Chapter 1: Grasping PPC Methods

In This Chapter

Getting to know pay per click

Understanding search engines and relevancy

Deciding whether PPC is right for you

Pay per click (PPC) — also known as cost per click (CPC) — is a type of paid advertising, such as a paid search, sponsored listings, sponsored links, and partner ads. In a PPC model, the advertiser pays the site that hosts the ad space only if a user clicks its ads and goes through to the destination URL or landing page — the location on the Internet where the person who clicked the ad ends up.

In this chapter, you discover how pay per click works and find tips to help you decide whether you need to add PPC to your web-marketing strategy.

Seeing How Pay Per Click Works

PPC ads are often used in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, generally along the top and right sides of the pages that contain search results. These ads don’t appear unless someone performs a search in that engine, and the ads that do appear are those that the engine deems most relevant to the user’s search results (see the next section in this chapter). This way, someone who searches for a baseball glove (see Figure 1-1) isn’t shown ads for shoes.

To get your ads to show up alongside relevant searches in a search engine, the search engine walks you through the PPC account creation.

Each search engine’s process is a little different, but here are the most basic steps you should be prepared to complete:

1. Create a PPC account with the search engine.

See Chapter 2 in this minibook for details on creating an account with each of the major search engines.

2. Create campaigns and ad groups around the products or services to be advertised.

A campaign is where you set many of your options, such as budget and geography. Ad groups are tightly targeted groups that make up the campaign and that house your ads and keyword lists. For more information on both topics, see Chapter 2 in this minibook.

3. Determine a list of keywords.

Keywords are words and phrases that describe, or are features of, the products or services to be advertised.

4. From the list of keywords, create ads that use those keywords to better explain to potential customers what benefits, features (such as styles and colors), or sizes are available.

So when a user searches for, say, women’s red high-heel pumps, she sees ads that are specifically tailored to people who are searching for that product. The search engine determines how well the advertiser’s campaigns and keywords match the search; if they match well, the search engine displays the advertiser’s ad on the result page.

Knowing How Search Engines Determine Relevancy

How do search engines determine what ads to show when? And to what degree can they really calculate which advertiser is more relevant than another? Each engine has an algorithm developed in-house that sorts out which ad to show, when to show it, where on the result page to show it, and how much to charge the advertiser.

Depending on the search engine, many known factors determine relevancy, along with several unknown factors. Most search engines use the following known factors to determine relevancy:

• Keyword list: Do the keywords in the keyword list match what the person typed?

• Ad copy: Does the ad mention what the person is looking for?

• Landing page: Does the ad go to a page that has what the person is looking for?

• Bid: How much are you willing to pay to get that visitor?

The amount of your bid in conjunction with these other factors determines where on the page your ad will display and how much you’ll actually pay. (For more information on bidding, see Chapter 5 in this minibook.)

For a complete list of known factors for a specific search engine, consult the search engine’s help center.

Search engines keep some relevancy criteria unknown to the public to keep the playing field level for all advertisers and to preserve a good user experience. This system cuts down on false advertising and misleading, spam-type ads; it also rewards advertisers who are adhering to the rules and editorial guidelines of the search engine.

Figuring Out Whether You Need PPC

PPC advertising has evolved as a way for companies, people, and sites to purchase a spot on the first page of search results. Often, the first results page has room for only about ten results, and few people click to see what’s on page 2, 3, or beyond. So if your site has low natural search rankings (where your website appears in the search results), PPC is a way to buy a spot in front of the most people.

Suppose that your law firm practices landlord–tenant law, but your website is pretty outdated, and you haven’t had a chance to do any search engine optimization updates (see Book II for more on SEO). When a user searches for, say, landlord tenant lawyer or landlord law firm, your firm’s website is on page 10 of the search results.

That page is buried pretty far back, so the chances of getting noticed by people who are specifically searching for your type of law firm are low. Often, instead of going through the search results page by page, searchers change their search terms and try again. In this case, your firm stays buried. So how do you find new clients?

Certainly, you want to work on your SEO, but that project takes time — not only to research what to do but also to implement and wait for the results. In the meantime, you can buy yourself a spot on that first page of results and be seen by people who are looking for the service you provide. For this example, your law firm can even create geotargeted campaigns (see Chapter 7 in this minibook for help on geotargeting) that show your ads only to people in the geographic region that your law firm serves. Whether that region is a metropolitan area or an entire state, PPC gets your firm’s name directly in front of people who are already interested in what you do.

