Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is the process of placing ads based on your keywords. You bid against other ads for your keywords which determines the cost of each "click". Every time a user clicks on your ad, the cost of the click is deducted from your ad budget, thus the term pay-per-click.

PPC campaigns, because of their very nature, are much more expensive but also provide the fastest results.

A good campaign looks at which organic search terms are doing well. If you are receiving good traffic for an organic search term, then there's no need to run a PPC campagin for that term. If however, your term is NOT drawing traffic, than that search term is a good candidate for PPC ads.

PPC advertising can be used in two different ways, Preliminary Testing and Ad Campaigns.

Testing for New Sites

Preliminary Testing enables you to get traffic quickly to a new website, test the effectiveness, and get an idea of its conversion rates. It's valuable in helping to determine whether your site is appealing to your intended audience and whether users are converting. Allow 2 - 3 months for the ads to run and tweak them based on your results. Once you're satisfied with the results, you can move into your Organic SEO campaign.

• Perform keyword research.
• Allow a budget of $3,000 - $5,000 ($1,000 just for your click-thru budgets) in order to get a fair test of your keywords. Your overall budget will be determined by the number of keywords you wish to test.
• Allow testing campaign to run for 2 - 3 months.
• Set realistic goals, the testing phase is not about making a profit but testing user interactions and conversions.  Conversions are defined as online sales, feedback and contact me forms or other requests for information, newsletter and email subscriptions and phone calls.
• Plan to revise your site based on the results of your testing.
• Move into your Organic SEO campaign.

Campaigns for Established Sites

Ad Campaigns

There are many Pay-Per-Click services but Google Adwords and Yahoo!Search Marketing (formerly Overture) are by far the industry leaders and drive 98% of the PPC traffic.

We recommend a budget of at least $1,000/month just for your Google and Yahoo click-thru budgets.

It is important to determine your goal for your PPC campaign and set realistic expectations. If your goal is to creative brand awareness, then your results will be quite different than a campaign designed to drive buyers to an e-commerce site.

Landing Pages
The importance of targeted landing pages if frequently underestimated. A landing page is the page that your PPC ad links to. You should not link your PPC ad campaigns directly to your website for two reasons.

The first being that we want the landing page to support the message of the ad , not the message of your website. Your website has many navigation links and many pages all with their own message. Your landing page must be focused on only one message. Many studies support this methodology and find that the conversion rates of the users who go to focused landing pages are much higher than just sending users to your website.

The second reason for landing pages it to track the effectiveness of the ad campaigns. Since only the ads link to the landing pages, the tracking results are a very clear indication of how your ad is performing.

Our Process

• We use the results from the keyword research and review your organic rankings and select the keywords to use for your PPC campaign.
• Once the keywords are selected, we write the ads for the campaign. A single keyword/phrase is used for each ad.
• We design specific landing pages for each ad that support the message of the ad and provide a very clear action path for the user.
• We monitor your ads weekly and provide a monthly report detailing ad activity and your final ROI.