A Beginner’s Guide to Pay per Click Advertising

Our beginner’s guide to Pay per Click (PPC) advertising covers the most popular platform in the UK which is Google Adwords.

This introductory guide aims to give you a broad understanding of PPC and how you can use it to drive more traffic and generate sales and enquiries for your small business website.
What is PPC?

PPC is paid online advertising where you pay a pre-determined amount each time someone clicks on one of your PPC adverts.

PPC adverts or Sponsored Links as they’re sometimes referred to, usually appear on the right hand side of the search engine results pages but for certain keywords the top results will appear on the left hand side above the natural search results.

How does PPC advertising work?

• Choosing your keywords

The first step to coming up with a successful PPC campaign is to choose the keywords and phrases you want to advertise for. It’s important that when compiling your list that you pay attention to the average cost per click (you can get this information from the Google Keyword Tool) as your budget may not go far if you’re bidding on a very competitive term.

For example “financial advisers London” has an average cost per click of £8.92 (at the time of writing) if you want your PPC advert to appear in positions 1-3 for this phrase.

• Setting your budget

One of the main advantages of PPC is that you can set your own budget so if you only have £200 a month to spend, then you can set up your campaign so that level will never be exceeded.

• Writing your adverts

In order to attract traffic you need to create compelling advert text with the keyword in the heading and a call to action such as “order online now”. You should also write more than one advert for each keyword you’re targeting so you can compare them and use the one that’s driving the most traffic and conversions.

• Monitoring your results

It’s important to monitor your campaign regularly to see how your adverts are performing and what return you’re getting on your investment.

Competitor activity can affect your PPC campaign so it’s wise to keep up to date with how it’s performing.

• Can I do it myself?

It’s free and relatively easy to set up a Google Adwords account for PPC advertising. If you have a specific problem there is lots of help and information available online.

However, if you don’t have the time or inclination to set up your own campaigns then there are lots of dedicated PPC agencies around.

The role of PPC in your overall online strategy

PPC advertising can be very effective for small businesses that perhaps don’t have the budget for a long term SEO strategy or can’t afford to wait until they start to see results.

PPC advertising allows you to advertise your products/services almost instantly online which is a huge benefit to many smaller businesses.

If you liked this article you may also want to read my top 10 PPC tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Guides for Beginners, Pay per Click. 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.