SEO Blog

The re-launch of MSN Live to Bing has generated a lot of hype across the Internet. Many advertisers who wouldn’t have considered using the Microsoft adCenter before are certainly giving it some thought now.

There  are many tools available for new advertisers and also those that have been running paid search campaigns for years.

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Pay Per Click or PPC is a fast growing method of producing dramatic results for your business by advertising your products or services online. These are just some of the benefits:

• Precision: In a results oriented culture, being able to precisely target interested customers and clients is vital. The efficacy of PPC has been particularly demonstrated through the precision that the ads offer the advertiser. PPC allows greater control over who arrives at your website and through which keywords. This level of control is important to ensure that the correct customers are targeted.
• Budget Control: PPC allows complete control over what you spend on advertising. Campaigns can be arranged with a daily budget and this can be increased or reduced depending upon changes in your business.
• Ease of Measurement: Measuring the success of your advertising campaigns is very easy with PPC. Pay Per Click systems come with the type of tools that allow the advertiser to analyse the success of their online ads. By creating specific landing pages for each different ad, you can see how effective the ads are at driving traffic towards your site. The analytical systems will also allow you to directly measure the conversion rate of specific ads from ad to sale.
• Geo-Targeting: The ability for the advertiser to geo-target specific locations is one of the greatest benefits of PPC. By choosing precisely where in the world you want ads to appear, you can increase your global marketing or decrease your costs. Unfortunately there are still companies across the world advertising their services in countries where customers cannot buy them. Whilst this might expand the presence of the global brand, it is also a waste of valuable finances during this difficult economic period.
• Speed of Execution: Each aspect of PPC is quick to set up and execute. You should always write the ads in advance, but the actual mechanical creation time is very short. Once created, the ads can be up and earning you money within minutes. What’s more, in terms of speed, the time taken from click to sale has been drastically reduced to potentially a matter of minutes. Traditional advertising on television or in the newspaper simply cannot compete on any level with the efficacy of PPC.
• Capture Visitors: One of the strengths of PPC is its power to capture visitors. Someone searching for your keywords will be attracted to a well-written PPC ad. Once you’ve got that person to click your ad, you can use your website to help them make whatever decision you require.
• Boosting Brand Awareness: PPC is a successful way of increasing brand awareness. The complete control the advertiser has over the entire process allows them to easily promote their brand. Not only is each ad a potential sale, but even those users that do not click the ad are aware of the brand without the advertiser spending any money.

Pay per click is an exceptionally successful way to increase qualified traffic to your website but is only one part of a fully integrated marketing mix.

Yahoo has recently updated the terms and conditions of its pay per click (PPC) advertising program to allow it to optimise your account.

I’m not going to repeat what has already been written on this topic but if you’re a Yahoo Search Marketing PPC client, it would be in your interest to read this summary from Econsultancy:

Is Yahoo’s proactive account ‘optimization’ legal?

Pay per click is a business model where by you pay for advertising when a searcher clicks on your advert and is delivered to your website not just when your advert is displayed.

Click Forensics have just released a press release highlighting the fact that pay per click fraud for Q3 2008 was 16%, a slight reduction on the previous quarter and the same period in 2007.

Pay Per Click Fraud Rate by Quarter

This data is taken from their Click Fraud Index.

Unfortunately, the UK is listed as one of the PPC fraud hot spots accounting for 3.5% of all fraudulent activity.

If you’re a pay per click advertiser, clearly you need to be vigilant with your traffic. There are professional solutions available for anyone wishing to monitor their paid traffic closely or, as reported last month, there is a simple solution if you do suspect click fraud and want to monitor your traffic.

Google have just announced a change in their policy for companies wishing to advertise gambling related services online using their AdWords pay per click advertising platform within the UK.

Google’s announcement explains that this policy change for gambling advertisers has come about “due to recent changes in UK law” and to “bring it inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue in the UK”.

The statement goes on to say “Our review determined that, at this time, we will allow gambling ads to target England, Scotland and Wales as long as the advertiser is registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number.”

Any gambling site wishing to use pay per click advertising to promote their business will first of all need to create a new Google AdWords account and complete an application form for Google. They will then review the application and notify the advertiser whether they have been successful or not.

Given the competitive nature of the industry, we would anticipate pay per click costs being high for AdWords gambling advertising in the UK and would suggest that new advertisers consider using Google AdWords management services if they’re unsure how to build an optimised campaign.

With the emergence of services like Google AdWords, Pay per Click advertising has grown to be the marketing medium of choice for online businesses. No other form of advertising has been known to create such a stir in the industry for all online marketers.

So what exactly is Pay per Click and what can it do for your business?

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is exactly how it sounds! You pay every time that a searcher clicks on your ad. While this may seem like a simple illustration, it demonstrates the beauty of the idea. Let’s compare this method with a traditional form of advertising. Let’s say that your business put up a billboard on the side of the road. You pay a monthly fee for this. This means that regardless of whether anyone actually looks at the advert or not, you’re paying! People who don’t want anything to do with your product will look at it and you are still paying for it.

