In the fight to get traffic to a website, many (including myself) have turned to Pay Per Click (PPC) for an instant and effective way of getting more web visitors….

It is so easy to do…you create a little ad with some guidelines you heard from a guy down the pub… then you set your budget by taking into consideration the traffic you want and the amount of conversions you will get and the amount of money it will bring into your business.

Exciting times!

Well not for me when I first started using PPC…or for some of the businesses that I have spoken to. I got my money taken from King Google but I didn’t take any extra cash from any new clients.

A new client of mine shared a story where he was seduced by the convincing patter of an SEO dude to part with £3,000k for a month’s adwords campaign. The problem was that he was in a position where he needed new clients… but he also had outstanding bills. He was pulled into the promise of high traffic and a high return of investment where he could satisfy his bills and make an additional £5k…. You know what’s coming right?...

The bills didn’t get paid…

And he didn’t even get his £3k back. The risk wasn’t worth taking, he got high traffic but it proved that it was the wrong type of traffic and he didn’t get a return on investment (ROI) and it nearly killed his business.

For a long time now I have not advocated the use of PPC unless you can prove that you can get a ROI

So being the curious type I stuck my head out of the bunker and started to ask the experts on PPC what could be done to ensure we do get the magic ROI. So I turned to two great ladies that I know and asked them to share their thoughts

Liz Garvey from Google Adwords Authorised Reseller - ReachLocal says:

“I understand that it is now harder and harder to increase your presence on the natural listings since Google launched their new product ‘Google caffeine’ which not only now looks at your website for relevance but looks at everything you have online from Blogs, Twitter and Facebook to News Feeds and Reviews.

However, what I also understand is paying for clicks to your website is not necessarily a good way of bringing in customers to your business. What use is knowing which keywords are bringing traffic to your site if you don’t get business from it.

That is why I concentrate on keywords that are actually generating calls to your business and generating new business.”

Wow! That sounds like powerful stuff

Liz went on to say…

“It is important to remember that Google AdWords clickers are different to Google Organic Search Result clickers as they are generally at a different stage of the consumer decision making process. In many cases, users who click on the organic search results are more likely to be in the research or ‘interest’ stage of the buying process, whereas users who click on sponsored links (like Google AdWords), are more likely to be purchase ready customers.  

Who wants 1000 people in their store that aren’t buying when you could have 50 people in the store and half of those do buy. Knowing which keywords generate calls is key to optimising your budget and analysing the exact return on investment.”

Liz then shows me a funky piece of technology that actually monitors the keywords that generate business and automatically changes the budget and price per click to suit the needs of the campaign.

I can certainly see how this innovation could help provide you with a return on investment as it ignores the adwords that costs you money and doesn’t produce a call and weights the ads that are most successful.

Good job Liz and ReachLocal :) 

Not being content with being curious I also sceptical… Surely it cant be as easy as what Liz suggests. There must be a right way and a wrong way of doing things. What is the magic formula or what are the strategies of top adwords campaigns? There was only one thing I needed to do and that was to ask the awesome June Cory

June Cory of My Mustard (Google Certified Partner) is not what you would call a typical Adwords master. She brings this stuff to life and, dare I say it makes it fun!

June says:

“Google AdWords greatest attribute is it's accessibility - you need a website, a credit card, a fiver and you're away - but sadly this is also it's greatest downfall.

Why would anyone need help, its easy isn't it?' Hmm...running with that philosophy we'd all be mending our own car and cutting our own hair. It is ever changing, time consuming, potentially costly & labour intensive.

In the four years since I set up my AdWords agency I have met dozens of people who think it doesn't work because they got no response, or spent too much money or just didn't understand what they were doing.

1. Be very specific about who you want to attract; what are they searching for, where are they based and what will be the average conversion value be?
2. Assess the market size and the cost per click by using the Google keyword tool.
3. Get your landing page ready for these people; what do you want them to do when they get to your site, it must be easy for them to engage (download, sign up, buy etc) or you're just paying for browsers.
4. Start with 10 keywords, use 'phrase' keyword marching, write 4+ ads & rotate them so you can see which message works best.
5. Get a freebie voucher to practice with then set aside some time, start small and be patient.

Last year I spent £250,000 of my clients' budgets and turned it into £5million of new revenue for them - that's the power of AdWords when its done properly.”

So there we have a little successful strategy from the lovely June    

If you want to use Adwords to drive traffic then listen to these two experts advice and this will increase the chances that you will earn a return of investment

My top tips that I would like to spout about is:

1. No Pain No Gain – Use attention grabbing headlines to ease peoples pain or solve their problem, for an increased response
2. Don’t just send people to your home page from an ad… That converts less than 1% (across all sectors)
3. If you have paid for a click then you want a way of getting the price of that click back and some. Exchange a little gift in exchange for their contact details and then think of some “wallet purchases” we could sell to them a few days later to achieve a self numerating marketing system

As everyone says PPC is easy but it does has its dangers. Use this as a guide to stay away from the common mistakes. Happy PPC’ing