What is PPC?
And how do you maximise your paid search return?
approx 42 minute video
What is Pay-Per-Click?
Nettl Academy PPC Live Event! Session 10
This session is the tenth in a new series of live events from Nettl. This week they’ll explore what Pay-Per-Click(PPC) or paid search is and how you can get maximise your return.
What do we cover about PPC?
If you are looking for a more short term solution to put relevant traffic on your website, paid search or pay-per-click maybe right for you. We’ve put together this free session to help you understand more about it.
We covered hot topics such as:
- What is PPC?;
- Understanding the different options;
- What are adverts?;
- How do you manage your spend?;
Plus the team were on hand to answer questions. Keep an eye out for more live sessions. If you have questions in the meantime contact your local team and we’ll be delighted to help.
Check out the next video in our SEO webinar series
Today we’re going through PPC, which is pay per click marketing. This is a bit different from the original sessions that we usually do on search engine optimisation but it all has the same objective of getting people to your website and getting a lead or conversion.
I’m going to give a bit of an insight into exactly what we do, and how some of it works and how it might benefit you. Some of it will be really relevant to your business, some of it might be a little bit less relevant, and some of it will seem quite self-explanatory. I’ll also be explaining some of the benefits to you as well. We’re going to go through keyword research, how intent affects paid media, what volumes might look like, what keyword types there are, what are negative keywords, what structure do we use, how ad copy might be built and how we have to write it all manually, what an account build might look like, what quality score is, how we use locations to benefit you quite drastically, and then what display marketing and shopping marketing is if you’re e-commerce or you’re looking at doing re-marketing. Then just a little bit about bidding strategies and optimisation.
What is PPC?
What is PPC? Paid ads are PPC, when clients choose to pay to promote their website or content and pay for each click. You’ve probably seen them, they’re normally sponsored posts directly on Google or on social media. Sometimes you’ll see display ads on third-party websites or Google partner websites or you might hear them on audio – so if you don’t pay for Spotify premium or Apple Music premium, you might hear audio ads as well. These are all different ventures which we can manage for you.
What are the benefits of PPC?
What are the benefits to your business? Paid is really great because it’s immediate exposure. Unlike SEO, where we have to wait maybe months for results to start showing for some of the really key terms that you might want to be looking at, with paid we look at keywords and we instantly promote them, and they’re instantly on Google. Depending on how much we pay for those keywords will determine how high up in Google you go, along with a number of other things like quality score which we’ll cover later.
We can get in front of the right people that are searching for your product offering. So if you sell bikes and you want to promote push bikes to clients then people that are going on to Google are looking for your product so we want to be in front of those people immediately so we can get that immediate exposure. They will search for it, they’ll hopefully see your ad, they’ll click on it and hopefully they’ll buy.
We can use paid for brand consideration. So that might be social media or audio. So if we’re looking at doing maybe radio, Spotify – anything like that – then we can really create a nice brand consideration if people have never heard of your brand but are maybe looking for what you’re offering. We can be really specific in terms of audiences and locations. We can target specific age brackets, demographics, gender interests. We can really get down to the nitty gritty. So if you know exactly who your target market is, we can specify that market so we’re only spending money on people that we know are probably going to be interested in it.
Alternatively, if you don’t know what your target market is or you think you know what your target market is and actually there is a new market out there that maybe you haven’t considered, we can see that information within analytics and within ads to say that actually these people in this age bracket and gender are actually clicking on your ads but not converting. So we can do something with that, and it creates different exposure for you, for your business.
Locations, again. If you work as a window fitter and you’ve got a 15 mile radius that you can work within, maybe you only want to just be displaying ads within that 50 mile radius. We can absolutely do that as well so that you’re not traveling 50 miles out of your way, for one job.
We can re-market to non converters. I think we’ve all been there where we’ve gone onto a website, we haven’t purchased, or haven’t bought and then several minutes later, we start seeing advertisements for that on third-party websites or on our Facebook or Instagram accounts for that specific product or a similar product that maybe you haven’t bought. We’ll go into that in more detail in a bit as well.
