Sunday 3 August 2008

Marketing Your Website With Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click marketing is sold as a quick and easy way to huge amounts of traffic. To the opponents, it's expensive and open to fraud. What is Pay Per Click and who might use it?

Pay Per Click marketing, PPC, is where your advert is displayed on search engines or websites and you are charged for every viewer of the advert that clicks on it and becomes a visitor to your website.

This means that you are only being charged when someone who is interested in your advert actually clicks on it. If the site showing your advert places it somewhere on the screen where it is hidden away or the page the advert is on is not appropriate to the content of the advert and it's not of interest to people seeing the advert, it doesn't matter to you. These people aren't going to be interested and aren't going to click.

So what are the essentials of PPC advertising? Well, you are going to have to encourage the right people to click on the advert. Advertisers are not going to carry your advert if no-one ever clicks on it and you won't gain loads of traffic if there's no-one clicking on it.

Starting off, you usually choose the keywords that are applicable to your advert. If you want people to visit your shoe shop, then shoe shop is a good starting point, but it's so general that you probably won't actually get that much good traffic. Try instead choosing keywords more closely matching what you actually sell. Do you sell brands, specialist shoes or hard to find shoes? If so, then base your keywords around these ideas. If you sell mismatched shoes for people with different sized feet, then that's what your keywords should concentrate on.

Not only does this mean you are finding the correct audience more often, you are getting more relevant visitors, who are more likely to convert into customers. By targeting your advertising closely then you get less wasted displays and more relevant clicks. This increased 'click through rate' can, on systems like Google, mean that your advert is displayed higher up the list.

How should the advert look?

Taking the typical, Google format, you usually get a title, 2 short lines of description and a URL. Make the title snappy and to the point. Sell your services in that first line. 'Oversize Shoes', 'Discount Lelli Kelly Shoes' etc tell viewers straight away what you are selling. Writing the title in 'title case', where the first letter of every word is in upper case has been shown to encourage more clicks.

In the description lines give further information about what you sell, without over selling. People act negatively to adverts that are too pushy. Mention benefits like in stock, free delivery, discounts etc. Finish the description with an "action statement" - "click here", "view our range" etc. Don't get carried away with 'title case', write the description as a normal sentence - title case can make this look too much!

How many adverts?

To allow you to closely match titles with keywords, it is a good idea to write a different advert for each keyword, or set of keywords. This technique also allows you to watch the stats from the advert and see which adverts are getting the most clicks - and you can compare that to orders taken.

It is also quite often possible to have more than one advert per set of keywords. This allows you to experiment with different titles and texts. For example, does "Discounted Lelli Kelly shoes - Click here." work better than "Click here for discounted Lelli Kelly shoes."? Try small changes and see which one works better. Then create a new advert with a slightly modified text based on the best advert and see what happens then. By finding out which advert gets the best relevant click rate, you are getting maximum visitors for minimum cost.

How to control the advert?

Just setting off the advert with various combinations and 101 keywords isn't a good idea. Make sure that you set a realistic cost per click and daily budget. The cost per click is the most you are willing to pay per click - not necessarily the actual amount you will be paying. You should also set a daily budget for your campaign so that you don't get an expensive fright when you next logon a day or two later.

Who is PPC suitable for?

PPC can be used by almost any site (just some adult and gambling sites are excluded from certain schemes), but I would always recommend a cautious trial before throwing huge amounts of marketing budget at a campaign. It does suit itself more to established products that people are searching for rather than brand new products lines that no-one has heard of yet, but even these, with careful thought, can be promoted.

As with all website marketing ideas, if you haven't already tried it then give it a go and see if it works for your site. If there isn't much search engine traffic in your niche or most custom is usually reapeat loyal customers, then PPC might be slow. But if you are a market that people are searching for your products, then you stand a good chance of plentiful traffic.

No comments: