PPC Success With Google Ads
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) – such as Google Ads (AdWords) – offers your website an opportunity to advertise within the sponsored ads on Google, Bing and other search engines, whenever a user searches on a specific keyword related to your product or service.
Quite simply, you can buy your way to the top of the search results within hours and then pay a fee for every visitor that comes onto your website. PPC advertising is therefore a highly targeted digital advertising tool and it is also a marketing sector that continues to grow rapidly as more and more companies come to realise how it can be a very cost-effective and measurable source of new business.
As one of the leading Google Ads / AdWords consultants in Australia since 2006, we can support you with setting up your company’s Google Ads campaigns, and help more customers find your business. Please contact us today to find out more.
Running a successful pay-per-click campaign
Pay-per-click advertising is becoming more competitive as an increasing number of companies compete for top positions on the main search results and consequently in some market sectors, only those with deep pockets can buy the best positions. However, used sensibly, a PPC campaign can be extremely effective for several key reasons:
- it’s immediate: you can set up a campaign immediately with Google Ads and be ranking in the top search results within the hour. Set up requires very little investment and, depending on the nature of your market, pay-per-click can prove to be very cost effective, making it realistic for any size of business.
- it’s flexible: you can also control activity and spend online, including targeting activity by time of day or day of the week, making it a highly flexible tool for promoting business objectives such as market penetration, sales promotions and catering for weekly or seasonal variations.
- it’s measurable: conversion rates from pay-per-click leads can be measured by adding tracking code to a site, so you are able to calculate the cost per sale and conversion rates that pay-per-click is giving you. This makes it very easy to justify and monitor responses compared to other forms of advertising. You can also monitor clickthrough rates (adverts served v adverts clicked) to measure the effectiveness of your advertising messages.
PPC advertising campaigns can require close management on a regular basis, for a number of reasons, including:
- not all clicks are equal: making sure that the people who click on your ads are likely to generate a lead or sale is critical to the success of a pay-per-click campaign, and there are a number of pitfalls to watch out for. Bidding on very general keywords by an advertiser in a specialist sector, attracting the wrong type of visitor with your adverts and providing a poor experience once a user reaches your website are just some of the issues to consider.
- bidding complexity: strategies to bid on keywords have become increasingly complex. The two bid types – manual bid adjustments and auto bidding (which incorporates smart bidding) – need to be carefully managed to produce the optimal results. Even though the latter benefits from Google’s machine learning, it’s vital to choose the correct automated bid strategy and campaign type which will produce the best possible return.
- the importance of selecting the correct campaign type and bidding strategy: this is critical for success, as some campaigns such as Google Shopping work well either with a ‘Smart’ version, or a standard one. These campaigns can be extremely effective at increasing product sales if managed correctly. In addition, charities and not-for-profits can use Google Ad Grants.
- click fraud: this can be a common concern for advertisers and whilst the major PPC providers have some security measures in place, it is still possible to assume that you will receive wasted clicks from your competitors or other sources, so this needs to be built in to the cost of a campaign. Ultimately, any PPC campaign has to generate an effective return on investment.
- how sustainable is it? Many other methods of web marketing allow you to achieve sustainable results without investing large sums of money (although hard work & astute decisions are almost certainly required). Pay-per click is very much like advertising in that as soon as you stop investing in it, you will lose any benefits immediately.
How Web Marketing Workshop can help
As experienced Google Ads / AdWords consultants Web Marketing Workshop have a wide experience of managing pay-per-click accounts for our clients, helping to take away the hassle and also maximising the benefits of this often complex advertising medium.
We are also Google Ads Premier Partners, which reflects the volume of ad spend we manage for our clients on Google, and also our expertise and experience in running successful campaigns.
If you would like to run an initial test PPC campaign for your website, or to improve the performance of your current campaigns, contact us now for more information. Alternatively, request our FREE marketing assessment to discover what other online marketing opportunities may exist for your site.