Basics of Paid Search Engine Advertising Optimisation

The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) Google AdWords compared with normal advertising is simply this: almost all normal techniques are broadcast methods to users who have shown next to no interest in buying your product. Think radio ads etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure there some directed than others, if you are selling marketing services to companies, you put adverts in a marketing magazine, but that's a crude method these days.

Search Yahoo for "cars" and down the right hand side, you'll see links by websites who are paying the search engine to have their advert and site displayed there on the main page of results. This is Pay Per Click Advertising and this is why Google now dominates the search engines!

How about someone searching Google for "what is the best car maker"? That's a consumer that right at that precise moment in time is interested in learning a very specific thing. If you expect to sell a product that can help, you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Google or which ever Search Engine you prefer. What's its value to you to have that consumer visit your website within 4 seconds of entering that into the search engine?

You could search engine optimise your website to achieve Higher Search Engine Placement for your term, but this takes time and a sizeable investment in cash. This is where paid internet marketing really starts to shine, and is under rated in my opinion. Your website might be on the first page of MSN the same day for that search term for a modest budget. In a month or less you'd have some indication of the amount of potential customers that will really look for that term, go to your site, and buy your service. This is real time, market research for a low budget that can't be got get any other way.

Let's say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your ad making a combined total spend of 100. And say the conversion rate is a modest one percent, so you've got 5 new sales and more importantly 5 extra customers that you can now up sell to. All for just 100 spent! How much is your average client worth to you? Doesn't this look like something you should be doing?

Another important thing to understand is how Google ranks the paid for PPC marketing Adverts. In essence it's a real time auction. The top bidder comes out on top. If you bid 20p and a competitor bids 25p, they will rank higher than yours. It is in fact significantly more in depth than that: if you have a better quality Pay Per Click ad campaign, it's likely for you to rank above the 25p ad because Google will give bonuses to higher performing PPC Adverts. The key point is that if your Pay Per Click Management Firm knows what they are doing with Pay Per Click bid management, it is likely you will get higher rankings (read more traffic) for less money. So your limited online marketing budget goes further and you save budget. On the other hand, if your Pay Per Click ad campaign is administered by someone who has no idea their job, it will cost you real money.

Here are some of the jobs a specialist Google Advertising Professional should be doing (E.g. Intrinsic-Marketing.co.uk who do Website Optimization Analysis) whilst administering your account, and if yours isn't, we strongly suggest you get a review of your online marketing campaign today:

Be in It to Win It - The objective of PPC bid campaigns is to get on the first page of your Google etc fast. However, where there's in excess of eight (in normal conditions) even PPC ads can drop off the 1st page. Where there's competition such as this, there's absolutely no point doing a PPC marketing campaign if you are not on the 1st page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or forget it.

Improved Website Return on Investment through Tracking Conversions - This is modern marketing, this is not usual marketing, so you can use that to your benefit. The technology exists to monitor every sale and from where it comes. You will know exactly which advert converts to sales and which do not. It's one thing to have lots of people visiting your site, it is another to have a lot of sales. Would you rather have for PPC paid advertising: an ad that generates a thousand clicks and 1 percent sales, or one that generates one hundred leads but 10% sales? In each you get identical sales, but the 1st costs you ten times as much in PPC advertising budget.

Landing Page Optimisation - A common mistake is not matching the page that users see when they click your ad, to the words found in your ad; which definitely should be aimed at what the potential customer searched for. This simply means that when the person clicks your Ad, they get to see what they expect. Did you know that internet users are lazy? Did you know that half of all internet consumers exit a website in less than 8 seconds just because they do not discover what they expected! Doing this is even more crucial than Keyword Analysis Research

A/B Splt Testing Your Ads - This is good PPC management and simply involves having more than one advert and testing which works the best. Here is one personal example, we had 2 ads which were totally the same in every way except the start of the top title. One started "Learn to Prevent . . ." and the other started with "Stop . . ." Split testing found that 5 percent of the people who saw the "Learn to Prevent . . ." clicked it. BUT eight percent of the users who saw the "Stop . . ." ad clicked that one. It will not surprise you to discover that, we abandoned the first ad and got a better quality Ad which ultimately Google promoted to the top ad position on the page, for the same Price Per Click!

Several Ad Groups - The first rookie mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single Ad. This is usually bad. Keywords must be divided into groups with Ad text that accurately show the keywords searched for.

Phrase/Broad/Exact Matching - Google PPC Advertising allow 3 alternative ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but most online marketers just go for the default matching option. You could double your Click Through Rate from intelligent use of the other options which many careless Google Advertising Professionals do not even bother with.