Now, let’s look at the advantages of PPC advertising. Your ad appears prominently within the search engines and related websites. When your ad appears it means that one of the keywords relating to your business triggered the ad. This means that someone who is looking for something related to what you have to offer just performed a search. Therefore, your ad is only being shown to people who are looking for what you have to offer. Then, you only have to pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and goes to your website. That means that you only pay when someone actually comes to your place and checks out your product. You are not charged for someone who merely looks at your ad. This is obviously a superior form of advertisement. You are getting highly-targeted traffic to your website.

One of the major benefits that Pay per Click has for your business is the ability to generate massive amounts of traffic in a short space of time. You just start an account, write an ad and start running it. Within a few hours you can have people visiting your site.

While this is definitely a benefit, it can be a detriment if you are not careful. If you don’t set a careful daily budget for your advertising, you can rack up a huge bill with the search engine. You can make your daily budget as small or as large as you want. It is truly customisable. The traffic won’t stop coming unless you make it stop. Therefore, you have to watch your budget carefully.

Pay per Click offers access to quality traffic online. It is a steady stream of targeted customers that you are paying to bring to your website. If you have a good product, you will increase sales with a carefully crafted PPC campaign.

At Impact Media, we understand Pay per Click and if you want to focus on developing your business, you should consider our Pay per Click management services.

Of course, there’s no absolute answer to this question as many search marketing agencies will charge for their PPC services at different rates.

With Impact Media, we work with our clients typically by charging an initial fee to set up their Google AdWords PPC campaign or to optimise an existing campaign. This varies based upon complexity and/or number of products or services but is flexible enough to accommodate most budgets.

We then work on a monthly retainer basis, the purpose of which is to allow us sufficient time to further optimise the account, develop additional Ad Groups and provide comprehensive reporting. Given that we see what we do as a partnership with our clients, no one is tied into any long term contracts and we only want our clients to stay with us if they feel we are adding value.

Some agencies will also charge a monthly service fee as a percentage of the spend they are managing through the pay per click search engine(s) and you should check the details if that is the case as this could develop into a hefty additional charge.

When shopping around for a company to use for PPC management, make sure you have a good chat with them to understand their approach and also ask for testimonials or case studies. If you find a good one, stick with them! Once you do this, the question will change to “How Much is PPC Management Gaining Me?”

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Impact Media provide AdWords management tailored to fit your needs.

We are pleased to announce we have been appointed as Simply Mirror TV’s professional search marketing partner.

Simply Mirror TV specialise in Mirror TV’s and that’s it, they also offer customised Mirror TV’s in unusual shapes with bespoke frames.

We will be running Simply Mirror TV’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign via Google AdWords to ensure it is both cost effective and efficient from the outset, providing the best possible return on investment.

We are very much looking forward to working with Simply Mirror TV on their PPC project.

Google are well known for their technical innovations and when it comes to pay per click (PPC), their AdWords advertising system is the clear market leader.

However, they’re not perfect and recently seemed to have dropped the ball when it comes to using Broad Match. This is the most common type of matching used when you create an AdWords campaign with the others being Phrase Match and Exact Match.

In very simple terms, Broad Match previously meant that if you entered a keyphrase, e.g. England Football Team, those three words could appear in any order and still display your advert. For example, someone entering the search term, “What is the best football team in England?” could have displayed your ad.

In short, Broad Match has always given most exposures but not always relevant. To combat this, we add a large dose of Negative Keywords.

Now though, Google are developing their algorithms to enable synonym replacement on words. Carrying this example on, it may be that the system thinks ‘English‘ is a good swap for ‘England‘ and ‘teams‘ for ‘team‘ so someone searching for “English football teams” could display your ad. Not too bad? What about “England Rugby Team“?

Although this is a very frivolous example, last week we saw in our own campaign that we had paid for the click “John Lewis Website“. This had come from the broad term Website Marketing Company. Go figure!

The point here is that we’re seeing a lot of totally unrelated searches coming through and if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have it full of broad terms, you may want to start running regular Search Query reports and scanning a critical eye over the search queries column. Go on, run one today… you may be in for a bit of a surprise!

More AdWords Tips…

At Impact Media we pride ourselves in helping our clients increase the return on their Internet marketing investment.

Of course there are many ways we accomplish this but even if you have no plans to out-source your pay per click to a professional agency, there are still plenty of things that you could (should) be doing in order to help yourself and reduce the wasted clicks, aka cost, going though your AdWords account.

One of the most powerful, yet under-utilised, techniques to use is that of negative keywords. A negative keyword, what on earth is that? Well, simply put it’s a word or phrase that when used will prevent your advert from showing if used in conjunction with another word or phrase that appears in your campaign.

For example, let’s say you sell blue widgets and you’re using a combination of match types to get the maximum exposure for this product. However, your keyword research has thrown up that there is a lot of searches for ‘used blue widgets‘. In this example, you would add the word ‘used‘ as a negative.

Although important with both broad and phrase matches, with Google’s synonym replacement on broad matches, it is imperative that anybody running an AdWords campaign has performed thorough keyword research to identify as many negatives as possible. Failure to do so will mean a poorly performing campaign costing far more than it need.