The lists of benefits and drawbacks in the following sections might help you determine whether PPC is right for you or your company. The size and complexity of the campaigns you’re considering might be too large, for example, and you should outsource the management or initial setup. You might be able to find a firm that will set the program up for you and even include lessons or continuing support as needed. Also, several companies have created PPC management software to help automate the process. These programs tend to be best for large accounts across several engines with budgets to match. If this situation fits your case, you’ll need to do a lot more research, starting with a basic search for pay per click management software. The search engines themselves don’t recommend one software program over another; in most cases, in-house teams manage accounts for their biggest clients and search-marketing agencies.

At the very least, start small and build up. As you work with a search engine’s program and get a better feel for it and for PPC management, you’ll be much more efficient, and then you’ll be able to create keyword lists and campaigns easily and bid with the best of them.

Benefits of using PPC

Trying out PPC advertising has several benefits:

• It’s a form of advertising that anyone can do.

• It gives advertisers a lot of control of their budgets and audiences.

• It has a great amount of accountability in terms of where the sale occurred, how much it cost, and which keyword and ad triggered the sale.

If PPC advertising is done correctly, the results can be measured very accurately to give you an idea of where you can put your advertising next.

Getting measurable results

PPC not only allows you to purchase a spot in front of potential clients, but it also allows you to test things quickly. If you’re redesigning an outdated site but aren’t sure which version of the Contact Us page you want to use, for example, you could set your campaign to send half of your visitors to one page and the other half to another page. Then you can measure the response in easily interpretable results, such as these:

• What keywords did people use to find your site?

• How many people filled out the form on a landing page?

• How many people called the firm directly?

• How many people left the site after visiting the landing page?

With PPC, you can drive visitors to your pages quickly and often, rather than wait for visitors to appear naturally.

Spending your money wisely

PPC enables you to set daily budgets for an account or campaign and edit bids on a per-keyword basis. If you’re trying to determine which keywords to target for SEO purposes, you can use PPC to measure the success and popularity of those keywords for yourself and, at the same time, limit the amount spent on that experiment. You can also set your budget to spend by time of day or geographic region and even turn your ads off when necessary, either automatically or manually. PPC gives you a lot of flexibility for managing both the amount spent and the frequency of your ads.

Finding niches

Particularly if your company is in a highly competitive market, you can use PPC to find a niche that isn’t as competitive as others or that you can specialize in. Searchers give you a lot of information when they come to your site: what keywords brought them there, what pages they visited, how quickly they left, and what they bought or downloaded. If your law firm is receiving conversions from the keyword phrase lawyers for landlords, you can build a specific ad group and ad around that keyword to target searches better — and at a better cost to you. (See Chapter 5 in this minibook for more on budgeting and spending.)

Possible drawbacks of PPC

So far in this chapter, you’ve had a brief introduction to PPC and discovered some of the benefits of creating and running a PPC campaign. But beware — PPC isn’t for everyone or every company. Fortunately, you’ll know quickly whether your PPC campaign is working out. If not, consider whether you should seek a professional consultation or call the experiment quits.

Here are some situations that could limit the success of your PPC campaigns:

• Not enough budget to spend for your industry: If you’re trying to generate leads for a machine that retails for $80,000 and are spending only $500 a month for PPC, you’re not spending enough. If your product is expensive, and the average cost per lead for the industry is expensive, don’t expect to bid $1 and get 500 leads.

• Poorly designed website: You can bring all the visitors to your site that you want, but if your site is hard to navigate, the shopping cart is difficult to understand, or you don’t provide information about things like shipping time and charges, people are going to be far less likely to buy. You may have what they want, but if they can’t find it or the cart fails, they can’t buy.

• Slow page loads: If it takes longer than a couple of seconds for the pages on your site to load, chances are that the visitor is going to leave and search for another site. Slow load time creates a poor user experience — and now it’s also a factor for Google AdWords in determining relevancy (see the section “Knowing How Search Engines Determine Relevancy,” earlier in this chapter). The slower your site is, the lower it is in the list of search results.

• Not enough volume: Sometimes, the problem simply is that not enough people are searching for the keywords you’re bidding on. If your niche is too targeted, you won’t be able to bring new traffic to your site. In this case, you should expand your keyword list before calling it quits. (For tips on working with keywords, see Chapter 3 in this minibook.)

• No analytics: If you’re not using an analytics program of some kind to track the results, how can you honestly tell what’s working and what isn’t? Guessing is never the way to go, especially because PPC is such a measurable form of advertising. See Book II, Chapter 8 for information on choosing an analytics package that suits your needs.

• Setting it and forgetting it: PPC campaigns need to be managed actively. Simply setting things up and logging in only once a month is a recipe for disaster. Particularly at the beginning, you need to log in daily — if not more than once per day — to tweak your keyword lists, budgets, and bids. When you have a better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t, you can cut back on the amount of management. Still, you should never just leave the campaign running unchecked.