Papers & Articles

17/01/2008  |  Top Tips for Successful Pay Per Click Campaigns

What is Pay Per Click? Put simply, Pay Per Click is the system of sponsored listings you see on Google, MSN, Yahoo and other Search Engines. An advertiser sets a budget then pays every time a user clicks on an ad at a price determined by the search engine. The search engine then determines the position on the basis of the price, the competitiveness of the keywords and other factors. PPC is much like an auction, where each advertiser bids for chance to get the highest position for the most popular keywords.

But how do you get the best out of your Pay Per Click Campaign? This article briefly looks at some of the methods of achieving this:

1. Return on Investment; Achieving a healthy return on investment (ROI) is vital for Pay Per Click success. According to a recent survey by E-consultancy 53% of businesses don't measure their ROI from Pay Per Click (PPC). Sometimes this tends to aticfially inflate the bid price of Cost per click (CPC) but sooner or later those who are losing money on PPC or not managing their campaigns properly will run out of budget. It's worth mentioning that in the same survey of those who measured their ROI, 23 per cent of businesses received a five times or more ROI and more than 50 per cent received three times ROI. By managing your campaign correctly spectacular results can be achieved.

2. Keywords; These are the core of a well run Pay Per Click campaign. Key phrases or keywords are the words or search term a user types into a Search Engine. Some keywoards can be highly priced and it is important to ensure that those you use provide a good return on spend. Consider phrases with more words as well as variations of phrases. For instance if your base keywords are "Laptop Repair " it's a good idea to use modifiers such as a location such as "London" or a brand name such as "Sony". Often people using long tail keywords (those more specific) are buyers while those who search with short tail keywords (more generic phrases) are browsers. However watch out for the negatives, if you do not sell "Dell" Laptops you may want remove this from your campaign.

3. Your Headline and Ad Copy; would a user type in the keywords your ad uses? Is your ad text loud and punchy? Does it call out to the customer? After you've selected which words you should be targeting, the other words you should consider carefully are the ones you should use for your main ad text.

4. Landing Pages; Before you begin your campaign make sure that your landing pages are as effective as they can be. The purpose of these is  to convert your clicks to sales. Be certain your ad points to the landing page it relates to. Nobody likes to hunt for something they thought they had found.

5. Management; It can be very easy to lose track of your campaigns. It is better to group your campaign into ads with different sub categories; brands, budget, geo-targeting. Grouping ads in this way not only makes them more manageable, but you will be able to assess the click through rates for different subcategories. Compare the CTR of "Sony Laptop £1000" with "Sony Laptop £500" and you will be able to assess which ads to use and which to remove.

6. Measurement; Consider whether your ads were successful and if necessary experiment and change them as necessary. Check whether there was a high proportion of click throughs on an ad that didn't convert to sales or enquiries. Managing a Pey Per Click (PPC) campaign is a coninuous process that should be done with the greatest of care and expertise.

At White Hat Media we have a dedicated Pay Per Click management team who are all acccredited Google professionals. We have our own bid management software which provides  dynamic price managament and extensive reports. We currently manage multiple campaigns for companies both large and small.

To find out more about how White Hat Media can help you with your Pay Per Click management, call 01273 704771 or click here.