PPC Glossary
I just wanna cover some of the anagrams that you’ll probably hear me saying stay. CPC is a cost per click, so that’s the amount of money you spend per click. Every time that you create an ad, it goes into what is normally an auction-based system where we bid for positions and bid for keywords. So if you were that window fitter and you decided that you wanted to show for ‘local window fitters’ then you would go in against an auction based system, along with a number of other maybe competitors. Then the person who is willing to spend the most amount on that keyword will normally get the higher positions, although it’s not always worked out just based solely on money as Google wants to stay highly relevant. Impressions is how many times an ad has been viewed. A click through rate is the percentage of people that have seen the ad and then have clicked on it. Return on ad spend, which is probably more focused around e-commerce, is the return on ad spend. So if you’ve spent a pound and you’ve made a pound then your ROAS is 200%.
Keyword research
Searching for keywords. So when we do keyword research, we will look directly at your business and we’ll work with you to understand what kind of keywords that we think we probably want to be bidding for and then we can look at some other alternatives as well. So what we’ve done here is I’ve looked at ‘BMW’ as an example. Along with keyword research, we also get to find out exactly how many search volumes there might be across different locations, and what the cost per click might be depending on what other competitors might be bidding on. Sadly, we can’t see the competitors, but we do understand that maybe the top of page rate might be 48p if it’s at 2:00 AM on a Saturday, however, it might be £1.92 on a Monday evening at 8:00 PM because that’s when people might be most looking at it.
Keyword intent
High intent
This brings us onto intent within keywords – what people might be looking for. High intent keywords might be something like ‘BMW car lease’, they’re not looking necessarily for the car manufacturer or the make, they know that they want BMW and they know they want to lease it therefore it’s a higher intent. What we’ll see here is that there’s a higher CPC, there’s a higher chance of that user converting because when they’ve Googled something and they’re seeing the advert, it’s giving them exactly what they’re looking for. They know what they’re looking for, they’re further down that sales funnel, which normally means they’re ready to take action.
Examples of this might be, ‘BMW one series price’. They might be looking at the make, manufacture, the engine size, color, or a number of other things, or they might be looking for a specific location so, ‘where’s my local dealership?’ These are really high intent keywords.
Low intent
Moving on from that, we obviously have low intent keywords. What we’ll see here is if someone searches ‘BMW’, this is the feedback that Google gives us. When we’re looking at what keywords we might want to start bidding for, the keyword ‘BMW’ is searched for 300 to 1000 times and it tends to have a much lower CPC because not many people will bid on a competitor anyway. BMW might want to bid on this because of their brand, but other competitors might not want to because it’s very broad. What we mean by broad is that we don’t know what they’re looking for. Are they looking for servicing? Are they looking for brochures? Are they looking for specific dealerships? We just don’t know. So we have to be quite careful.
The reason we have to be careful is because if there’s 300 to 1000 searches on that, if we had a click through rate of 5% against that at an average of £1.50 cost per click, that’s quite a lot of clicks that you’re getting through to your website therefore it’s a lot of money that potentially you’re not generating a lot of money out of. This is why we have to be quite careful about what kind of strategy that we want to look at when we’re looking at paid. So is it that we want to be specifically selling something? Are we looking to generate leads? Are we looking for brand exposure? Are we looking for consideration? What is it that we’re actually looking for?
These will have much higher search volumes but they’re all going to have lower conversions and they’re more than likely going to be doing some sort of research or they’re looking for an alternative to the product. So they might be looking for servicing, not necessarily to buy a BMW, but they might be looking to hire one, et cetera.
Other examples of really broad keywords are stuff like new cars, or maybe they’re looking for the difference between BMW and Mercedes. So that’s low intent.
How do we know what people are looking for?
So how do we kind of combat this to know exactly what people are looking for? Because we want to be showing for ‘BMW one series in blue’, but we don’t want to have to go through every single colour. We don’t want to be typing in ‘BMW one series orange’, ‘one series purple’ when people are looking for ‘BMW one series’. We want to cover all bases. So this is where match types come in. So when we’re building our campaign with the keywords, there’s four different uses of the keywords. We have a broad match: there’s no change, it includes all misspellings, synonyms and any related searches. An example here is that the keyword might be ‘women’s hats’, someone could search ‘ladies hats’ and still see your ad, even if the keyword is ‘women’s hats’. They could see ‘ladies cycling helmets’ because it’s related.
