Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has been around much longer than you might think. Back in 1998, 'GoTo' sold search results for pennies per click. This sparked an entirely new advertising concept that has quickly evolved into the most efficient and competitive advertising marketplace ever.

PPC advertising gives you the opportunity to pay for top positions on major search engines. This delivers instant traffic and offers many ways to compliment SEO, by testing keywords, business models, and marketplace verticals allowing you to develop your internet marketing and any SEO plans with facts, not assumptions.  PPC ads appear at the top, bottom or right side of the search engine results page (SERP) and are identified as "Featured Listings", "Sponsored Listings", "Sponsored Links", "Paid Links", or "Sponsored Results."  PPC is based on an open bidding system, giving a wide range to what a keyword can cost you depending on the competition for that keyword. This can make PPC very costly for the amateur advertiser. There is a science to finding high numbers of low volume keywords (very specific long tails) that are very inexpensive to advertise on, and can be used to hedge against the more expensive high volume keywords, significantly lowering the average cost per click across an entire ad plan. Additionally these more specific long tails have a strong tendency to increase conversion rates. When PPC is managed efficiently it's very cost effective and should not be overlooked for filling the gaps in organic results as needed.

PPC Tips

Google Adwords, Microsoft Ad Center, and Yahoo Search Marketing provide advertisers with an advertising management interface. Although their features vary, your success with each of these formats requires an understanding of what people search for, and how to find the inexpensive keywords that pack a punch, instead of entering a bidding war for the most obvious keywords that other advertisers are bidding up. Once you have found the best keywords and place your maximum bid price, the search engine will rank you based on all bids. If you don’t come up on the first page, you will need to increase your bid price, or you’ll be wasting your time. Some search engines such as Google, include a ‘Quality Score’ algorithm which can give you a higher ranking based on certain variables, instead of bid price alone. For example, a search for ‘BBQ in Katy Tx’ will give higher placement to an advertiser who bids an exact match on that term, verses an advertiser (even with a higher bid ) on a broad match of ‘BBQ Katy.’ Understanding the quality score algorithm will give you an edge over the big corporate budgets that crank out thousands a day in broad match PPC spend.

Benefits of Pay Per Click:

PPC is beneficial when you can’t wait for the search engines to rank you. Search engine ranking doesn’t necessarily react immediately to SEO. While some SEO changes will bring results in days, their tactics can take months to realize the expected rank increase. PPC can also be an alternative to your website being relevant enough to rank naturally or organically, but it is a very expensive choice. To be competitive you may spend $2000 to $20,000 per month on PPC. SEO is significantly less and your site becomes a significant bookable asset. With PPC, the second you stop feeding it money, the sales stop.

The use of PPC with SEO is often done to verify assumptions. The instant results from PPC allow you to:

• Receive instant feedback on a market
• Gather real-time ad test results of a specific audience
• Prototype an idea or website before investing a lot of time and money

PPC can and usually should be used in any aggressive online marketing effort. It isn’t practical in some markets to target every possible keyword in your SEO effort because there are too many or the market is in some way intangible or ambiguous. Let’s use Marketing Consulting for example. There are so many things that fall under the umbrella of Marketing that you could easily come up with 30 to 40 areas that each might have 50 to 100 key word terms. So as you build your site over time you buy PPC for the hundreds, or even thousands of keyword terms for which your website just doesn’t have the breadth to SEO. Over time the plan should be to continue adding tertiary and quaternary pages on the various areas and then SEO those pages to the logical keyword terms. In the mean time PPC allows you to compete where your SEO is not competing well, albeit at a price.

Even if you have tons of content on your website and cover every possible area and are SEO’d to the hilt, there still may be times when dynamics in your market will require immediate response to a threat or challenge from a competitor. PPC gives you immediate results, but again, at a fairly substantial price.

We can tell you about people paying $1000 per month and getting tons of sales or the remodeler who spends $5000+ each month and sells two deals. It all comes down to the percentage of gross profit spent. If you spend $1000 and sell 1000 items with a gross profit $10 each for a total of $10,000 gross profit. Your cost of advertising is only 10% of your gross profit. However, if you are spending $5000 in PPC for two sales with gross profit of $7,500 each for a total of $15,000 (as one of our clients was), that’s an advertising cost of 33%. PPC is eating your lunch. Stop reading and call Ascendgence now.

