If you use Pay Per Click marketing to drive traffic to your site and you find that it is becoming more expensive? It is probably because you are making some of the most common mistakes that we often see when we take on new PPC management for clients.

• Poorly crafted copy
• No call to action
• No landing page

If your PPC campaign is just hemorrhaging cash and you are thinking about dropping it, test these three simple steps to see if your return on your investment in this marketing channel can be increased.

We have seen many clients generate more leads and more sales through the implementation of just these 3 tried and tested tactics – and so can you.

1 – Craft that title and add a question mark?

The first line of any PPC advert that you create is the most important – This is the headline of the advert. There are two simple things to remember when thinking about headlines.

a) Include your targeted keyword – when your ad displays in Google or Bing, if your keyword is included in the title of your advert, the system automatically formats the text as BOLD, helping to make your ad be seen better.

b) Add a question mark at the end of your title – adding a question mark will trigger a physiological desire to click your advert advert out of sheer curiosity for the answer to the question.

2 – Be clear on one benefit and one feature

Adverts that simple tell us all about the features of a product and no benefit, simple don;t work. People want to know what it is that they will get when they engage with you, buy your product or simply click your advert. It is still important to add a feature, but remember you don’t room to write an essay so don’t try and ram it full of content. Keep things short and sweet. Use the first line of the advert body to describe a benefit and the second line to describe a feature.

3 – Use landing pages to really deliver on your promise

If you are driving traffic using PPC to your homepage, STOP! On the whole, people respond and click adverts when they are ready to buy. Why would you send them to a generic page where they have to go hunting for promise you gave in your advert. Take them to one of two pages:

a) A product page or an offer page related directly to your advert, even using the same headline in the title of the page, then show them how easy it is to buy that product – by adding a ‘Buy Now’ button.

b) A lead capture page where you are going to give them a free download, access to a webinar or any other product or service, just for entering their details.

Better PPC Campaigns

Learning how to polish your PPC advertising campaigns will help you active a greater return on investment from them. Don’t run with lackluster copy, uninspiring headlines and please stop if you are not driving traffic to landing pages or direct to product pages.

To learn more about our PPC management services, call the team on 01793 608777 or visit our PPC Management page for all the information you’ll need.

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising can be very successful at bringing visitors to your website but it can also be a drain on your marketing budget if you get it wrong. Most PPC schemes, like Google Ads, work by charging you for every click your advert gets. If your advert targets the right people and takes them to the right place there’s a good chance they’ll buy from you. However, if your advert attracts the wrong people or they feel misled when they click through, you’re going to be paying for nothing. Here are 5 tips for better Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

Be specific with your search terms
When you set up a PPC campaign you specify the keywords that people search for to trigger your advert being shown. It’s very easy to get these wrong, especially if you don’t think carefully about exactly what it is you are advertising. For example, if you run an Italian restaurant in London you might want your advert to show up every time someone searches for the word “restaurant” – but that would be crazy, because your advert would show regardless of what kind of restaurant people were looking for. A better search term would be “Italian restaurant” but if people click through and discover you are in London – but they are in Newcastle – they are unlikely to book a table – and you’ll have paid for the privilege of them not booking. Make your search terms really specific – “Italian restaurant London” will only show when people search for that specific term, and narrowing it down even further – eg “Italian restaurant Hammersmith” – will really hit the spot.

Use Phrase Match and Exact Match – not Broad Match
Most PPC schemes allow you to choose between Phrase Match/Exact Match or Broad Match. Many people opt for Broad Match because they think it will give them the best coverage, but actually it will simply increase your costs by showing your advert on irrelevant searches.  Going back to our example, if you choose broad match then not only will your ad be shown for “Italian restaurant London”, it will also show for any searches that include the words “Italian”, “restaurant” or “London” … because Broad Search looks for the individual words in a search term rather than the complete phrases. The first two options will only show your advert when the exact search term is used, so there’s a far better chance that your advert will be relevant.

Have different adverts for different products
If you sell several different products then write an advert for each one rather than one advert for your whole business. Say you sell widgets, but you have a blue widget, a green widget and a red widget and they all do very different things. Running one ad for widgets isn’t going to be hugely successful as you’ll attract people looking for all kinds of widgets, but running separate ads for each of the red, green and blue ones will be much more effective.

Make sure your advert links with a relevant webpage
If someone clicks through from your advert and then can’t find what they were searching for they will leave your website – but you’ve still had to pay for the click through. If your advert is for the blue widget but the link goes to your home page it might not be easy for people to find the widget they want – so make sure you link the advert to the blue widget sales page.

Do some research
When you select the search terms you want to bid for, don’t just go with your first choice. It could be that it is a popular phrase which will be very expensive per click. Or it could be that it’s a phrase that no one ever searches for, so it’ll be a waste of time using it. Most PPC services have keyword tools so you can find similar search terms and see how often they are looked for – Google’s Adwords Keywords tool is a good one.

