This article will explain how PPC can take your business to the next level and beyond by harnessing the marketing power of the internet. PPC stands for pay per click and most savvy businesses use or have used this form of advertising to turbo charge their businesses.
One of the first things in looking at how PPC can take your business to the next level that you should know is how does PPC work. PPC is a paid form of advertising and as the name suggests you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. On the surface this sounds like it could be an expensive exercise but there are several things to keep in mind when considering PPC:
1. When a person types their keywords into the search bar, search engines like Google will give them results of what they are looking for. In addition to this there are also PPC ads on those search pages which are relevant to the keywords that the user has typed in. For example they may have typed in ‘how PPC can take your business to the next level’ and up will pop information on this topic plus ads offering services around this topic. The upshot of this is that the ads will be targetted to what the user is looking for so there is more of a chance of getting willing buyers to click on your PPC ad.
2. You nominate how much you are willing to pay every time that someone clicks on your ad. You could nominate as little as 0.01c or as much as $50 or more. Usually the price is influenced by two things – how much demand there is from advertisers for certain terms and how important it is to be in the first three or four ads of the first page of search results. Put simply with competitive ads you will have to be prepared to pay a lot more per click to get on the first page or your ad may never be seen. The more you are willing to pay the more chance you have of getting on the first page.
3. You can set a daily budget so that you don’t blow your budget! So depending on much it costs for you to get your ad appearing high up on the search results you could have a daily budget from $5 to $1000 plus. This is an important area to monitor as any successful business person will tell you because if you don’t control your budget then instead of learning how PPC can take your business to the next level it could send you broke!
4. Googles Adwords program is the most popular form of PPC advertising. They allow 25 characters for the headline and two lines of 35 characters each. Therefore your message has to be short and to the point which means your ad has to be lazer focused. Â Make sure to enable Google remarketing as it will help you to stalk people online. Â This will help your business grow tons.
5. You can run more than one ad so that you can experiment with different types of wording and headlines to find out which are the most effective in terms of people clicking on your ads and then buying. If you want to know how PPC can take your business to the next level then you must remember that people clicking on your ad isn’t the real measure. The real measure is how many of those people actually become buyers. You may find that an ad gets fewer clicks but it results in more buyers because the ad appeals to people ready to buy rather than appealing to people who are just browsing.
So one of the keys to how PPC can take your business to the next level is the wording of your ads. It is very important that you choose your keywords carefully. These are the words that searchers are most likely to type in to the search engine. Therefore they might type in ‘Houston Spa Pool shops’. If you are in that market then it might be a good idea to include a place name because if you have just ‘spa pool shop’ then someone searching for a spa pool from London may see your ad and click on it but there’s no way they will come to Houston to buy it.
So another lesson is if your business is geographically specific then it’s a good idea to include the location name in your keywords to avoid people from another part of the world clicking on your ad and wasting your budget. If your product or service is not location specific then this will not be a problem for you.
Another important pointer for how PPC can take your business to the next level is to include negative keywords. This means that if searchers type in certain words then your ad will not show. For example ‘free’, ‘discount’, ‘cheap’ or ‘bargain’ may be keywords that you want to avoid. If searches are after cheap or free stuff and you charge a premium then these users will waste your PPC budget so make sure that you use negative keywords.
Another aspect of keywords is the length. Generally the shorter the keyword phrase the more searches it will have. For example the term ‘mens shoes’ gets 1.22 million searchers a month. If we extend the phrase to ‘mens shoe shops’ there are 5400 searches per month and ‘large mens shoes’ returns 8100 searches. The term ‘buy mens shoes online’ has 1900 searches.
Of these three keyword phrases the one most likely to result in a buyer is the third one because it is specific and it has the word ‘buy’ in the phrase. Therefore this leads us to another important point in how PPC can take your business to the next level which is to include the word ‘buy’ in your ad heading if possible because this will help to filter the type of searchers that will click on your ad. Again using our example above you could have ‘Buy Large Mens Shoes’ as your heading. You have the search phrase in the title and you also have ‘buy’ in there to help further filter the searchers so that it is more likely that only buyers will click on your ad. Remember that you want people clicking on your ad who are ready to buy your service or product, not just after some information.
Another good trick to assist you in how PPC can take your business to the next level and convert those clicks to buyers is to make sure that when a searcher is taken to your website they arrive at a landing page that matches their keyword search. So if we use the mens shoes example above, if your ad says ‘Large Mens Shoes” then make sure your landing page says ‘Large Mens Shoes’ and not something like ‘Mens Sports Shoes’. The more targetted your adwords and landing pages are the more likely you are to get a sale.
A simple way for you to be successful in learning how PPC can take your business to the next level is to look at what other companies in your industry are doing with their PPC campaigns. Start by finding out which are the most successful companies because these are the ones who have learnt how PPC can take your business to the next level, and then study their PPC ads, click on them and carefully look at their landing pages. When you are viewing their ads and landing pages look at them as a potential buyer. Ask yourself questions like what caught your eye, what words or phrases encourage you to buy, are the ads and landing pages attractive to the eye and do they draw your attention to the product or service you are looking for. Just by studying what your competitors are doing can provide you with quite a few free tips on how PPC can take your business to the next level.
To conclude this article on how PPC can take your business to the next level if you are ready to test the PPC waters then I recommend that you try Google’s Adwords program first. Google is the most used search engine in the world so your ads will be seen by more eyes than any other search engine like Yahoo! and Bing, Google adwords is easy to use, they provide easy to follow training modules, you only pay for what you ask for, they provide tracking tools so that you can see which ads are working and which are not, in fact the Google Adwords program makes the whole process of learning how PPC can take your business to the next level a very simple process. You do have to do a bit of work to begin with but it will not take you long to get up to speed so I encourage you to give Google Adwords a try so that you will quickly and successfully learn how PPC can take your business to the next level.
