrases that are related to “science of selling” :-
- Science of selling : monthly searches in the UK = 3,600 : Average CPC = £1.89
- The science of selling : monthly searches in the UK : zero : Average CPC £0.04
- Selling techniques : monthly searches in the UK : 3,600: Average CPC = £1.23
- Selling training : monthly searches in the UK : 1,600 : Average CPC = £2.28
How much will it cost me?
Each CPC campaign can have a fixed monthly (or daily) budget so that you can say for example that you are willing to spend £30, £50, £150 or any other figure. You should however remember that once your budget has run out the advert will stop being shown so if you budgeted maybe £5 per day, using the example CPCs above you might end up with between 2 and 4 clicks per day.
How do I know it is working?
The best way to measure if the PPC campaign is working is that you get more sales than you were getting before it started. You should however, realise that as with all marketing activities it can take a couple of months or longer to fine tune the campaign (you may need to tweak the wording of the advert or even the page that people land on when they click the advert [ the landing page] to improve the results).
There are tools you can use if you want detailed statistics on what happens when people get to your site via a PPC advert, these include many paid for versions of software but a lot of businesses find that Google Analytics works just as well for them – this is free and just requires about 5 or 6 lines of code to be added to every page on your website.
Related Reading:
 | Marketing For Dummies (UK Edition) - Marketing is one of the most important aspects in business today, but it's also highly competitive and complicated, with intricate strategies and methods of delivery to understand and retain. This straight-forward guide leads you through every aspect of marketing. |
 | Powerful Marketing On A Shoestring Budget: For Small Businesses - |
 | The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book - This book is written for you if you want to get to grips with your marketing but you need a helping hand. Marketing expert Dee Blick has ... Read More > |
 | Kotler on Marketing - State-of-the-art guide to marketing strategies and tactics. Kotler has combined the expertise of his textbooks and world renowned seminar... Read More > |
 | The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book - |
