How to Advertise Online Using Pay Per Click

With 89% of US consumers using search engines to make purchase decisions, it’s difficult to ignore the business opportunity offered by search advertising.  Unlike Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) can instantly place your website in the top 5 search results on the major search engines: Bing, Yahoo and of course the big one, Google.

Warning: PPC advertising is a huge opportunity – and requires lots of work.

It’s easy to do wrong.  Google offers a detailed step-by-step guide to setting up a PPC campaign.  You can do it yourself – right now.  But it can be dull and most likely you will spend a lot of unnecessary time and money before getting worthwhile results.

How failing at PPC ultimately led me to the secret of PPC success.

Back in 2004 I worked in a traditional marketing function for a start-up technology company.  Our in-house team diligently learned about Google Adwords and set up several campaigns.  Nothing happened.  A lot of time and money resulted in no sales leads.  In the years since, I’ve learned a valuable lesson: A PPC expert gets 100 times better results than a PPC “dabbler”.

4 Ways to Lose Big.

  1. Send PPC directly to your homepage. Each website visitor is looking for specific information when clicking through PPC ads.  And they’re in a hurry.  They will click the dreaded “back-button” instantly if they see general info about your business.
  2. Use one group of ads for all products and services your offer. Your website visitor has taken the time to visit your site.  Have the courtesy to welcome them with a specialized landing page – or your competitors will.
  3. Ignore quality score. Although, you’re the paying customer, Google wants to deliver relevant ads and ultimately helpful landing pages to searchers.  If you don’t do this (ie low quality score) Google charges you more for advertising than your competitor.
  4. Don’t test. Testing drives bigger and better results.  With PPC, you can test results to find out what’s working.  You can instantly change the ad copy, search terms and bids until you find the winning formula that brings you the most business.

Are you ready to let your old marketing efforts look silly?

You can even do this yourself.  Jump right into a PPC campaign.  Don’t get frustrated if you don’t get the results you expected, we can help get you on track. Or, if you are getting results, but want to bring in some expertise to take your sales growth to the next level, give us a call.