How does Adwords work?
A company creates a Google Adwords account (£5 registrations fee) and from that point on is free to create up multiple Adwords campaigns. Campaigns are just a useful way of grouping ads together to save on admin: two Ads running from the same campaign can run off the same group of keywords, with Google displaying the more popular Ad more often, so you can test different text in the same market.
Adwords, keywords and Cost Per Click
Google sets a Cost Per Click (CPC) for each keyword. For example, a niche keyword like Light Beech MFC might cost £0.10. If a searcher enters Light Beech MFC, every Ad who has selected Light Beech MFC as a keyword gets displayed on the right hand side and the top of the SERP, as well as Ads which Google thinks might be relevant to that search. The order in which they are displayed depends on how much they set their maximum CPC to, relevance and quality score (score from 0-10, based on a couple of variables). Therefore, if 100 people have all bid the same as you but your ad doesn't seem as relevant, you'll be at the bottom on page 10. You only pay the money when someone clicks on your ad. You can set your own CPC per keyword and you can decide how much to spend each day using a daily budgets per Campaign.
Click Through Rate on Adwords
Of course, what you don't want is an Ad that loads of people click on, costing you money, when it doesn't generate business. Let's say you write an ad that says "Free Video Conferencing software, click here". You'll pay Google for the clicks, but you'll get no business because once they get to your website, they'll realise there's no free software (and anyway "Free" is not a word normally allowed by Google unless the website confirms the product is actually free, within a couple of clicks of the landing page).
Targeting the right customers in Adwords
You need to make sure that the people who click on your Ad are genuinely interested in your product and are actual potential customers. Then, when they click through to the site (you can send them to any page you like), you need to make sure that the text on the site is appropriately written to convince them to buy. So it's necessary to regularly review all the data surrounding the Adwords campaign, find out what people searched on before clicking on the Ad, which ones stayed on the site and for how long, and so on. Then we can see at what point in the process the campaign is weak and improve it accordingly. This ensures that the PPC campaign is getting a decent ROI.
Unproductive Adwords Clicks
Word of warning: Google is a very successful business, and runs Adwords to make money. Nothing wrong with that. But it will encourage you to add lots of keywords and set a high CPC and a high daily rate. It doesn't have to care about the actual business you get, that's your problem.
Google sets a Cost Per Click (CPC) for each keyword. For example, a niche keyword like Light Beech MFC might cost £0.10. If a searcher enters Light Beech MFC, every Ad who has selected Light Beech MFC as a keyword gets displayed on the right hand side and the top of the SERP, as well as Ads which Google thinks might be relevant to that search. The order in which they are displayed depends on how much they set their maximum CPC to, relevance and quality score (score from 0-10, based on a couple of variables). Therefore, if 100 people have all bid the same as you but your ad doesn't seem as relevant, you'll be at the bottom on page 10. You only pay the money when someone clicks on your ad. You can set your own CPC per keyword and you can decide how much to spend each day using a daily budgets per Campaign.
Click Through Rate on Adwords
Of course, what you don't want is an Ad that loads of people click on, costing you money, when it doesn't generate business. Let's say you write an ad that says "Free Video Conferencing software, click here". You'll pay Google for the clicks, but you'll get no business because once they get to your website, they'll realise there's no free software (and anyway "Free" is not a word normally allowed by Google unless the website confirms the product is actually free, within a couple of clicks of the landing page).
Targeting the right customers in Adwords
You need to make sure that the people who click on your Ad are genuinely interested in your product and are actual potential customers. Then, when they click through to the site (you can send them to any page you like), you need to make sure that the text on the site is appropriately written to convince them to buy. So it's necessary to regularly review all the data surrounding the Adwords campaign, find out what people searched on before clicking on the Ad, which ones stayed on the site and for how long, and so on. Then we can see at what point in the process the campaign is weak and improve it accordingly. This ensures that the PPC campaign is getting a decent ROI.
Unproductive Adwords Clicks
Word of warning: Google is a very successful business, and runs Adwords to make money. Nothing wrong with that. But it will encourage you to add lots of keywords and set a high CPC and a high daily rate. It doesn't have to care about the actual business you get, that's your problem.
Monthly charges
A lot of PPC companies charge as a percentage of your monthly spend, which, again, is because they are businesses out to make money i.e. the more clicks you get, the more money they get. That's not in your best interests, because you'll end up with ads along the "free software" lines and no business. That's why we charge a monthly figure instead: you get a setup period (writing the Ads, designing the reports and creating the accounts) followed by a monthly time period to analyse the data, write the reports and make changes to the Ads based on the data. It's in our interests to keep the spend low and the converted sales up, not the other way around.
For more information or advice about how Lab Lateral can improve, manage and develop a bespoke Pay per Click (PPC) campaign, contact our Surrey based Online Marketing team on 01483 60 80 60.
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