Pay Per Click advertising (or PPC), can be one of the most powerful and cost effective ways to get traffic to your site.
With PPC you bid a small amount for a particular keyword combination. When that phrase is searched for, your text-based advertisement will appear alongside the “natural” search results. If a user clicks the ad – you pay a small amount for that click. The amount you pay depends on how high you bid on the term compared to your competitors.
But what is it about PPC that makes it so useful, and how can it drive traffic to your site?
The right type of traffic...
Yes, people more commonly click organic search results than PPC ads - by a ratio of around 80:20.
However, there are reasons why so many businesses focus on paid search. (According to Forrester's 2008 Online Advertising Survey, 71% of European advertisers are using PPC.)
Once you have stripped out the amount of searches that are information based (such as “what's the capital of Botswana”), domain-name based (such as typing facebook.com), or hyper-specific (around a quarter of Google queries have never been searched for before) - you're left with terms which have a commercial intent.
So, PPC helps you target these commercially useful searches and drive that traffic to your site. This of course makes it very cost-effective, as you can focus on terms which are high-converting.
You don't have to wait around
PPC is responsive and flexible. Unlike organic search engine optimisation (where you try, over a long period, to rank higher in the natural search listings), with PPC you can immediately target new keywords.
In fact, PPC is the only way to guarantee a first page placement in the Google results.
So, if tomorrow was Christmas Eve, you could target terms including “Christmas Eve special offers”. Or, you could respond to sudden changes in search trends with relevant ads (such as when more people search a popular news term, as with “credit crunch” in 2008).
Isn't competition too fierce these days?
If you're bidding on a term like “credit cards”, then yes – you might need very deep pockets.
However, skilled PPC marketers use a combination of modifiers and untapped keywords to help attract the broadest spread of traffic, without spending a fortune. For example, terms might target specific locations, use descriptive modifiers like “discount”, “last-minute” or “favourite”.
Grab traffic, then keep it
Successful businesses aren't built on focusing on one-hit sales where you never see that customer again.
Your
website design company should be able to create landing pages that convert customers and then encourage further involvement with your site.
And, because your PPC campaign is so flexible, responsive and targeted, you can also use it to discover new keyword combinations that you can optimise your site for organically. It's far easier to test the effectiveness of a keyword (and its conversion rates) using PPC than it is with SEO. So, not only can you drive useful traffic directly to your site through PPC, you can also enjoy indirect benefits from better organic optimisation to cheap market research.
About the Author
Oliver Pluckrose is the Head of Development for Online Business Solutions UK Limited (OBS Group) – a web design company based in London. Formed in 1998, OBS Group’s ethos has always been to provide simple, end user-driven
website development for a sensible, fixed price.