Then we move on to broad modified. So a plus in front of each word means that it must include those words but in any order – it doesn’t have to be in that order. So the key word, ‘plus women’s’, ‘plus hats’ can return ‘women’s hats’, ‘red hats’, or ‘baseball hats for women’, et cetera.
Then we have exact: this is exactly what it says on the tin. It has to be one of those words and it has to be in that order. There is no phrase match or anything related to that, it has to be that specific keyword. We normally see a much lesser search volume for that. So if ‘BMW’ is an exact match, we wouldn’t see any alternatives, any models, any services, any other type of word beyond BMW.
Then we have a phrase match which is very close to the broad modified but it can be in an exact order. So it has to be ‘best women’s hats’, ‘women’s hats for sale’, ‘women’s hats in blue’, et cetera. It can’t be ‘hats for women’, it has to be ‘women’s hats’. That’s how we can control which keywords we want to be seen in front of. Not everything necessarily has to be broad modified, but we do tend to use broad modified and exact because we can control it. We’re not limiting what kind of keywords we might be shown for and we’re also not limiting colour or size, or again, if you’re a window fitter and want to fit three by four windows or two by eight windows or whatever it might be, people can search whatever variant they want and still be shown for that keyword.
Negative keywords
Moving on from that is negative keywords. What are negative keywords? We may want to not be shown for certain keywords. An example of this is your selling tins of paint in any colour imaginable, you want all the search terms related to colour without having to list every single colour under the sun as a keyword, however, you don’t want people searching for Dulux or Valspar paint, seeing your adverts. So you might not want to see people searching ‘Dulux colour match’, or ‘Dulux paint in blue’, but you do want to be shown for paint in blue. We can use ‘Dulux’ as a negative keyword to stop people searching for those specific terms seeing your adverts, because what we do tend to see is that when people search for competitor brands and then end up clicking on your advert, they tend to bounce off the website very quickly because they realise that they’ve clicked on that by mistake, because they actually were looking for ‘Dulux’.
We also might want to stop people looking for irrelevant products. So if you sell external bi-fold doors, using broad modifiers so anyone searching for any size sees your ad – very similar to the colour problem. I want people looking for three meter bi-fold doors or four meter or four sliding bi-fold doors, we want all of those people to see our ad but we don’t sell interior bi-fold doors so therefore we probably use the word interior as a negative keyword to stop people seeing that advert, because we’re only looking for external.
Campaign structure
Moving on: structure. Keywords dictate pretty much everything that we do, because we have to make sure that all ads are relevant to all searches. So an example of this and what a campaign structure might look like is the campaign, then the ad group, then the ad copy, then the landing pages. If we had the word ‘BMW one series M sport’, the campaign might be ‘BMW one series’, the ad group might be ‘M sport models’ and the keyword within that might be ‘BMW one series M sport’. The other ad group within that same campaign might be ‘BMW one series generic’ that is just someone who’s searching ‘BMW one series’. What we can do then is really make the ad copy relevant to what the person has searched and the keyword. So the example I’ve put down here is ‘BMW one series M sport’, the ad that I see on Google is ‘BMW one series M sport’. It contains the keyword I’ve searched for, and that has been specifically created so that the ad copy matches the search.
Account build example
Here’s what an example account build might look like, based on all of that information. We can see here that the top list might be the keywords of ‘electric can opener’, ‘can opener’, ‘tin can opener’, ‘electric tin opener’. We want those to go to the exact same landing page because it’s the same thing but just called something different. The campaign would be ‘can opener’, the ad group then splits into ‘can opener’ and ‘tin opener’, and then the ad copy adjusts based on what that person is searching for. So the first four lines that you see there, they’re ‘easy electric can opener’, ‘easy to use card opener’. I basically duplicated that and used the word ‘tin opener’ instead of ‘can opener’ to make sure that the ad copy matches the keyword and we’ve done that all the way through.
