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Pay-per-click advertising campaigns can offer a number of benefits to online businesses:
- Cost Effective
- Compared to other forms of online advertising such as banner adverts, pay-per-click advertising requires very little investment to set up and depending on the nature of your market can prove to be very cost effective, which can make using pay-per-click realistic for any size of business.
- Measurable
- Conversion rates from pay-per-click leads can be measured if a tracking code is added to a site, so you are able to calculate the cost per sale and conversion rate that pay-per-click is giving you. This makes an effective pay-per-click campaign very easy to justify compared to other forms of advertising. You can also monitor click through rates (adverts served vs adverts clicked) to measure the effectiveness of your advertising messages.
- Immediate
- You can set up a campaign immediately with Google and with the space of a few days on Overture. All the major pay-per-click tools also allow you to control your budget and bid levels online, which means that you can easily alter your activity and spend in line with business objectives such as market penetration, sales promotions and catering for seasonal variations.
However pay-per-click advertising can be a highly complex arena, which can present a number of difficulties:
- Intensive management required
- Bidding against competitors, testing strategies and monitoring budgets all require significant management in order to provide the best results.
- Not all clicks are equal
- Making sure that the people who click on your ads are likely to generate a lead or sale is critical to the success of a pay-per-click campaign, and there are a number of pitfalls to watch out for. Bidding on very general key words by an advertiser in a specialist sector of a market may well lead to a high level of click through cost from unlikely customers.
- Targeting the right kind of user in your ad text is also important, as such it often pays to be specific in what you are offering. Finally once a user clicks through to your site, it must actually provide them with a relevant offering, providing a specific landing page and improving the users journey to a lead or sale on your actual site can be of great help here.
- Multiple clicking by competitors
- There is some concern that competitors may spend time clicking on your adverts in order to increase your costs. Google AdWords UK publish a FAQ stating that they use a number of methods to deal with this (likely to including monitoring of IP addresses and monitoring of patterns). They advise using a tracking URL alongside checking your site’s web server log to identify suspicious traffic.
- Overture UK do not detail the measures that they take, however they state that it is a priority for them and they are
likely to use similar software to Google. Whilst it is clear that the major providers are putting security measures in place, it is still possible to assume that you will still receive clicks from your competitors and this will need to be built in to the cost of a campaign.
- How sustainable is it?
- Many other methods of web promotion allow you to achieve sustainable results without investing large sums of money (although hard work & astute decisions are almost certainly required). Pay-per click is very much like advertising in that as soon as you stop investing in it, you will lose any benefits immediately.
To assess whether pay-per-click advertising is suitable for you, read about the major players in the UK pay-per-click market and find out about the web search workshop's PPC management service.
Return to Materials introduction
The top search engines
How the top search tools work together
Options for paid search listings
UK search engines and directories
Partnerships between UK search engines and directories
European search engines and directories
The future of web search tools
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