I often talk to people about their marketing strategies to find they really don't have one. Sure, they have created a website and have spent time on their content but quickly get frustrated when their website doesn't get any orders or customers. In fact, I have a new book coming out in 2015 where I talk about the 5 crucial mistakes most businesses make when trying to build an online brand.
When you first launch a website, you shouldn’t expect immediate orders or customers. It takes time for your website traffic to increase and people to find your website. I should clarify by stating that it takes time for “free” traffic to increase. If you want immediate website visitors which hopefully translates to orders and customers, you may want to explore what is called Pay Per Click or PPC for short. This article is going explore what PPC is and how you can use it in your marketing strategy.
Since we all know that everything you read on the Internet is absolute truth, I might as well use the very definition of PPC from Wikipedia.“
Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”
Simply put, an advertiser writes an ad about their product or service and places it on another website for their visitors to see. If the person is interested in what the ad says, the user clicks on the ad where they are directed to the advertisers website about the product or service. The advertiser is only charged when a user clicks on the ad and not when the ad is displayed.
As an example, let’s say that an ad is shown 1,000 times and received 100 clicks at a cost of $0.50 per click. The advertiser would pay 100 x 0.50 = $50 to the website owner.
When used properly, PPC is one of the most effective ways of marketing. It is a highly targeted marketing strategy because the clicks that you receive on your ad are from users that are already interested in your product or service.
Prior to PPC, companies would place ads in newspapers, yellow pages or direct mail. I am not going to say that these forms of marketing aren’t still used or effective in any way. But, a company has to spend a lot of money to place these types of ads with no real way to determine how effective it will be. Sure, they can forecast what the response rate will be based on “national averages”, but each product, service or industry have different response rates.
What I love about PPC is the fact that I only have to pay for a potential customer that is already interested in what I have to offer. By not having to pay for unwanted customers, that leaves me with more money in my pocket at the end of the day to spend in other places.
Today, it seems like every website is offering some form of PPC. Why is that? PPC has actually been around before Google even existed but I think Google took PPC to an entirely different level. Almost everyone has at least heard the term “Google” if not use it in their everyday life. Google’s still makes the vast majority of its income by showing ads on their website at the top and down the right hand side of the search results page.
According to the June 2014 comScorerankings of search engines for USA traffic, Google was the clear winner at 67.6%, followed by Microsoft Bing at 19.2% and Yahoo at 9.8%. While there are many other search engines out there, it is clear that Google, Bing & Yahoo serve 97% of all search results traffic in the United States. But, Google, Bing & Yahoo are not the only place where you can use PPC. Facebook, Amazon and literally 1000’s of other website offer some form of advertising where a company can show an ad and only pay when a user clicks on the ad.
If immediate website visitors is your goal and cost isn’t too much of a concern, then I definitely recommend using Google AdWords to get started. However, if you do not setup Google AdWords correctly, you can spend a lot of wasted money. If you would like to know more about how to properly setup a Google AdWords account, sign up for our newsletter, like us on Facebook, Twitter or simply keep checking back here at bomanry.com. Future articles will cover the basics of AdWord as well as intermediate and advanced topics and uses of AdWords.
[1] comScore: www.comscore.com – comScore measures what people do as they navigate the digital world – and turns that information into insights and actions for our clients to maximize the value of their digital investments. comScore was founded in 1999 by Magid Abraham and Gian Fulgoni and became a public company in June 2007.