Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

What is pay per click?

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

In the web world people are always going on about pay per click and its benefits, yet for most small businesses the opportunity is passing them by.

Well what is pay per click?? This is a way of advertising on a search engine, where you only pay for the advertising if someone clicks on your advert.

Why all the fuss? Pay per click or PPC for those that like the acronyms allows you to try advertising on the web for next to nothing, with the option to spend as little or as much as you like without committing to future spend. It also has the added bonus of being easy to measure return on investment unlike some more traditional forms of advertising.

What do I get? If you perform a search on Google for a formal shirt you will notice that there are up to 3 listings at the top of the page and a number down the side that are titled sponsored links. These adverts have been “paid for”, or at least they will be if you click on them. You don’t get much for your money, a title of 25 characters and two lines of 35 characters, plus your URL (only up to 35 chars). Based on this you need to think carefully about your wording which I will cover soon.

How much will it cost? It depends. Unfortunately if you are in a competitive industry it could be quite expensive, take car insurance, rumour has it each click costs the company something like £10. If you are selling bottle widgets you may find it is as little as 5p. You will need to set up an account on Google (about £5) and run a few tests. You can bid on as many keywords and phrases as you like and you can set a maximum budget for a day. So if you have a budget of £1 a day and this gets you 5 clicks at 20p a click Google will then take down your ad. No massive bills to pay and if it isn’t working for you, switch it off tomorrow.

You mentioned return on investment? Because Google tracks who clicks what in its search engine, you have a report on how many times your advert has been displayed and how many people have clicked through to your site. If you combine this with an analytics package there is a wealth of information that can be reviewed.

So with not much wording to work with you need to try a few variations to see what works best. At the end of the day you want to qualify your leads so that you are not wasting money, but on the other hand scaring people off before they get started isn’t good either. You need to get your customer hat on and decide for what they search for. The great things is though, if it isn’t working then change it.

I am just starting some PPC work for a small clothing company in Guildford. With a website that isn’t built with SEO in mind this is a way to traffic. It doesn’t require vast amounts of effort to get in place and once I have them setup they can do most of the work themselves.

Posted in PPC, Pay Per Click, SEM, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »

Site User Tracking

Friday, May 16th, 2008

A recent experience of pay per click advertising has shown the benefits of tracking customer activity from a number of sources.

If you take out some online advertising you will get built in tracking to show you clicks, cost per click and impressions, plus more stats than I have time to mention here. However what happens after users have clicked through to your site is your responsibility. Therefore as a minimum it is advisable to have a free tracking tool like Google Analytics (GA) on your site and where possible ensure that server logs are switched on and are available to you as required.

I had set up some advertising and allowed “content match”, as you would assume that large companies are on the ball with who is displaying their adverts and you would hope that they are getting the best for their customers. I was wrong as it turns out.

There were several distribution partners that display adverts in directory style websites and if you actually look at these sites they have very little in common with some of the adverts they display.

The adverts I had produced were carefully worded to target specific customers including a price that should keep those looking at the lower end of the market out of the site in question.

Luckily Google Analytics clearly shows where people have come from how long they were on the site and which pages they navigate through (Document on how to find this out to follow). With an average time on the site of less than … well zero seconds it was obvious that someone was taking advantage.

Having referred this to the advertising company, they then asked for server logs. If you are unfamiliar with these they involve thousands of line of code and look like something out of the Matrix films, but buried deep with in them is confirmation about pages opened and the time on the site.

The issue has now been referred to a fraud team. A couple of points have come out of this:

  1. Make sure you have a form of site tracking on your site, even if it is an information site.
  2. Review the data, especially if you have PPC advertising on the go.
  3. If you think something looks suspicious do check it out and do report it to your PPC company.

Posted in Google Analytics, PPC, Pay Per Click, eBusiness | No Comments »