Why bother with pay-per-click advertising?
You would have to be as crazy as a box of weasels to pay each time someone visits your site with pay-per-click advertising, when you can rank high in Google for free… Right? Not necessarily. Pay-per-click advertising has certain advantages over SEO.
– Achieve a much larger overall number of customers to your site by running pay-per-click in tandem with your other marketing efforts. – Achieve a positive financial return on your marketing spend in many cases, and keep on selling to these customers in the future. There is one caveat to the last point.
If you are a small fish trying to enter an extremely competitive market, such as house loans, insurance or international plane flights, it’s likely the big players in the market are buying a large amount of advertising, forcing the average costper-click to astronomical prices, and making it difficult for new players to get a profitable return.
If you want to delve deeper into the science of pay-per-click advertising, I’ve included some great resources on AdWords at the end of the chapter. Sound good? Let’s get started.
Which is the best PPC provider to start with?
There are many pay-per-click providers out there, Google AdWords and BingAds are just two. Google AdWords is generally the best starting point. You can sell anything on Google AdWords if you have money to spend because the user base is so large. If you’re looking to jump into pay-per-click advertising, get started with Google AdWords. Move on to the other pay-per-click networks after you have some experience under your belt.
Here’s why AdWords is probably the best choice for your first foray into payper-click advertising: – Fast, instant results. Send new customers to your site within an hour or two. – Advanced targeting technology. Target users based on where they are located, or what browser or device they are using. Google’s ad targeting technology is among the best in the world.
With Google’s search engine market share at 67%, and Bing at 18.7%, you can reach out to the largest potential amount of customers with Google. – Due to the popularity of AdWords, there’s a wealth of knowledge on running AdWords campaigns successfully.
Ensuring success with research and a plan.
Like all marketing projects, for an AdWords campaign to be successful, you need to start with research and a solid plan. Without first defining your goals, and designing a robust strategy to achieve them, it’s impossible to create a successful marketing campaign—you’ll have no way of determining if the outcome is successful!
You really can’t afford to spend much more than $20 on each customer you acquire. Write this figure down, and review it later. You may need to first run a small test campaign to determine if pay-per-click is profitable, and the right marketing channel for your business.
Last word
What are the most common characteristics of your customers? For example, if you’re selling late-night pizza delivery in New York, you don’t want to be paying for the lovely folk in Idaho searching for late-night pizza delivery. Write down your customers’ common characteristics, and later in the settings recommendations, if there’s an option to target these customers, I’ll tell you how to do it.
