Pay-per-click adverts are those that appear on the right-hand-side of the Google (and Bing etc) search results. You come up with your ads, point them to a page on your website, and say how much you’re prepared to pay “per click” – the system shows them for free.

Sounds simple, but there are many devils in the detail and much that can trip up a nascent campaign. You need to know what people are likely to type in for your products; what you DON’T want your ads to show for (“free”, “cheap”, “scam” etc); you need to be sure your website does its job (nice big visible form, reiteration of a value proposal). I could go on, but that’s what we’re here for – to cut through the noise and help our clients to conduct effective PPC campaigns.

Why you should allocate a big enough budget for pay-per-click
However, one thing that can trip up a campaign is the amount of money the client wants to spend. Look at it this way: We’d never advocate just coming up with 10 likely key phrases, banging out an ad or two and sending the traffic to your home page. You need well-researched and pitched key terms, lots of ’em, ads that are segmented to your customer groups, and special “landing pages” that allow potential clients to find what they want quickly. All of this costs money, takes time, and is totally essential for success.

So you’ve got a campaign all set up and ready to go. Guess what? You’ll probably find that only one or two niches are driving 80% of your leads. So what happens next? We re-jig the campaign to further divide and conquer within those niches. You get more and better leads and the price drops. The campaign becomes viable.

There’s only one way to find out what works
If all this sounds like double Dutch, that’s fine – we do this for a living and can explain how this often supremely cost-effective method of advertising works when we speak with you. But here’s the rub – if you don’t allow enough money to be spent in order to find those niches, we never get the intelligence we need to make a new campaign start to work. Spending a few thousand on an online advertising campaign may sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever bought a page in a magazine to get 5 leads, you’ll know you have to punt to get the returns. Thing is, with PPC, the last dollar is much more likely to be delivering the goods for you than first.

Or to put it another way, you’ve got to jump in to see how warm the water is. If you stand on the side occasionally dipping your toe in, you’ll never really know and your campaign will suffer accordingly through lack of real data.

PPC advertising isn’t for everyone. But if you feel some well-positioned ads in Google are worth doing, whether you decide to grab an idiot’s guide and have a bash yourself or feel it’s important enough to hand it over to professionals, do realise that web pages aren’t a “build and they will come” phenomenon, and that only through spending can you make the initial findings necessary to get online advertising working for you.

Industry knowledge is itself a valuable commodity
It’s a rollercoaster, but in the end you’ll have a campaign that is either generating leads for you (as is normally the case) or you’ll know for sure that PPC isn’t for your business. The good thing is that if the latter is the case, and you’ve used professionals to conduct your campaign for you, at least you know your competitors will likely be failing too and so have gained some solid market knowledge for your efforts. Nothing worse than the niggling feeling you’re the last to the party, especially in business.