What Strategy Should I Use for Pay Per Click Advertising?

You can use either Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MS AdCenter for your PPC campaign.  For the purposes of this document we will be using Google Adwords however the information applies for all PPC advertising.

Overview
Pay-Per-Click advertising guarantees that your website will receive high quality targeted visitors, many of whom will be interested in precisely your product or service.  Setting up an account with Google Adwords will take no more than 30 minutes and you will start receiving traffic to your website immediately.


Sign up for an Account
The first step is to sign up for a PPC account.  You will be asked for your contact details, info about your website and your credit card details for payment.  The process takes a few minutes but you will only have to fill in these details once and it's worth it!
Sign up for a Google Adwords Account


Keyword Research
Here is a short list to give you some inspiration for finding search terms that are relevant to your business.  To start with you should be looking for about 50-100 search terms and try to be as detailed as possible.  For example 'Web Design Southampton' is better than 'Web Design' if you are based in Southampton and offer Web Design.

What business are you in?
What services do you provide?
What products are you selling?
How would others describe what you do?
What words are used in your current literature?
How have customers found out about you before?
What are the unique selling points of your business?

Using the our example you might have found:
Website Design Southampton
Web Design Southampton
Business Web Design
Small Business Web Design Southampton
Toolkit Websites
Toolkit Web Design


Bidding
Deciding how much you are prepared to pay for each keyword is called Bidding.  This is an important part of setting up your account and will determine how many visitors you get for each keyword.

Purchasing advertising with PPC is like taking part in an auction.  The more that you pay for each click, the higher up the results you will be.

The minimum bid for a keyword is typically 5p.  If there are thirty other companies advertising under this category and your bid is 5p then you would appear at the end of the list (on the third page).  The maximum bid is 1p above the highest other bid.  If you bid £16 but the highest bid of the thirty other companies is £14 then you will only pay £14.01.

The rule-of-thumb is this:  you probably want to appear on the first page of results (within the top 10), but you also want to avoid the top three positions.  This is because when people search they will often click immediately on the top few ads to see if they have found the right category.  If not they will move on to another search.  If they have found the right place you are still likely to get good traffic if you are in positions 4 to 6 for example.

Therefore we recommend you adjust your bids to try to aim for your ad to appear between positions 4 to 6.  There is more detailed info in our advanced guide.


Advert Copy
You will need to write good text in your advert in order to attract visitors to click on your advert.  The more times your ad is clicked (the click-through rate or CTR) the more Google will love your ad.  Another factor that decides how high your ad appears (in addition to the price you pay) is how  good the CTR on your ad is.

Essentially you want to be short and to the point.  If you are a small business it probably pays to stick to generic descriptions of your products or services rather than you particular brand names.

Yoga Instructor in Bristol
Are you stressed out and tired?
We will give you back your vitality.
www.SusansYogaSchool.com

In the first line say exactly what it is you are offering. 
In the second line suggest the problem that the customer might have.
In the third line tell the customer what you will do about it!
In the fourth line add your website address.


Conversion Tracking
We recommend that you set up Google's Conversion Tracking which allows you to track how many people filled in the contact form on your website or purchased a product.

Simply follow the instructions from the Google website and when instructed add the special code onto the 'Thank You' page after the customer has contacted you.

It is important to track conversions because one keyword may send many visitors to your website but if they are not converting into leads then they are the wrong type of visitors!

You will be able to see which keywords give you the best traffic.


Statistics
You should use the detailed statistics software provided with your website to analyse the traffic that comes to your website.  You will be able to see which other websites are sending visitors to your website, how long visitors stayed for, what keywords they searched for and much more!


More Info
To learn more about advanced techniques with Google Adwords and PPC we recommend the following resources:

Adwords Tips
Free Guide to Adwords From SEO Book

Definitive Guide to Google Adwords
By Perry Marshall

Google Adwords Handbook
By Andrew Goodman

Better PPC
Excellent testing system for your ads that appear in google

WordTracker
Online Keyword Research Tool

Managed PPC Services