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Pay Per Click, also called Pay Per Performance, Paid Perfomance and PPC all refer to the same business marketing campaign.  Placing your website in a special sponsored section of the search engines, generally giving you higher ranking and increased visibility immeidately, compared to what you would have previously received.

For this article I will be using Google as an example.  If you go to Google’s homepage (http://www.google.com) and type in mortgage you will see a huge number of results.  Within a highlighted bar, (orange for most settings) you will see three sponsored results, in addition you will see more results to the right in a sidebar.  These people have paid money to show up on that page in hopes that you will do business with them.  Now they are not paying anything to simply be there, however if you click on their link and go to their site they just spent money to have you visit them. 

PPC is the process in which an advertiser or business pays for each targeted lead to visit thier site based on categories and relevant keywords.  If you own an automotive detailing company and want to draw people to you, you will hopefully pick the keywords that best work in getting people to your website.

But this does not mean that you should put in just anything to get people to your website.  Your detail shop should not have keywords related to aquariums or Chinese food.  Since those searchers will be looking for those items, going to your site will just upset them.  They will in turn hit the back button and Google will take note that your visitors only stay on your site for a few moments before leaving your site.  You will enjoy a sudden drop in ranking and a large bill for no customers.  A PPC campaign should be targeted specifically for your customers.

If your business is geographically based you should take that into consideration when setting up your campaign.  If you are a weeding planner in Citrus Heights, and only want to target your pay per performace campaign for Sacramento, then you should include those words into your keywords for Google.  Yes, those of you who have rudementary experience in Adwords (Google’s Pay Per Click segment) say, hey wait, Google will let me pick my geographic location so that my ads only target my area.  This is true, however most searchers do not know that and will still type in their city.  Most PPC companies don’t take this into consideration and end up paying more per click than those who don’t.  The more targeted your keywords are the more likely you are going to have a better conversion rate rather than a ton of wasted clicks.

Pay Per Click Campaigns must be continually monitored.  Which keywords work?  Which ones cause more sales?  Can I see an increase in my visitors?  These are just some of the questions you have to answer when looking at a PPC report.  You will see words that may only give you a few visitors a day, but also get your phone ringing more than ones that give you multiple visitors an hour.  How will you or the PPC company you choose know which work best for you?  Three words;

Slow and Steady.

Yes, you could choose nine thousand keywords, plop them all in and when your sales increase you will probably be happy.  However you could very easily be throwing away hard earned money for no reason.  If you own a small restaurant and chose every keyword you could think of, yes, you may increase your sales, but strong marketing is about more than just increasing your profits; it’s also about lowering your costs as well.  In looking at your report you could see that you received 1,000 visitors, gained 15 customers a month and you would more than likely be satisfied with that.  However what if you had a BBQ restaurant and even though you were spending thousands of dollars a month it would be nearly impossible to track which keyword phrases were actually generating the phone calls without grilling (pun intended) the customer.  So you would be stuck keeping all of your keywords up.  That being the case you would never know that it was someone looking up “Rancho Cordova BBQ” that is getting you the most calls at $2 a click versus the $5 a click you are paying for “Sacramento Restaurant”. At ten thousand visitors a year you could be looking at a price difference of $30k.   Well more than you would have paid a qualified SEO marketing company like SIA to research the best and most cost effective keywords that would increase your return ratio.

Finally, understand that Pay Per Click does not always mean the highest bidder gets the click.  Google knows there is more to retaining thier nearly 70% market share of the web than just selling out to the highest bidder.  Every page of your website should be completely optimized to increase the chances of giving you solid ranking while lowering you per click cost.  This alone could end up saving you thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, in the long run rather than accepting your site as it is.

As for budgets, companies who sign up with business accounts for Google see a discount based on the volume of quality business they bring to the Search Engine Giant.  Many times, we save our customers enough money that it offsets the time and cost they would have otherwise incurreed in setting up the program themselves.  Some companies agree with standard marketing practices and allow for ten percent of their income from their website business to go back into their PPC campaign until they cap out, at which point their budget is larger than the amount of viable cusomters available, at which point it is time to sit down with me and figure out where to go from here.

So a well designed site, a solid grasp of what to expect to pay, and a little patience, can be a strong beginning to building a paid performance campaign that acutally pays you back.

Joseph L. Zeleny

Chief Marketing Officer

SIAServices.net

Tags: PPC?, Website Search Engine Submission, What is Pay Per Click

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing Campaigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.