Ad copy example
Here’s what an ad copy might look like, an example one that I built a few days ago. We have to manually create all ads, we have to type them all out manually so we have to absolutely understand your business and we have to understand what kind of keywords you might be looking for. All headlines are a 30 character limit so what we would normally do is contain the keyword in the first instance. So headline one would be the keyword, headline two might be ‘trust’, and then headline three might be a call to action. So what is it? Why would I want to click on your advert? I can get in touch today or I can order it today or you’re doing free next day delivery, or you’re doing free orders over orders of 50 pound, get a free gift or whatever it might be.
Descriptions, they’re a little bit longer. They are a 90 character limit and we can have two of them, that’s just explaining a bit more about your business. So where are you, why would you click on it, maybe a bit more about the product that they’ve searched for, et cetera.
Display paths are a little bit less relevant, but they can’t be there. We use the website as the initial display path and then pass one or pass two might be forward slash BMW. Maybe bmw.co.uk forward slash one series forward slash M sport and then that means that they know that they’re getting directed to the correct part of the website.
Then the final URL. There’s no characters and that’s just the landing page we’re sending them through to.
Headlines and descriptions should be relevant keywords. We recommend one responsive search ad and two text ads. A responsive search ad is basically allowing Google to choose between up to 15 different headlines based on what their users look for and it will rotate them depending on the best performance.
Full campaign example
Here’s what it might look like. We’ve got a headline one, headline two, description one, description two, and site link extensions. You can see here that they’ve chosen not to use a headline three. That might not mean that there isn’t one, it might just mean that Google is not showing it at this time depending on what device you’re looking at, what you’ve searched for and whether or not it’s relevant. It’s the same thing for descriptions, it doesn’t always show. Then the site link extensions. I’ll touch on this really quickly: if you are running a brand based campaign, if you’ve already got quite a strong brand, you may want people that are looking for different areas of your website that have just searched BMW to go to be able to find the right place within your website very quickly thus creating a better user experience rather than having to go to the website and then direct themselves around it if they’ve landed on the homepage.
What is a quality score?
Quality score. What is called a quality score? Quality score is the measurement Google used to ensure people continue to use their platform. They don’t want poor ad copy, poor landing pages, or really broad keywords. They want people to keep using their platform and to keep people using their platform every search result has to return a relevant result to what they’ve actually searched in Google. There’s quite a heavy punishment if we don’t do this, as you can see here, if you rank a one out of 10 quality score you have to pay 400% of the recommended cost per click, which doesn’t indicate anything of the auction that you pay. So if the cost per click is a pound for you – that’s what you’re willing to pay – but you have a competitor at two, they will only ever pay a maximum of £1.10, they don’t immediately pay the two. If you’ve got a quality score of one, your four pound bid doesn’t immediately beat their two pound bid. You still pay one pound, but you will pay four pound for every click that you get.
However, to reward you for relevant ad copy for relevant landing page material, they will discount the cost per click by up to 50% on the same premises. So if you are that competitor that you’re paying two and your competitors are only spending one, you will actually only spend one or 50p whereas they may have to spend one pound because cost per click is at the five score.
A really bad example of this is if someone searched holidays to Mexico and then the ad copy says something about gym memberships, and then they still clicked on it and then the landing page is all about flowers, that’s probably not even going to get ranked on number one on the first page of Google. If anybody did find themselves on page three and they clicked you would more than likely be paying the 400% increase.
Location-based ads
So moving on from that, we can be really specific in location-based stuff. So this might be really relevant for quite a lot of people because you may only work within a certain area or maybe you’ve got a static location and you only want to attract people within certain towns or cities, these are really relevant when people are looking on Google. Now, a lot of people will put ‘dealerships near me’ or ‘window fitters near me’ but what you can do rather than just using ‘near me’ is put the specific locations in. The example that I’ve used here is ‘Bristol car dealerships’ and what we’ll see here is used car dealerships in Bristol. So that’s perfect for me, the likelihood of me clicking on that advert is much higher because it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
What that does mean then is that we can really look at narrowing down on your audience size and saying we specifically want to target the people that are interested in my product within this area of a population size of X. What Google will do is give us a good search volume if it’s a large enough area – we can’t do it for villages or towns – we can actually tell you what the average search volume might be in those areas. Therefore you might be able to be a lot more competitive within that location because you’re able to increase your budget within that location, because you’re not advertising to the whole of the country.
