Paid Search Marketing with Google, Bing and Facebook
You're wasting half your advertising spend, but which half?
Wouldn't it be great to know how well every penny you spent on advertising was doing? Traditionally the method was to hand over your money to some advertising company for a print or broadcast media campaign, then wonder which clients came to you through that message. If you were far sighted enough you might put an offer code, or questionnaire in the process to try and identify the leads, alternatively you just ask your receptionist to ask everyone where they heard of you.
There is a better way, for on-line advertising at least, it's called Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), but you may know it as Google Adwords though similar facilities exist for Microsoft Bing and Facebook. Essentially it works like this:
- You choose a phrase that you feel represents a need among your potential customers that you can profit from fulfilling, say "extra broad women's shoes"
- You pay a Pay Per Click provider (usually Google, but it could be Bing or others) to show a small text advert on the results page when a user searches for that phrase or something similar (the specificity of the match is something you can control). It works slightly different for Facebook but the concept is the same, match advertising spend to specific words and phrases.
- People search for that phrase or phrases like it (again Facebook is slightly different, matching more to users profiles than their searches), and your advert is shown on the results page in a position dictated by your spend relative to the other people bidding for that word (it's a kind of auction).
- No costs are incurred until a visitor actually clicks on your advert, then the visitor is taken to the page which you defined as being the landing page for that advert.
You only pay for feet, not for eyeballs
By only paying for potential leads rather than simply for the right to display the message, the whole process becomes much more manageable. With the inclusion of good visitor analysis software, it now becomes possible to see not only where your visitors came from and so what your spending has achieved, but also what those visitors then do on your website. The creation of costed goals within your website would then allow you to justify almost every penny spent on this medium. The process works like this:
- You create a costed goal, e.g. if a visitor contacts us about X then we can normally make a sale 20% of the time and each sale is worth roughly £1000, so each contact is worth roughly £200.
- You create a Pay Per Click Advert designed to attract visitors interested in X and you bid for terms related to X, lets call them Xa, Xb and Xc (are you beginning to see why we work with computers?)
- You calculate your conversion rate for those terms (simply how many of those visitors you can persuade to complete one of your website goals). Lets say Xa is 5%, Xb is 15% and Xc is 1%
- Now you just calculate the visitor value by multiplying goal value (£200) by conversion rate, which means each visitor now has a value that we can compare to the bid price for each term, if it is more then keep bidding, if it is less then look for an alternate phrase.
If this is still unclear why not contact Appropriate Solutions to let us talk through the process with you. We know it looks complex but that's what we're here for, to help explain it in as clear and simple terms as possible.
Monitoring and Management are the keys to successful PPC
As you can see successful Pay Per Click management is down to some straight forward maths, knowing your customers and a little intuition. If you know your customers and your market, we can bring the maths and the monitoring and together we can help you to bring real quantifiable results to your website. Not just traffic, but actual leads that you can watch being converted into business.
Pay Per Click Advertising with Google Adwords or others has many other benefit:
- Pay Per Click Advertising can help to improve your natural search position through increased exposure
- Pay Per Click Advertising can be used as a test bed for new search phrases, quickly finding viable terms
- Pay Per Click Advertising can help improve your usability through Landing Page optimisation techniques
If you would like to try Pay Per Click for the first time, or maybe you tried it and were unimpressed, why not contact Appropriate Solutions for an informal discussion of the potential of Pay Per Click Advertising for your business.