Don’t Be Afraid to Pay (or: How to Stop Worrying and Love PPC)

A sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone. That’s sometimes the response we get when we’re talking to people about the possibility of actually paying for search engine traffic. Odd as it may seem to you - charming and good looking as you are - there is a category of business person who would prefer to spend money on SEO alone. Lest we forget - there are no guarantees in the SEO game, and in competitive markets it is strictly a long term game. So why do they hesitate when it comes to paid search listings?

Expense?

The absolute, central genius of the pay per click model is that it is suited to almost any budget. If you only have a couple of quid a day to play with then you can advertise in a marketplace with millions of potential customers - even with that small amount of money.

If your marketplace is very competitive, you might not see very much return on your few pounds. But then again, if you’ve only got a few pounds to spare for marketing, then you’re probably not really able to handle dozens of enquiries.

Better still, if you’re prepared to stump up a limited budget, you can stop AdWords within seconds as soon as your budget is reached.

Clickfraud?

Regrettably, many people labour under the misapprehension that once their ads are up and running that their competitors will just keep clicking the ad until the budget is used up.

Even if your rivals are the kind of guys who are likely to twirl their moustache while tying a girl to a railway track this is an extremely unlikely scenario.

Firstly, Google tracks clicks from individual computers using cookies and IP addresses. Don’t worry about the jargon - it just means that if you click an ad Google knows you’ve done it. The clever bit is that if you click the ad again Google doesn’t charge the advertiser. If you click an ad a thousand times, Google sees this as one individual click.

Secondly, because of the way Google tracks those clicks, a person wanting to click your ad 100 times would have to employ 100 people sat at 100 different computers to make one click each on your ad.

Doesn’t sound very likely, does it?

Lack of Transparency?

If you buy advertising with a TV or radio station, or place a nice colour spread in a magazine you actually have very few ways to track the results. Some people put something on the ad saying “Quote reference: PY7 when calling”. It’s just a way to try and understand how effective that £2,000 colour spread really was.

PPC programs remove all of that uncertainty. Each click on a keyword is reported back to you through online tools. You can see how many times your ad was shown. How many people clicked it. Which keywords they typed in. With the addition of a little bit of code you can even see how many enquiries or sales resulted. With a little bit more code you can even track the value of those sales.

If you knew that every pound you’d spent on Google had brought in 5 pounds in sales - how would that change your marketing budget? We think the answer is pretty obvious.

Complexity?

OK. This is where the mild sales message comes in. Running an effective PPC campaign needs a certain skillset:

1. A sprinkling of technical know-how in order to get campaigns up and running and proper tracking installed.
2. A pinch of copywriting magic to make your ads attractive and encourage clicks.
3. A hint of mathematical nous: once you’ve started getting traffic, identifying trends and weakspots in your campaigns needs the ability to define a story from pages of boring numbers.
4. A liberal dash of experience in knowing how to maximise use of budget - spotting ebbs and flows in conversions, winkling out ineffective keywords and a million such details.
5. No small amount of imaginative thinking - looking at competitors’ messages and finding ways to make you look better than them.

If you’ve got all that then you’re good to go! Otherwise, call in some professionals (hint!)

Today’s Moral

PPC works. What’s more it works in a uniquely transparent way. In no other advertising medium can you you accurately track ROI. If you’re only looking at SEO, then you could be looking at settling in for a long haul (unless you’re in an uncompetitive market). If you can wait for it to pay off then things are just dandy! If you’d prefer to be earning money today, then PPC is the way to go.