However, that does flip it around on its head a little bit. So if you have a population size of 10,000 people at a cost per click of only 15p, but you want to spend a thousand pounds in ad spend, that might be really difficult to do because you don’t have the population size there on a very niche product to be able to get everybody in that area to search Google for your product and we can’t meet the cost per click higher. Sometimes that’s really good but we have to make sure that that expectation is always set. If you look at narrowing down your really niche markets into really specific areas. So though locations can be really good, they can also have a negative effect in terms of the exposure that your brand may require, if we’re looking at spending the money on ads at all.
Display marketing
Re-marketing
That leads nicely onto display marketing. So there’s two different elements of display marketing, there’s audience re-marketing, and then there’s in-market audiences. I think everybody could probably relate to me here, where if you’ve been on the website and you’ve looked at a product but you haven’t bought it, the likelihood of you seeing an advert re-marketing that product, or a similar product to you is very, very high. The way it works is that we can look at your website and analytics and create specific in-market audiences and say, ‘if someone’s hit my website and they’ve put an item in the basket but they haven’t done a checkout, then we can really specifically target only those 1% of my users that have abandoned their baskets’. Or maybe I’m looking at non converters, or maybe they downloaded my brochure, but they never actually got back in touch with me after two weeks.
There’s quite a broad thing that we can do here and we can be really specific about what type of pages they’ve hit. I’m going to use the example of BMW again. If you had someone to look at the one series page but no other page, you could target them with just one series adverts. If they hit the three series page but no other model then you could target them with three series banners. But if they’d been on maybe the one series, the three series, the eight series and they didn’t know which car they were looking for, you could maybe target them with a brochure, a ‘why don’t you come and talk to us?’ advert or ‘why don’t you come and download a few brochures?’ to see whether or not you can entice them further down that channel.
In-market audiences
Then you have in-market audiences. In-market audiences work fairly similar, but they’re not for your specific website. They may have looked at a specific product or they’re doing research on another product or make. An example that I would use here is probably that they say that you are Mercedes but, as a user, I’ve been on BMW’s website but I’ve never been on Mercedes website, Mercedes might look at that and say ‘I want to target people that are specifically interested in cars but don’t already know about my brand, or haven’t been on my website’. What will then happen is that Google will look at cookie information and say, ‘we weren’t going to target all the people that have been looking at cars that haven’t been on this website’, and you’ll start seeing banners and images. You might look at Nikes website and start seeing adverts for Adidas as an example.
You can also reach an audience which fits a specific set of attributes. So, if you want to attract new male customers that have an interest in golf who are over 45 because I sell yachts. So I sell yachts, and I know that I want to target these specific people, because I know that lots of people like that buy my yachts, for example. Alternatively, you could target absolutely everybody. There’s no limit on who you could target. ‘I want everybody to see my brand, I’ve got limitless money and everybody needs to think about my brand because I’ve got such a great product’.
Here’s some examples. You’ll normally see these in all different shapes and sizes, some of them will be animated, some of them won’t be. Google’s really restrictive on what size they can be. These obviously have been quite largely inflated but keep an eye on these, they’ll give you a good example of what kind of things that people are targeting you with or what they think you might be interested in depending on your demographic.
