Paid Search Engine Advertising Optimization Explained

The advantages of Pay Per Click (PPC) Google AdWords compared with usual methods is just this: almost all usual techniques are broadcast methods to users who have demonstrated little interest in purchasing your service. Think flyers through doors, magazine ads, radio ads etc etc. They are all broadcast ads. Sure there some targeted than others, if you are selling marketing services to firms, you put adverts in a Marketing magazine, but that's a course technique these days.

Input "solicitor" into Google and on the right hand side, you'll see adverts by websites who are paying the search engine to have their link and site displayed there on the first page of results. This is PPC Advertising and this is why Google now dominates the search engines!

Compare that to someone searching Google for "how to do direct advertising for lawyers"? That's a person that right at that moment in time is interested in finding out a very specific piece of information. If you expect to offer a service that can help , you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Google or other. What's its value to you to have that person visit your site within 5 seconds of entering that into the search engine?

You might search engine optimize your site to achieve top positions for that keywords, but this takes time and effort and a significant investment of money. This is where Pay Per Click marketing really comes into it's own, and is under used in my opinion. Your site could be on the first page of Google the same day for your search term for a bargain budget. In a few days you'd have some indication of how many users that will definitly look for that term, visit your website, and buy your service. This is real time, market research for a low budget that can't be got get any other way.

What's more, lets say that you are paying 20p per click, and 500 people click your link making a combined total spend of 100. And say the conversion rate is a modest 1%, so you've got five new sales and more importantly 5 additional customers that you can now up sell to. All this for just 100 outlay! What is your average customer worth to you? It's attractive isn't it?

A fundamental thing to understand is how Google ranks the paid for PPC marketing ads. Basically it is an auction in real time. The top bidder comes out on top. If you bid 20p and a competitor bids 25p, they will rank higher than yours. In truth it is considerably more in depth than that: if you have a better quality PPC ad campaign, it is definitely possible for you to rank higher than the 25p advert because the search engine will give boosts to higher performing PPC ads. The key point is that if your internet marketing expert knows what they are doing with PPC bid management, it is possible to achieve better rankings (read more traffic) for less money. So your important online internet marketing budget goes further and you save money. On the other hand, if your AdWords advertising campaign is administered by someone who does not know what they are doing, it will cost you real cash.

Some of the jobs an expert Google Advertising Professional should be doing whilst managing your account, if yours isn't, we strongly recommend you get a review of your PPC campaign as soon as possible:

Be in it to Win It - The whole point of PPC advertising administration is to get on the first page of your Google, search engine, MSN etc fast. However, where there's in excess of 8 (typically) even PPC ads can drop off the 1st page. Where there's competition like this, there's absolutely little point doing a PPC marketing campaign if you're not on the first page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or forget it.

Tracking for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not traditional marketing, so you can use that to your benefit. The technology exists to track each and every sale and from where it comes. You can learn exactly which advert converts to sales and which don't. Remember, it's one thing to get lots of traffic, it is another to have lots of sales. What would you rather have for PPC paid advertising: an advert that generates one thousand clicks and one percent sales, or one that generates 100 leads but ten% sales? For both you achieve the same sales, but the former costs you 10x the price in PPC advertising budget.

Landing Page Optimisation - A very common issue is not matching the page that potential customers see when they click your advert, to the actual content of your advert; which should be aimed at what the user searched for. This just means that when the user clicks your Ad, they get to see what they expect. Internet users are lazy! Did you know that half of all internet browsers leave a website in under 8 seconds just because they don't discover what they expected!

Split Testing your Ads - This is good PPC technique and simply involves having more than one advert and testing which one works best. Let me give you one personal example, we had 2 ads which were identical in every way except the start of the title. One began "Learn to Prevent..." and the other began with "Stop...". Split testing determined that 5 percent of the potential customers who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT eight percent of the potential customers who saw the "Stop..." ad clicked that one. It will not surprise you to learn that, we dropped the first one and got a better quality Ad which eventually Google promoted to the top advertising position on the page, for the same Price Per Click!

Several Ad Groups - The basic rookie failing is to group every keyword together to feed a single Ad. This is typically bad. Keywords must be divided into separate groups with Ad text that reflects the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching / Broad / Phrase - Google PPC Advertising allow 3 alternative ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but many advertisers just go for the basic matching option. You could significantly increase your Click Through Rate from intelligent use of the other options which many careless Google Advertising Professionals don't bother with.