What is Pay Per Click (PPC) and how can it improve your business?
There are over 4 billion active Google users worldwide, with over 70,000 searches per second, averaging over 7 billion searches per day. A lot of these searches are about buying a product; anything from clothing to laptops or services like insurance plans or plumbers. With such a diverse range of results and over 56 billion pages on Google, how can you make sure your business is seen?
If you were to search Google for a new laptop, you’ll notice the top results will be advertisements and therefore more likely to be the first links you might click on. These are called ‘inorganic listings’. These are paid for by the business to appear at the top of the page. In broad terms, the amount they pay for their listing/ad depends on the number of people who click it – hence the term ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC).
In contrast, ‘organic listings’, are free. They appear underneath the paid ads. Their position or ‘ranking’ in the search results is driven by the popularity and quality of their website.
To get your inorganic post on Google, you need to use a system called Google Ads. This allows every company to advertise their product to their target audience and, more importantly, measure how well it does.
How does Google Ads work, and can it be done on a budget?
Let’s use an example: a furniture retailer wants to try Google Ads to get their listing at the top of page when people are searching online for furniture. They have a budget of £1000, plus the costs of using a specialist online marketing company (such as Tailored) with expertise in implementing PPC campaigns.
What do you need to get started?
Google Ads is free to set up. All you need is some basic information, such as your company URL, name, and email. This allows you to set up your company and start advertising. The second thing you will need is some concept of a campaign, or plan as to how to entice prospects online, so you get the most from your investment in online marketing.
How to start
Now you have set up your Google Ads account, you need to determine the cost for your PPC campaign. This will determine how much it will cost you when someone clicks on your link. This is done via a ‘Google Ad Auction’, in which you bid on keywords relevant to what you’re selling to gain a better ‘Google Ad Rank’ (how high you appear on the results page).
Using our furniture retailer as an example, the keywords could be: “couch”, “couch for sale”, “couch on sale” and “cheap couches”. The relevance and popularity of keywords will determine their pricing. The keywords don’t have to be overly specific, but you also need to ensure they aren’t too broad. For instance, the keyword “couch” would be used by every furniture store, so the PPC cost will be high, but if you were to add Stockport to make “couches Stockport”, suddenly the keyword becomes more relevant to a potential buyer searching for couches in Stockport, while making the PPC for that keyword cheaper as it is more specific.
What’s next?
Once you’ve selected your keywords, you need to decide how much you are willing to pay for each one. Google can help with this by showing you how popular your keywords are – and therefore how expensive. This enables you to decide how to allocate your pricing and get the most out of your PPC budget. Another way is through location: if you are based in Stockport then you could target Stockport specifically or even the radius around where your store is based. This helps you identify and target the people that are more relevant to your offering, by only presenting it to people within that area without costing any more money, but still improving your Google Ad Rank.
How long does my advert run?
Your Google Ad can run for as long as your budget allows. You can place a limit on daily to monthly spending so you can spread your budget to last however you long you like. You can also tweak your spending if certain adverts are working better than others, or if it’s at specific times of day. Sometimes it may be of benefit to increase the price at those times and places to get the most out of your campaign. Remember, you are not locked into a campaign; you can start and end them at any time or increase and decrease the budget to best fit your changing objectives.
How can you measure success?
If you can’t measure success, you don’t know what’s working. If you don’t know what’s working, how do you adjust your budget, timing or keywords to make it better?
Essentially, Google Ads tracks everything your advert has done, from impressions (how many have seen it), clicks and how many of those people actually visited your store. This allows you to work out something called Cost-Per-Click (CPC), which shows how much profit you make per 1000 clicks and tells you if you’re turning a profit.
CPC is probably the most important statistic for any company, as this will determine whether to keep the ad running. Google can tell you average impressions and clicks a post could make, but the CPC takes around a month to work out an accurate figure, as it will take a few weeks for your campaign to bed in, and results can fluctuate widely over shorter periods.
How can Tailored help?
Understanding how PPC works is one thing, but putting it into practice without a thorough knowledge of the relevant tools and strategies is not an easy task. As a result, most businesses turn to a specialist online marketing company with experience of driving good PPC results, and which has the skillset required to set-up, monitor and manage a PPC campaign to maximise its value.
Here at Tailored, we have a successful track record with PPC. As a certified Google Partner, we are used to helping our customers transform their online presence and reach their revenue targets.
To learn how we could supercharge your business online, get in touch for a no-obligation chat.