Pay Per Click

There's quite a bit involved in making a profit with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising so here's a quick outline of how you can profit from Google's Adwords and, further down the page, Facebook.

Your PPC ad can appear in Google's search when someone searches on a keyphrase you've chosen to target. Google Adwords places ads elsewhere too, but I'm going to ignore that for simplicity.

So the first task is to choose good keyphrases, which entails a great keyphrase analysis project. Keyphrase analysis is about generating a long list of possible search terms, then throwing out those with little traffic, very high competition, no profits, or that aren't 100% right for you, then prioritising the rest.

You pay for each click, and how much you bid to pay partly determines whether you appear at all and if so, at which position. The higher you bid, the higher you will appear.

Equally important is your quality score. Google judges your ad according to relevance, click-through rate, and other factors. High quality ads (ie. ones that satisfy the user) appear much higher at lower costs.

To get a high quality ad you need copy that reflects the search term in the ad, and in the landing page. So a searcher for 'corned beef sandwiches' sees an ad that mentions 'corned beef sandwiches' and when they click on it, the page they end up at says 'corned beef sandwiches'.

You can decide whether you are targeting an exact match: 'corned beef sandwiches' only, a phrase match: 'awesome corned beef sandwiches', or broad match 'traditional sandwiches'.

Each keyphrase needs two ads because you set them up in competition with each other to find out which is the best.

See how it quickly gets complicated? If you have 100 keyphrases you're going to need to manage 200 ads and 100 landing pages. So that's what PPC ad management is all about, setting that up and managing it so you make some money.

Management of the campaign involves watching how the different ads and keyphrases perform both in terms of click through rate but also in terms of conversion and profit, switching off what's not working, turning up and improving what is.

Success might come simply from using a different headline on your landing page. You can test that using split testing, where half your visitors see headline A, the other half see headline B, and you measure the difference. A 20% improvement could be all it takes to take a traffic stream into profit and then you can test again with something even better.

Consequently, you might find profit doesn't fall into your lap straight away, there's a life-cycle to this and it could take weeks or even months to divine where the money is, the whole system has to evolve and sniff out the profits. And when you get there, competitors have systems to see what you're up to. You'll have to defend your position, and you do that with conversion .. basically if you convert better than them they'll run out of budget well before you do.

So managing a PPC campaign isn't just about the ads, it's also about the landing pages and about website conversion. In fact, I tend to advise that .. even though you might make profit with PPC, if you can get yourself an income stream through PPC, I would invest in some serious SEO for those keyphrases so that eventually you can turn off PPC for that phrase. With PPC, you're always paying Google a chunk of your profits. With SEO, traffic comes for free (kinda .. you have to pay me for my time, of course :-) ). So PPC becomes a tester, a way to buy traffic to your site to prove it converts, a way to get traffic in order to improve conversion, and a proof-of-concept before investing in SEO.

PPC is also completely controllable. You can fix a daily budget, ads start in just an hour or so, you can switch them off whenever you like, you can place them wherever you like. So basically, if you've the budget you can have huge traffic today.

Even better, imagine you're an online deli that sells, say a particular kind of goats cheese. If you SEO that and then you change your mind and stock something else or you sell out, that SEO effort is partly wasted. With ads, as soon as you run out of stock you can switch them off. If you're a big warehouse operation that could be automated.

Facebook is a little different in that it doesn't work on search keywords. Whereas Adwords displays in search where people are actively looking for a solution, with Facebook people are just going about their business and the ads are a distraction. Nevertheless, you can be much more targeted about your demographics. With Adwords, you don't know who is typing the search term. With Facebook, you can select by age and sex, by where they live, by their favourite band and .. curiously .. by which company they work for. So if you sell stuff for drummers you can target drummers on Facebook.

You don't have to worry about all that, I'm used to managing PPC campaigns for profit, so why not get in touch and let's see if we can work something out.