Once you have your website and are ready for customers to start visiting, I always recommend paid advertising on Google, known as Pay Per Click (PPC) as the first avenue to pursue. Why do I recommend PPC when you could undertake Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which can get you customers for free? There are a whole of benefits if you undertake PPC first before SEO. Read my article to find out more.

With Google, there are two avenues for advertising. Paid advertising on Google known as Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This paper will focus exclusively on PPC.

Once you have your website and you want to start driving traffic to it, I always recommend Pay Per Click (PPC) as the first avenue to pursue. Why PPC when Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is free and can provide loads of free traffic?

SEO is fantastic and I am a big proponent of it. If you want to find out more about my thoughts on SEO, please read my article on Search Engine Optimisation: The Importance of Quality Keyword Research. However, PPC has the following advantages:

1. Instant results and feedback. Within 24 hours of implementing a PPC campaign, we can see what keywords are converting, how successful our sites are etc.
2. We can tweak our campaigns and within 24 hours see the effect of the change that has been made.

With SEO, changes can take as long as two weeks if not longer before we see results. And the ‘refresh time’ is not constant. Google can take two weeks to spider us and then after our next change take up to 4 weeks. Also, with PPC we can immediately see which keywords convert the best. Once we determine this, we can then apply SEO to our website for these very same keywords.

The other challenge is that Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm. So you could easily find yourself in a situation where one day you are ranking quite highly and the next day you check out your ranking and you are ranked on page 37. So yes SEO is an essential part of your online lead generation strategy but it should come second after PPC. For instant feedback, results and to keep building momentum, I recommend a PPC campaign across your websites as the first course of action.

The challenge will be finding the “right keywords”. As small business owners, we don’t have infinite pockets – so how do we find out what our customers are looking for. Well, firstly, ask them!! Ask your existing customer base what keywords they associate with your business. And don’t be surprised if they are completely different to what you thought. It has amazed me time and time again how often a business owner’s impression of his / her business is quite different to a customer’s impression of the business. I’m not talking about quality of service but the range of services.

Secondly, TEST! TEST! TEST! Just like your existing customers may have a different association to your business, so do your prospects. A classic example is with our company “IT on Tap”. We provide a range of secure, hosted computer solutions for small business. So when we started advertising on Google, we thought we’d get great results for such keywords as “Customer Relationship Management”, “CRM”, “Cloud Computing” and “Sales Force Automation”. Yet, I’m glad we tested because we found that our best converting keywords were “IT for Small Business” and “Starting up a business?” It is these keywords that have given us a much greater number of click thrus.

So once you have determined your keywords, what are the Critical Success Factors for your campaign? The success of PPC comes down to the following:

1. Budget: How much can you afford to spend per click and your total daily budget vs that of your competitors. This is why testing becomes so important because you only want to advertise in areas where your targeted customers are.
2. Targeted Ad Groups and Ad words: Regardless of whether you are going to use your own PPC or engage an external agency, make sure you have as many different targeted Ad Groups as possible, each with several Ad Words (keywords) in each Ad Group. An example of an Ad Group for the IT on Tap website is “Start a Business” and within it we have nearly 30 keywords associated with “Start a Business”. The advantage of having different Ad Groups is that you can now write a targeted advert for each Ad Group (rather than trying to target several different groups with one advert). Of course, this will lead to more people clicking through to your website.
3. Targeted copy and continual split testing: Split testing simply refers to having two or more (although we only recommend two) different adverts running at the same time. Google serves up these adverts and then tells you which one receives a higher click through rate.
4. Quality of targeted landing pages. Common errors (often due to time and resource constraints) are:Having one landing page that tries to incorporate too many customer groups. This results in the landing page not being targeted enough and a reduced ROI.No separate landing pages, forcing the user to surf around the site themselves. This results in a very poor ROI. We must remember that people browsing online will decide on average within 1.8seconds whether the site they are on is of relevance to them. So we want to create landing pages that are as easy as possible for customers to achieve their outcome (and ours), especially as we have paid for them to arrive at our page.Creating stand alone landing pages with no navigation to other parts of the site. There are still some “web experts” that suggest this is the way to go as users can get distracted when there are other links on the page, which is true. However, latest reports from Google show that the ‘Quality Score’ is reduced (increasing cost per click) when this happens. So what’s the answer? Create landing pages with a clear and easy way for the customer to provide email address while still having links to other pages in the footer of the page.

So is Google Pay Per Click an efficient and profitable way to increase leads, customers and business? Absolutely! There are some key factors that need to be taken into consideration to ensure the highest return on your spend and to maximise profitability.For more information on how I.T. on tap can help grow your business revenue and customer base, visit the Internet Marketing section of our site.

Internet Marketing Manager

I.T. on Tap

December 05, 2008

Tags: google adwords campaigns, paid advertising, pay per click advertising, pay per click optimization

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