Google Shopping
Shopping, for any of the e-commerce businesses out there, is becoming massive. Especially with the holidays, with Christmas just around the corner. There are so many people now using Google shopping. This was taken from the US statistics website from 2019: ad spend on e-commerce websites went up to 76.4% against text ads and the amount of clicks is absolutely huge for shopping because it’s so much more visual. We don’t actually use keywords to target shopping, which is really nice, it’s all done based on product description. So if you’ve got really good product descriptions, it would likely show you more results. Depending on what website you’ve run, we would either need a manual feed of all the products that you have – which is a bit of a headache – or we can implement a Google shopping API tool from their merchant store and then that just sits in the background and when you’ve got a shoe or a bike that goes out of stock, it will update it so it doesn’t appear on shopping. If you’ve got specific sizes then it will show for specific sizes. If you have a sale then it will update the price, et cetera, et cetera, based on what your website says. Something to really consider if you’re an e-commerce brand. It’s definitely the future and it’s a huge competitor to Amazon at the moment.
Bidding strategies
Automated bidding
Something else we want to talk about is bidding strategies. So I’ll cover this really quickly. The best way of doing this is to talk about the automated versus manual. There are automated bidding strategies such as maximise conversions or maximise return on ad spend if you’re e-commerce. There are huge pros behind doing automated strategies. Google has so much information on its users that it knows pretty much when they’re going to convert, based on how much research they’ve done, how many times they’ve visited websites, how long they’ve been on those websites, how many pages they visited, and they will best guess and put your ad in front of that person when they think they’re going to buy it or when they think they’re going to click on your advert. This is great because it means that we can sort of completely have free reign and just say, ‘Google, you know best, let’s do it your way’. However, it doesn’t always mean you’re going to show up at the top of Google. So, if you end up Googling yourself after starting ads and you don’t show, it’s likely it’s because you’ve not really been looking at many websites that actually sell your products, or it might just be that it knows that you’re not going to click on it. Therefore it’s not going to display it to limit how much wasted spend you’re having, because it only really wants to show to the people that are probably going to buy.
The cons of this automated bidding strategy is that it normally affects the CPCs. If there’s no one there to tell them how much a cost per click should be for every keyword, who is it bidding against? If you’ve got two people that are bidding on an automated bidding strategy, it’s up to Google – who want to make money – to decide how much a cost per click should be. It doesn’t always stick to your cost per acquisition, if that’s a bidding strategy you want to use.
Manual bidding
We can do it manually. There’s a lot more control because we get to decide how much we’re going to pay per click for each keyword. There’s no change without consent. We make all the changes manually so we know exactly how much you’re going to be spending. However, we don’t have all that information that Google does where we know exactly when the best time to display an ad is. If it’s a Monday between the hours of 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM because that’s when people are looking most – we don’t have that information. It takes time to build that information. This is quite a time consuming thing to do but it does mean that the results over time would be better and hopefully cheaper because as we get more and more and more data, we understand more and more and more about where and when to display these ads.
It is slower than automation, especially if you have thousands of keywords. So if you are lucky enough to have a business that only has maybe 50 to 100 keywords, that it’s not too time consuming. If you are a business that has a variation of products – e-commerce is probably the best example – if you have lots of different products and lots of different sizes, you have lots of different keywords, then that’s obviously a lot more time consuming than it would be if you only had 50 to 100.
What kind of optimisation can we do?
So what kind of optimisation can we do? I talk a lot about being able to know when the right time, the right place and what ages and stuff we want to be bidding in front of. So here’s just some examples of how we can control these elements. What we can see here is that there’s a schedule, we get to choose the time of day and the day of the week. We know when our ads best convert, therefore we want to pay more to be in front of these people based on all the historical data. We may look at demographics so we know exactly how old and what gender these people are buying therefore, we want to be displayed in front of these people specifically. We also understand devices and we can also understand location. So for every location that we put in, we can absolutely understand exactly where these people are clicking and we can inflate costs based on that. That doesn’t mean that when we create a nationwide campaign for you, that we put every postcode and every city into Google ads but there is information within analytics that means that we can break it down if you specifically want to push it within a certain area. Or if you were holding an event somewhere, then we could specifically target that location and say, ‘I want to be head and shoulders above any competitor in that location for that time period’. Let’s say it was Bristol for Christmas, because you’re selling a specific product and you had excess stock in that one branch as an example.
