Date3rd Aug 2009
CategoryMarketing Strategy/Marketing tips/News/
AuthorBoxed Red

Pay Per Click Marketing – The Secrets to Success

If you were to ask me what the single most important development in Internet Marketing or indeed marketing in its broadest terms has been over the last two years, the answer would be clear: Pay Per Click Marketing.

I have never seen one single marketing strategy that can so dramatically improve so many business’s performance in such a short period of time, there is simply no easier and faster way in the world to reach qualified potential buyers, Google have officially created the most effective direct marketing tool in the world! – no wonder they make so much money!

If you’re new to this, pay per click advertising simply means paying to put a listing for your website at, or near the top of the search engines – it basically means you’re paying to get to the top of the search engines. But you don’t actually pay a penny to appear at the top of those results. You only pay when somebody clicks to visit your site. That’s why it’s called ‘pay per click.’

How much you pay for each click depends on how much competition there is for the search terms that you want to use, and how high up on the search engine you want to be. Either way, you choose how much to pay – and you can also specify a maximum daily budget. To be able to reach such precisely targeted buyers is a business owner’s dream.

The impact for you and your business could be enormous.

Basic pay per click marketing strategies

The biggest pay per click company is Google. The other main company is Yahoo. If you are new to pay per click, then it will be well worth your time to spend a few minutes checking out their sites.

Today I’m going to focus on Google. It is very easy to set up an account, there is no minimum spend and best of all, your campaign can be up and running within minutes. In one hour from now, you could be sending a steady stream of qualified visitors to your website.

Here’s how it works. First, you write your advert. It needs a catchy headline and a few words of compelling copy to get people to click.

Then you select the keywords that you are going to bid on. This means that every time somebody searches using any of your selected terms you want your advert to show up on the pages showing the results of their search.

Next, you need to decide how much you are willing to pay every time somebody clicks on your ad and comes to your website. The more you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will be placed. How much you need to pay to be near the top will depend partly on how competitive your search term is.

For example, bidding on the term, ‘ballroom dancing training Manchester’ will be a lot cheaper than bidding on the term ‘Internet marketing’, because Internet marketing is a very competitive phrase for example. But here’s a word of advice. People get too obsessed about how much each click is going to cost. Actually, the cost of the click is not what is important. What’s important is the business generated by each visitor to your website and whether it’s profitable to you. Suppose I was selling sales training, and my daily rate is £2,500. I could be paying 5 pounds per click, and if only one in 100 of the people who clicked on my site, ended up booking me it would be a very worthwhile investment.

It can often be worth paying what seems to be a large amount for all these website visitors, because providing you have selected your keywords properly, these visitors are highly qualified leads and highly likely or at least interested in doing business with you.

Now, I would like to share with you two of the Google ‘SECRETS’ that people are either not aware of, or if they are, are certainly not utilising to their full potential. These can make a really big difference to the profitability of your Google pay per click campaign.

The first relates to the position of your advert. The adverts on Google appear down the right hand side of the page, and the ones near the top get significantly more clicks than the ones further down. If your advert is so far down that you appear on the second or third page you are likely to get very few clicks. So, you obviously want your advert to be as high as possible.

Many people think that the only way to move higher up is to pay more per click. But another thing that is really great about Google is that the amount you pay per click is only around half of what determines your position on the page. The other 50% is determined by the number of people who click on your advert. This is known as your click through rate or CTR. So, quite simply, adverts that get clicked on more often get a better position. And of course, that means they get clicked on even more often, and you end up in a cycle of success.

Well, guess what is going to determine the number of people that click on your ad? It’s not the quality of your product or service. It’s the quality of your advert! In other words, people who write better adverts get more people clicking on those ads and end up paying a lot less. If I am willing to pay £1 per click, and you are willing to pay 50p per click but your ad gets three times as many people clicking on it than mine, you will appear above me, and only be paying half as much as I am!

So people who are good at marketing and good at writing advert copy do really, really well on Google. This is yet another spin off on your decision to get good at marketing.

Our second Google secret is linked to the first and will actually help you get better at writing copy. Google lets you run two different adverts at the same time for any of your keywords. Why is this important? Because it lets you test two different adverts at the same time, and you can rest assured that one will almost certainly outperform the other.

So here, in a nutshell, is how to get really good at Google pay per click advertising: Always run two ads at the same time.

Once it becomes clear which of your two ads is performing best, delete the under performing one. Then write a new ad to try to outperform the better ad. Keep doing this over time and your click through rates will go up and up. You will soar above the competition, safe in the knowledge that not only are you getting more clicks, but you are paying far less than them for each click to your website.

Pay per click marketing is an important and extremely effective component of an online marketing strategy and is best utilised as part of an integrated marketing strategy.

Contact us now for more information or for help implementing Pay Per Click Marketing into your marketing strategy

Adapted by Chris Cardell

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