pay per click
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing, often referred to as "paid inclusion" is when you actually pay for a visitor to come to your website. (As opposed to 'natural' or 'organic' traffic that you get by getting naturally high rankings in search engines.) The best way to explain the difference is to look at Google. When you do a google search, the list of sites that come up on the left are the natural results. You can't buy your way into that list because Google wants to make sure that users find the most relevant sites based on their search. However, the ads on the right are all PPC ads. So when you click on one of those ads, you're costing that company a certain amount (we'll get back to that subject in a minute).
PPC v. Organic Traffic
Of course you'd rather show up in the natural search results because those carry more credibility (since you can't buy your spot there), and of course, because there is no cost to be there. However, there are only ever ten results on that first page. And let's be realistic: it's pretty tough to beat out every other competitor in the world and end up on that first page. Getting onto that first page is nothing that ANYONE can guarantee you. Google keeps the secrets of how it's search algorithms work very secret, so no one truly knows what does or doesn't get you listed higher (that said, there is clearly a ton of research that has been done on the subject and SEO companies have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't make a difference, but the truth is, no one knows for sure.) It's important to know that there is no silver bullet that gets you in a top position. It's a complex combination of your site, the other sites you compete against, and the structure and wording of the phrase the user search for. And really, some of the factors considered aren't even totally within your power to influence. For instance, Google looks at how popular your site is relative to other sites as one of their criteria. The rationale is that a more popular site (by number of daily visits) probably has better content than a site with little traffic. So if you sell Ipods, that means you've got to go up against apple.com, ebay.com, amazon.com, etc., which clearly have more traffic than the vast majority of sites out there. This is the tip of the iceberg. The number of things that factor into natural rankings is mind-boggling. The take-home message though is that while natural search engine placement is great (because it's free if you get good rankings), it's not reliable because you can't be guaranteed a top place, and even if you get one, it changes all the time, so it's a never-ending battle to stay on top.
Which brings us back to the subject of this page: PPC. If you're not one of the very lucky few who
can get top placement naturally, the main alternative is to buy your way into the spotlight. It works by
selecting series of keyword phrases that you want to target, and then creating very short ads for those
keyword phrases. When a user searches for your keywords, he sees your ad (that part is free). If he clicks
on your ad, he goes to your site, and you pay a small fee for the referral.
The amount you pay per click depends on a lot of factors. It's a little bit like an auction in that you specify the maximum amount you're willing to spend on a click, but you're only charged as much as necessary to beat out the other advertisers in the space. Let's say you're willing to pay $1.00 per click and there is only one other person going after the keywords, and he's willing to pay $.45. If the user clicks on your site, you'd be charged $.50 instead of your full dollar (note: this is oversimplified, but you get the idea. The algorithms for figuring exact costs per click are much more complex.)
Because sites like Google can probably send you much more traffic than you could handle, you can specify a maximum daily amount and then Google, based on their estimate of how many clicks you would get, will spread out your budget over the course of the day so that you don't blow through your budget between midnight and 1am.
Pay Per Click: Fast and Instantly Scalable
The beauty of PPC is that it's very quick. You can have it up in running in minutes and a website that was launched yesterday can have 200 daily users the next day. (With natural placement, it can take 2-12 months to see results). Also, PPC is very controllable. If you get too many leads, you can simply scale back your spending. And if you don't get enough, you can increase the spending, and the affects are almost immediately obvious. And because you are being billed for the exact number of users you get, you can control and estimate costs down to the dollar. The downside of it is that it's a variable cost that scales proportionally as you increase traffic. If you want more traffic, you have to increase your budget (or lower your price per click, which can have negative results, but again, we'll come back to that subject in a minute).
A Pay Per Click Case Study
Let's look at a typical scenario for a lot of our clients: let's say you've got $2000 to spend to drive traffic to your site. Do you put that $2K into search engine optimization and go after the natural placement? If you do, and you're successful, then you can get unlimited traffic for no additional cost. And your traffic will keep growing over time without spending money on each user that you bring to your site. But if it doesn't get the results you wanted (remember, there are no guarantees when it comes to natural placement because of all the outside factors involved), then you've put a lot of money into a strategy that doesn't realize a return on the investment. Where as, if you had spend that $2K buying traffic, you would know from the beginning roughly how much traffic you would end up buying for that $2K, so you'd be sure that you were going to get traffic to your site. The problem is that once that $2K dries up, so does your traffic. So you need to keep feeding it if you want to maintain your traffic. Tough call, isn't it? It's something every website owner struggles with. We'll certainly help you through this process and advise you. What you should do has a lot to do with the industry you're in (ie, if you're selling iPods, we'd advise more PPC spending since it's nearly impossible to steal traffic away from the big boys since they are so established, whereas if you are selling a service locally, we'd be more inclined to go with natural placement because we'd stand a much better chance of getting you top placement since your competition is so much less.) We usually end up recommending a combination of the two strategies so that all your eggs aren't in one basket. Buy the traffic using PPC to get up and running with substantial traffic from day one, but at the same time, keep a consistent SEO effort going to take advantage of the free traffic you can get with natural placement. Where you fall in the gradient of that mix is something that we determine after consulting with you in depth and evaluating things like your risk tolerance, your budget, your expectations, what others in your industry are doing, what keyword phrases would cost, etc., etc.
PPC is like Chess. Minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master.