Nettl’s PPC packages
This is just a slide showing you guys the PPC packages, if anyone’s interested and you want to have a look at a package. Essentially, the way the packages are built out for pay per click is as the basic, the business, the enterprise and the enterprise plus packages. The key difference between these is the PPC budget. The PPC budget is the actual ad words budget, the money you put to your advertising for Google and the package cost is the Nettl management costs. For example, if you want to just spend 5000 pounds on pay per click, that would cost 550 pounds a month in management. You’d obviously get a lot more leads based on that budget because you’d have more to spend. But if you had a smaller budget, which was 500 pounds, for example, then that would be a basic package at a cost of 250 pounds a month. You can find more information on this on the nettl.com website.
Q&A
Can you stop competitive bidding?
A client of ours is finding a competitor is putting our client’s name in its ad words. When I contacted the competitor, they said that they have some coding in that ad word campaigns that mirrors the search terms someone uses. Is the competitor allowed to do this and can we stop it? Can we stop competitive bidding essentially? Yes and no. You could put in a copyright thing to Google; there are certain trademark restrictions on ads, but there is an automated coding in the ads that you can use as well that mirrors the exact search term. It doesn’t always work out the best. So if someone searched ‘blinds near me’, ‘blinds near me’ would come up on their ad copy and it wouldn’t look the greatest so there’s the reason why sometimes we wouldn’t use that. In order to get back about the competitor bidding, you can’t stop people bidding on it cause otherwise Amazon would advertise on absolutely everything. Obviously people want to go to Amazon, but Amazon themselves could go to Google and say, ‘I don’t want people bidding on my brand or my trademark within Google’. You can file a complaint to Google although I don’t know whether or not you’ll be able to completely stop it. It would be up to Google discretion really.
What is the minimum time for a PPC package?
The minimum time for the PPC package? So that is a three month subscription but say you started on one of the lower packages and you had a certain budget per month, and then you decided you actually wanted to spend more per month because you were seeing a lot of success with pay per click then it would be fine to go up to the next package if you wanted to within that three months. We can get that changed for you.
A lot of customers obviously like to use PPC because you can see quicker results than search engine optimisation sometimes. It might not be a long-term strategy for everyone because ultimately you do have to pay the PPC budget as well as the management costs, but you are more likely to see instant results because you don’t have to spend a lot of time optimising the website over months in order to outrank competitors organically. So there are benefits of both strategies but it is essentially working out what’s right for your business. You might want to test both, or maybe you’ve already tried SEO and you want to look into PPC and see what’s the best for you. Ultimately there’s this value in both though.
How long should you keep a PPC campaign active?
How long do you suggest to keep a PPC campaign active? However long you like, really. I think if you’re going to spend the time setting it up, I would say at least a few months so that you can see the benefits. It isn’t like SEO where we would definitely suggest six months to see good results. With PPC, you could pretty much see the results after a month of it being live. I think one of the things that we definitely have to consider when you’re looking at paid is, is it absolutely worth it? What we don’t want to do is to make it sound like paid will get you instant, great results. It will get you instant results but we may need to tweak certain things. There may be keywords that aren’t worth bidding on that maybe we initially thought were because they were a waste of money and everybody who searches that term isn’t buying from you, but other terms might be more progressive than that. It may mean that we need to figure out a different type of ad copy, or maybe we need to duplicate a specific landing page of your website so it’s all about that specific product. The more we use paid, the more we understand the user journey and we can recommend improvements on how better to convert users because paid, for us, is not necessarily all about just sending you bucket loads of traffic. It’s about making sure that traffic is profitable because you are paying a cost per click.
In the packages, as you need to do optimisation each month, it’s not just the set up and then you leave it there. Each of these packages have different levels of optimisation so if you were spending 5,000 pounds a month, your account would need a lot more optimisation than one that’s spending 500 pounds a month, naturally, to ensure you’ve obviously got the quality score and that you’re targeting the right keywords and the right areas. The package cost is £250 for basic or £300 for business and then the PPC budget is the ad spend. The ad spend is what the customer spends on Google, so the customer should pay that directly from that Google ad account and then the cost of the management is the package cost. So essentially you get two separate invoices: one from Google who the client will pay directly to and then one from Nettl for managing it.