Paid Search

Paid search or Pay Per Click (PPC) requires careful management in order to be successful.  It has the potential to lose a company a lot of money very quickly if not managed properly.  Equally, when done well, it can be a source of high quality ‘hot’ leads.

To make your PPC a success requires a lot of management overhead with daily tasks such as bid management to ensure your adverts are appearing in the desired position and negative mining to make sure your adverts are only appearing for relevant terms.  Plus a continual programme of keyword mining, ad copy and landing page testing to improve its performance.

There are many dimensions to paid search.  Your paid search strategy should be developed in conjunction with your organic search and wider digital marketing strategy. Here are some of the key metrics you should monitor:

• Impressions: the number of ‘eyeballs’ seeing your adverts
• Clicks: the number of visitors coming through to your website from your adverts
• Click Through Rate (CTR): the percentage of clicks you attain compared to the number of impressions
• Cost Per Click (CPC): the amount you are paying for each click
• Quality Score (QS): how relevant Google rates your page to the search term, also impacted by your CTR above.
• Bounce Rate (BR): how many of your clicks are leaving your site without progressing to another page
• Conversions: a conversion is a visitor completing an action you want e.g. filling out a form, calling you, reading a certain article etc.
• Conversion Rate (CR): the percentage of visitors who convert/complete a desired action

It is not always a matter of driving up impressions and reducing your cost per click.  It could be of more value to pay more for a certain search term as it converts at a higher rate as its of higher quality.  Equally you may purposefully design your ad copy to put off a certain type of prospect you know doesn’t convert which decreases your CTR.   Monitoring, reporting and evaluating your PPC will help you understand what your target metrics should be.

Your landing page/s is of utmost importance as it affects both your quality score and bounce rate.  The more relevant  your landing page to the search terms the better the quality score and so the less you may pay.  It’s relevancy to the search term also gives you a higher chance of converting the click too (and reducing your bounce rate which will improve quality score).

Every company is different and will need to set out their unique targets for paid search so it can be reviewed and monitored against the desired goals and ensure any money spent gets great results for your business.

Contact me today for help on your PPC strategy and management.