The main advantage of PPC advertising is that you can expect clicks and traffic from adverts almost immediately.
- Your image or text ads can be displayed to customers across the internet, targeted to certain demographics or geographic locations for a certain specified cost per click (CPC).
- As well as advertising on the Google search pages, you can also advertise on the ‘content network’ consisting of thousands of websites with Google advertising banners and text adverts.
- Microsoft’s Bing also have advertising platforms ready to be used by businesses to display adverts in the ‘sponsored ads’ section of search results, and on their ‘content networks’ of affiliate sites.
You pay for every click through to your website, the cost of each click can vary drastically depending on multiple factors, including how many times the advert appears before being clicked (impressions), the relevance of the advert text, the relevance of the page that the advert takes the user to and many more factors.
Regarding Adwords – its quite easy for you to create a free Google account, you can top up with as much “credit” as you want via card payment. You can create some adverts for your services, choose they keywords you want your adverts to appear for, and choose the top “bid” you are prepared to pay for each click on your adverts.
- In areas of the country with less competition between competitors advertising, you can get per click costs from around 10p, so if you are one of the first few companies advertising within your local area (and you have a good/high converting website) you’ll find it a high ROI marketing channel.
- Whereas if you’re in a highly competitive area of the country, you can be paying several £s for every click.
- And If you’re ads aren’t setup well, with compelling sales copy convincing users to click your advert, you will end up paying even more for each click.
- Then, when visitors click your adverts and follow the links to your website – if your website “landing page” isnt setup to convince and convert those visitors into customers, you’re advertising investment is far less efficient.
Common small businesses PPC issues
The common problem causing low ROI on small business adwords campaigns, originates from the account and ads not being setup properly. You can end up paying a lot more for every click than your competitors – due to the “quality score” algorithm which decides if your adverts are of “low relevance” – if your adverts link to pages on your website that are “low relevance” you will end up paying much more than your competitors, who are advertising with properly optimised adwords accounts & websites.
PPC Advertising Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Easy to setup an account and create your first ads and get going
- Instantly turn on/off a revenue stream when you need
- Pay in instalments to top up your credit
- Target keywords that your website doesn’t rank-for in the main “Organic results” to make sure your website has visibility for all the services you offer.
Cons
- Easy to get started – means you can spend a fortune on poorly setup adverts
- Adwords is a very complex tool, and some of the default settings are not optimal.
- 3 dominant companies within a region can try to outbid each other and push up the prices for everyone, limiting your adverts from appearing in the top 3 sponsored slots, and pushing your ads into the right hand sidebar, unless you’re prepared to raise your bids.
- If you leave your adverts running without monitoring and adjusting bids, or removing low performing keywords, as your competitors adapt, your account’s and individual advert’s “quality score” will drop, causing all your costs per click to rise.
PPC Advertising setup costs
| Type | Cost | Details |
| PPC campaign activation on Google & Bing | £99.00 | 20 different adverts created on both search engines |
| Monthly Click Costs | from £20+ pm | Topup credit to pay for clicks – DDebit to Google&Bing |
| Monthly management costs | 10% of your budget | Up to budgets of £499 p/m |
| Monthly management costs | 7.5% of your budget | Budgets of £500 p/m – £1499 p/m |
| Monthly management costs | 5% of your budget | Budgets of £1500 p/m + |
- Performance monitoring and weekly CTR analysis
- No contract & no cancellation charges
Small business website marketing guide
- Word of mouth / networking
Tell friends, family, colleagues past customers and more about your website - Search engine optimisation
Climb higher in the search results to increase visitors - Social Media Marketing
Interact with customers to increase awareness and interest - Pay per click advertising
Display ads across the web & only pay for clicks to your site - Email marketing
Collect email addresses from customers and website subscriptions then send them targeted messages
