You are at: Home > Guides > Pay Per Click Guide > Part 1: Benefits

Pay Per Click Advertising Guide Part 1: Benefits | Part 2: Drawbacks | Part 3: Choices | Part 4: Costs

Pay Per Click is both easy and quick to implement. It also has the potential to be an extremely cost effective medium of advertising, but only if approached with eyes wide open. Success with Pay Per Click advertising demands a highly targeted ad campaign and website with careful planning to succeed. Our guide gives a comprehensive overview of Pay Per Click, covering Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adSense.

Part 1: Benefits

Setting Up

The conventional way of getting to the top of search engine results is through Search Engine Optimisation. However, as worthwhile as it is, optimisation work can take months before you see results. With Pay Per Click however, your ads could be running at the top of the likes of Google just minutes after setting up your account.

Pay Per Click provides great flexibility in this respect. For example, if you want to take advantage of a seasonal period, you can use Pay Per Click to advertise for that set time only.

Transparency

The beauty of Pay Per Click is that you can be in complete control of what you are spending and who you are targeting. Generally, you can set a daily or monthly budget which is adjustable at any time. You can allocate differing budgets for your advertised product/service range and even choose to allocate more of your budget at the weekend if you so wish.

Unlike an offline marketing campaign, where you generally have to commit to a period of time, these rules don't apply to Pay Per Click. Here you can pause and restart ads at will. Ad campaign not delivering? No problem, just delete it and try something else.

Targeting

Here is where Pay Per Click comes into its own. There is no other form of advertising online that allows you to be so specific about who you are targeting with your ads. As with Search Engine Optimisation, you're off to a good start already as you know that people actively looking for the products/services you sell are more likely to turn into a sales conversion.

After using free keyword research tools, you can choose specific keyword phrases which your ads will turn up for. You can also add 'negative words' to ensure your ads don't show up for certain keyword combinations such as "free," "discount" or "cheap". This means anyone who clicks onto your ad should be genuinely interested in what you provide.

There is also scope to be highly targeted geographically. The internet may be about opening up a worldwide market, but what happens if you only deliver within a local region? With Pay Per Click, you can decide exactly who to advertise to, right down to a radius from your postcode! This makes Pay Per Click a very cost effect way of advertising. By only targeting people who are after a local service, they're more likely to buy from you.

Measurable

One problem with many forms of advertising is that it can be hard to measure how successful a campaign is, but not so with Pay Per Click.

Your adverts' ranking on search engines is decided by a few factors that include:

		Bidding Amount As you would expect, the more you bid, the higher your advert will rank. However, don't believe this is the only factor to consider!
		Quality Score or Quality Index This factor is very important, as it has a big impact on where you rank, even if you are the highest bidder. The 'quality' is determined by the relevance of the ad text to the keywords you want to show up for. You should introduce keywords into your ad text.
		Ad Performance Historical data is looked at to determine your ranking too. If you have a high Click Through Rate, then it shows your ad is relevant. Small details like the success of your display url (the web link the user sees in your ad) is also a factor.
		Landing Page It's important your website's landing page reflects the content of the ad and also loads quickly. Search engines place relevance as a priority, and it makes sense. Try to have a landing page highly targeted for that ad, it will improve your chances of a sale.

These factors provide clues to why your ads might have a poor Click Through Rate (the amount of people who have clicked on your ads after typing in a keyword phrase you have selected). By using tracking software or specific landing pages, you can see how many people go on to purchasing from you after clicking on one of your ads.

You can easily compare ad performance with others. When looking at Click Through Rates and Average Cost per Click, you can ditch certain keywords and ads if your budget is best allocated to better performing alternatives.