PPC for Small Business
Paying for inclusion in search results is one of the most cost-effective methods of advertising, on or offline.
Put simply, it is the process of getting a search engine to display advertising for your products or services on its results pages when someone searches for relevant words or phrases.
There are two ways to pay for this. Some ads are displayed free, but you pay when someone clicks on the link in your advert.
Alternatively, you can opt to pay a nominal fee every time the ad is displayed alongside the results that naturally come up for relevant key words or phrases.
The biggest sites offering pay per click advertising are Google, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo, but there are others. Pay per Click Management Teams can advise which are best for your business and will understand the submission guidelines for each.
Why Outsource PPC?
Pay per click (PPC) adverts are simple to create and campaigns are easily put together. People are often tempted to do it themselves.
Unfortunately, the devil is in the detail, and a great deal of money can be wasted if campaigns are not managed effectively.
Effective pay per click management begins with setting clear goals; gaining a clear strategic understanding of the aims of the business and what you want to achieve from the campaign. An experienced PPC team will research and refine the keywords and phrases to precisely target your desired audience, and copywrite the adverts to get the required response.
Once the advertisements are live, the campaign needs to be actively managed, using detailed testing and analysis to monitor results.
This is the key benefit to a PPC campaign – feedback is available from the market in real time, and small adjustments can be made on the fly to ensure optimal return right through the campaign.
This enables you to test new ideas in the marketplace for a very small investment, and ROI can be quickly quantified. A/B Split-testing can monitor the outcome from small changes so that your campaign is always optimised for visibility against spend.
In-House Vs. Externally Managed PPC Campaigns
Some businesses invest in sophisticated bid management software, in the mistaken belief that this will ease the overhead of monitoring campaigns.
These systems have their place, but cannot take the place of an experienced human account manager keeping a practiced eye on things, looking out for possible fraudulent activity, monitoring your competition and reporting to you in words you can understand.
For businesses with multiple product lines or brands and consequently several campaigns running concurrently, the testing and analysis of data required to effectively optimise activities can be a heavy overhead.
An experienced PPC team can take over these activities and run them on your behalf in accordance with guidelines and outcomes agreed with you.
In addition, they will have good experience of what works in your business sector, and can advise on SEO, landing page copy and design, social media and email marketing to make sure all your marketing activity is working together to get you the best return on your Pay Per Click spend.
