Risk and Reward of Dominating PPC

Many of you will be aware of the fact that PPC (Pay-Per-Click) can be a risky game. The idea of paying every time someone clicks on your website can be pretty frightening thought for a lot of business. But what if I told you PPC could dramatically increase your conversions.

But let’s just hold on one second, PPC isn’t about just throwing money at clicks and hoping that some of it pays off. From speaking to a few of our own clients I think there’s a common miss conception that PPC is used as a quick fix. Generally the people who think like this will be the ones who spend their £1,000 budget in a day and say ‘things just got out of hand’. Businesses can successfully run a PPC campaign for many years with a strong return on investment. It’s all about how you manage it.

There’s no two ways about it, using ads can give you great prominence on a search engine results page. This is an example of a strong search page presence.

You can see that Graphic Air have a text ad and 5/8 of the Google shopping ads. Getting that kind of coverage takes time and a good structure.

It goes without saying that the more adverts you have then the more chance you’ll have of someone clicking on your ads. The top 3 paid ad spots get 41% of the clicks on the page. If you haven’t got an ad in the top 3 then that’s a large percentage you’re missing out on.

If you have a large presence on a search results page then you can be associated as being a ‘big player’. What I mean by this is if you are appearing more often than other competitors then consumers are more likely to trust you. They will see you as a trustworthy provider.

Continuing with the idea of being a ‘big player’ even if people don’t click on your ads, by having a big presence people may see your domain name, brand name or company name and go to you direct. I believe that people can get very bogged down with the numbers on a report with PPC. Conversion value and cost per conversion are both really important figures when it comes to PPC but you have to think of the big picture. Pay-Per-Click is a form of marketing not just numbers on a report.

Let me show you what I mean…

This is a conversion path length for one of our clients. You follow the flow of how people first found a product to eventually buying it. Look at how many paths started with Paid search (PPC). None of them finished with paid search so when you read your reports and see few conversions from Pay-Per-Click you shouldn’t always panic. You take away PPC or reduce your spend and that can have a huge effect on your natural sales.

I’m not going to beat around the bush on this… It’s expensive. The money can just fly away. ROI (Return on investment) is a very important figure when it comes to PPC and despite creating a presence you do still need to be making a profit at the end of the day. For ecommerce businesses you need to be selling more than what you’re spending. For service businesses you need to be generating enough business to justify you’re spend… Basic stuff.

People who fall when it comes to PPC don’t really give it the time and dedication it deserves. It’s easy just to whack a load of ads up, give them all the same bid and a bunch of keywords and just let it roll. You won’t make money from doing this.

When you invest heavily into PPC, you also need to invest the time into PPC or it’s never going to work. There are many different ways to manage your PPC but my friends that is for another story.

Learn more about using PPC for your business through our site or if you would like to contact us directly please don’t hesitate.