If you’d like more tips on using PPC or would like to find out about our Pay Per Click Management service just give us a call on 01793 608777 – we are experts at PPC and can show you how to run a successful campaign.

Photos:
Click image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Key image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The best way to direct traffic to your website is to make sure you site is optimised so you are easily found in the search engines. However, it can take time to properly optimise your site and create enough quality content to have a real effect on your search engine ranking, especially if yours is a brand new website or you are working in a competitive market. Another effective way to increase your web traffic is through PPC – Pay Per Click. If you’re not sure exactly what PPC is, do a search on Google and look out for the “sponsored” adverts at the top and bottom of the results page. These are Pay Per Click adverts, and they are displayed according to the keywords searched for, the popularity of the terms, the relevance of the advert and the amount the advertiser has bid for their ad to be displayed.

Reasons to try Pay Per Click

The main reason to try PPC is that rather than waiting for your website to rise organically to the top of the search engines, you can be visible instantly. Once you know what keywords you want to target so your potential customers can find you, you can put together your text advert and start your pay per click campaign straight away. So long as you’ve set your bidding price correctly (the price you’re prepared to pay per click on your advert) your advert will be seen as soon as anyone searches for your keyword. If your advert is compelling enough you’ll see an increase in web traffic very quickly.

Another reason to try Pay Per Click is that you can monitor the results very closely to see what works and what doesn’t. Whereas with organic SEO it’s difficult to calculate the ratio of people searching for your keywords against the number of visits you get, with Pay Per Click you can see exactly how many times your advert has been displayed and how many click throughs it resulted in. You can also run split tests – where you have two different adverts that use the same keyword – to see which is more effective. There’s no limit on the number of adverts you can have or the number of keywords you want to target either, other than as many as your budget allows.

Interested in trying PPC but don’t really know where to start? The third reason to try Pay Per Click is that you don’t have to learn how it works yourself, you can let someone else manage your PPC campaign for you. At HodgesNet we think search engine optimisation is the best long term tool for increasing your web ranking and visitor numbers, but in the short term we know that Pay Per Click can be really effective. We can research your keywords and set up your campaign for you, and then monitor it and tweak it to make sure you get the best value for money for your keywords.

If you’re interested in finding out more have a look at our PPC Campaign Management Services, or call the team on  +44(0)8432 894 402  to discuss your requirements.

Earlier this week we sent some updates and emails to our Pay Per Click customers, advising them on the changes to PPC and also blogged about this on the 22nd of November.

PPC management is something that we run for a number of companies but not something we over promote (See our PPC Management page here). Pound for pound and for longer term strategies, we believe that there are much more cost effective ways to market your website. PPC can however, if run correctly, can produce instant results – so it all centers around your budget for marketing spend if you want to use it or not.

Monitoring the social chatter and bloggerverse, it seems that some companies are saying that this is the death of PPC, whilst others are saying that this presents an awesome opportunity to get more out of it.

So which way to we swing?

Yesterday when our MD Ant Hodges, was presenting a seminar workshop at ECMOD in London, he raised the question of the use or PPC with the audience.

“Moving forward you need to ensure that your PPC is still delivering you real value and a positive ROI” said Ant.

“If you are bidding and winning positions 1, 2 and even 3, then you will still be seen. This is great as there will be less adverts distracting you on the right hand side of the search results, and potentially only you to be found at the top – particularly on mobile search.

“If you are bidding, as some companies suggest these are the best to go for, on positions 4 and 5, then your ad will disappear and to be visible you will need to bid more.”

Some of the audience argued that their PPC is out performing any other marketing activity that they are doing at the moment, including email marketing and direct mail, whilst others suggested that linkbuilding and SEO is now performing much better for them as their ads have had much less of an impact (less impressions) over the past two weeks.

It is still too early to tell what is happening with PPC and how Adwords could help or hinder you. In reality all you need to be doing is measuring and testing your spend and advertising in Adwords to ensure is is always delivering a positive ROI whilst Google decide what to do with it.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of Googles test. We will keep you posted.

Pay Per Click (PPC) has long been seen as a cost-effective way of advertising on the internet. In a PPC campaign, adverts promoting (mainly) websites are displayed on search engines, are triggered when someone searches for a specific keyword – Google, for example, currently shows PPC ads above the organic search results, and down the right hand side of the page. There is no charge for the adverts to be displayed, but advertisers pay for every click on the advert. Webmasters can also choose to display PPC ads on their websites, in exchange for part of the Pay Per Click fee.

Google announced this week  that they are going to run a test by stopping the display of Pay Per Click adverts down the side of the search results page.

After monitoring how the positioning of PPC ads affects the number of clicks they receive, Google will now display these “sponsored” adverts at the bottom of the organic search results. According to Google, “In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.”

The trouble with Pay Per Click