Phase 1: PPC Keyword Discovery

When starting fresh with a PPC account, the first step is finding a number of keywords to test on the market. Collecting all the tools offered by the different PPC interfaces, and cross referencing cost per click and impressions (how many times your ad is seen –not clicked), you find a plethora of information useful for your campaign. Google offers the Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal),that gives a very rough estimate of keyword searches per month for any given keyword. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/advertising-intelligence), is an Excel ad-on, that will give you more accurate numbers based on the PPC accounts of businesses advertising on their network. The goal here is to find the most-searched keywords that are used to find your product or service. From this list of ‘most-searched’ keywords, you want to find those keywords that have a high volume of searches, but with very low ad competition. You can spend a fortune paying for 1^st position on a very broad keyword such as: "houston cars" or "cars in houston" because every car dealer in Houston wants to be ranked first on that highly searched keyword term. However, the broader the keyword term, the lower the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of all who click your ad that actually ‘convert’ into a customer (or lead in some businesses). Long-tail keywords, or keywords that are 3-5 words long, which are much more specific have a higher conversion rate. Additionally, these keywords have a lower cost-per-click because they typically have less advertising competition. Of course these more specific keyword terms are typically not high volume searches so you need to advertise on many more of them to get the numbers of impressions you will get from one broad keyword term.

While you are discovering keywords establish a budget. How much will you spend per month? Once the budget is established, you fine tune your PPC account to optimize the return of the investment through constant monitoring, eliminating poor performing keywords, weeding out keywords with low conversion rates, finding new low-competition keywords, and by adding negative keywords (you can designate words that you do not want in a result). DO NOT CHASE CLICKS WITH OVER BUDGET SPENDING. Tune your advertising within the static budget. Remember that many of the PPC techniques compliment your SEO efforts, providing you with a better knowledge of which keywords are best to focus on developing organically through SEO.

Be thorough in discovery so you have a clear understanding of how people search for your product or service, and how different keywords can increase or decrease your ROI.

Here’s an example of something called keyword dilution: Let’s say a business executive is looking for a new cell phone. He goes to the computer and types “new cell phones.” This person might also put in a number of alternatives: “new pda cell phones”,” reviews of new cell phones” or “best new cell phones.”  An ad bid placed on the broad term: “new cell phone” will show for all of the above searches, which is good as these searches all fall under the broad term of “new cell phones.” Unfortunately, as Google can’t possibly know your intended target audience based on your keyword alone; there are a number of keywords that will dilute your ROI. People looking for and searching with terms such as: “new cell phone covers”, “new cell phone battery”, “new cell phone insurance”, and “new cell phone ringtones” will all find your ad and likely click it (cha-ching). These dilutions can be costly, though they can be controlled to some extent by negative keywords, but the take away here is that this is not a non-contact sport. You have to stay on top of this game. It’s not like a face lift, or a onetime overhaul. It is an ongoing strategic, tactical, analytic and constant campaign.

So now we understand why keyword discovery is so important. It’s not only to find the most valuable keywords searched by your target market, but to fine tune your campaign by knowing which keywords are the most efficient and which to eliminate to increase your ROI.

Phase 2: Prescription

Now that we have established the current state of your market and the competition and have done a complete keyword discovery, we can look at a best strategy moving forward. When deciding upon a budget, you need to consider what your marketing goals are. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, then you should expect to spend more on ads where ROI is less traceable, verses direct product marketing, which will quickly yield to you the worth of any particular keyword.

During this phase, we identify your ‘money’ pages. These are the pages in your site that have a track record of converting at the highest rate. If blue hats are selling at a higher conversion rate than red hats, you will want to place more of your monthly ad spend on promoting blue hats. As this conversion rate shifts, your campaign should adjust. Increasing the landing page’s conversion rate can also be achieved by employing our web usability tactics, where we eliminate any thought process on the user’s behalf once a buying decision has been made. Anything that makes the user stop and think, when they are ready to buy, will lower the rate at which visitors become buyers. Unlike department stores, where you park your car, and walk in the front door, a web visitor has very little sunk-cost, and the back-button is the most commonly used feature of any web browser. Once your visitor has decided to purchase the only task should be to get them to the sales confirmation page via a cleared and uncluttered path. The bare minimum of questions, buttons, choices or clicks is the key to higher conversion rates, sales and ROI for your campaigns. This is a usability issue and not PPC or SEO, but it’s incredibly important.

Phase 3: Development

The development phase is never ending. As language develops and trends introduce new terminology to your industry, there will always be room for improvement and optimization of your ad campaign. Your competition will always counter your moves. You discover, strategize, execute, evaluate, and start over again and again. Development is simply the day to day operations of managing your PPC accounts. If you have other things to do with your human resources outsourcing this to Ascendgence might be a solution for you.  A well managed PPC program to supplement SEO is, from an ROI standpoint, a ‘no brainer’ with returns including outsourcing costs upwards of 15:1.

Contact us for more information on PPC management.