That's a lot to consider, and really, we've not even scratched the surface of all the factors. That's why Taoti does offer both SEO and PPC campaign servers on an ongoing basis. When it comes to PPC, it's true that you can go to Google yourself, create an account, and run your own campaign. So why hire Taoti to do that for you? Well, most website owners don't understand the complexities of dealing with keyword phrases, ads, and budget. If you don't know what you're doing, you can end up spending way too much money per click, or worse yet, going after the wrong keyword phrases all together. Also, when it comes to PPC, because you pay for every user, the goal is not to see how much traffic you can drive. The goal is to maximize the value of the campaign by making sure that the users you buy are pre-qualified (so the ad that they respond to is absolutely critical in how much bang for your buck that you get.)
Our Pay Per Click Methodology
We start by researching the keywords that make sense for your industry. But again, we don't just want to buy keyword clicks because they're in your industry. We try to narrow them down so that we're only buying the creme de le creme of the users in terms of qualification. For example, let's say you're a plastic surgeon. Sure, we could go out and buy "face lift surgeon" but really, that's not the best use of your marketing dollar. Instead, we'd try to figure out your 'hook.' Are you cheap? High end? Experienced? Whatever your best attributes are from a business point of view, we'd try to work those in so that we get rid of users who may not be the best potential customers for you. We also do some research as to what keywords are being searched the most so that we know where to focus our phrases. One of the biggest misconceptions of PPC marketing is that you need thousands of keyword phrases so you cover all aspects. We disagree. Fewer phrases that are more accurately targeted will get you more ultimate business per dollar spent. Once we know the keywords to go after, we work on the ads. This is our point of greatest qualification. Going back to our plastic surgeon example, we'd localize the ad to get rid of anyone that isn't local since they're not really great candidates. After all, you don't want to spend money just for someone who wants to use your site for research half way across the country since they'll never walk into your office. So the ad has everything to do with how effective the campaign is to your bottom line. If you make the ad 'too loose', you'll end up spending money on users that have no intention of buying from you. But if you make it too tight, you won't get the volume you're looking for. We get a lot of clients who think we should use 'cheap' or 'free' in the ad somewhere because it attracts the most traffic. And that's true. But if you aren't really cheap or aren't offering anything for free, then all you've done is wasted money bringing users to your site that won't end up actually buying. So what's the point? (Another big misconception is that the goal is to increase traffic. Nonsense. In most cases, you don't want traffic for the sake of having traffic. You want more leads or sales, and just flooding the site with random users isn't the most effective way to go about that. You need to make sure that you get the RIGHT users to your site and that your site does a good job of converting them (conversions are explained elsewhere on this site and are probably the biggest thing that web site owners neglect. Half of the time when our clients say they want more traffic, we end up convincing them that it's not the traffic that is their problem--it's the fact that their site isn't converting the traffic that it already has. Anyway...) So having the right users come to your site is critical. If you mislead them by having the wrong keywords or ad, then you'll just be wasting money. And while you can brag about your increased traffic stats at the coffee shop, it won't be helping your bottom line. The next thing to factor in is the cost per click that you're willing to spend. This is another critical variable. Here's a free tip: it doesn't make sense to spend top dollar to get the top spot on every search result. That said, you don't always want to be at the bottom of the list either. It's important to do some search research here to find out what others are paying. We can adjust the amount per click for each individual or group of keywords, so there is a lot of work to do here in terms of figuring out which keywords you need to pay more for to compete in the right places. Note: everyone wants to know "how much does it cost per click?" There is no set answer to that. It's a function of all these other variables that we've mentioned. But to put you in the right mind set, typical costs per click range from $.25 to $2.00. They can be less and much more. Highly competitive areas (such as online gaming) can run into the $7.00 per click range. If forced to pick a number, $.85 would be a fair average, but again, it would just really depend on all these factors.
PPC isn't sounding so simple anymore, is it? ;-)
PPC Management Services
At face value, it is very simple and anyone can do it. But to get the most out of your campaign, you may prefer to leave your campaign specifics to us. We can handle all of the above for you and you can wash your hands of the process and research completely and just enjoy the benefit. For this, our fees range between a quarter and a third of your monthly budget (depending on the complexity of your campaign). If you're not sure that it's worth it, we can provide references who will attest to the fact that we cut their budget, still had room for our fees, and increased their traffic by as much as 300%, all just by refining their campaign and doing it better than they were doing themselves. It usually takes no time at all for our services to pay for themselves when it comes to managing PPC campaigns. And we've never had a single client drop us from managing their PPC campaign to do it on their own.
We do have a $300/mo minimum budget (that includes our fee) and a 6 month minimum commitment (since most of the work is loaded in setting up the campaign). Most of our clients start out at $500/mo (which is a good starting figure with which to work).
Big Mistake: We hear this all the time: "Let's leave the site up for a while and wait for it to generate revenue, and THEN we'll put some money into marketing." If business worked this way, everyone would succeed. It's just not the way it works. You need to invest in marketing FIRST to drive traffic to your site so that you can generate the business. If your plan is to put up a site and just sit back and hope someone finds it, you need to re-think your plan. There are literally billions of websites out there. You need to do something to actively market it. SEO and PPC are certainly not the only methods, but you need to do SOMETHING active. With over 600 clients, we see time and time again that our clients who actively market their sites are fare more successful than the ones who don't. We're not going to put up a track record of our clients' successes and failures for obvious reasons, but the trends we see from our vantage point are very clear: you need to market first if you want to generate revenue. Without marketing, the odds of 'making it' are very low.
Getting Started with your Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign
If we've piqued your interests, we'd love to chat with you in more detail about your specific situation and how we could help market your site! Click here to contact us.
Some 30-40% of search clicks come via Pay Per Click (PPC) ads often costing as little as $0.10 per click.
(Source: iProspect, Search Engine User Attitudes)
Taoti manages Pay Per Click campaigns on the following networks:
