Pay per click can really work

Pay per click certainly works and is a really good way of driving well targeted traffic to your site.

The principle is really easy.

• Set up an account with Google and tell them how much money you are prepared to spend each day ie £20/day
• Design a nicely worded 3 line advert that will only appeal to people that want the service that you are offering (remember that it costs you money every time somebody uses the advert to get to your site, so be as specific as possible)
• Then choose the key words that you think people will use to find your site Google supply some useful tools for thinking up words and testing how popular they are likely to be. Then you are ready to set a bid level for those key words. That’s right, it is an auction and you are competing against all the other people that want to attract searchers using those same ‘key words’ to their sites and Google is limited to 8 adverts per page

It is no wonder that Google is making a lot of money from ad-words. Some people are bidding substantial sums for the top spots.

While the principles of using Google Ad-words are simple, the practice can get very complicated as befits any competitive process. Some of the neat things that you can consider:

• You can run separate campaigns aimed at specific target words or groups
• You can link the advert for each campaign to a different page of your website
• you can select a different bid price for each set of words within the campaign

For example when we were setting up ad words for Elysian Holidays, our website listing hundreds of beautiful hand-picked villas for your holidays.  

The basic search terms that people might use are:

• Villa(s)
• Villa holiday(s)
• Villa holidays(s) in Spain
• Villa holidays in Lecrin

Each of the above are listed roughly in order of both the frequency with which they are used in search engines enquiries and the consequent cost for each click thru.

The question that needs to be resolved is whether it is better to bid £2 for a click through on the term ‘villa’, or to bid 10p to obtain a click through for the term ‘villa holidays in Lecrin’. It would be nice to be able to do both, but that is not normally either cost effective for sensible. Since Elysian Holidays have a delightful selection of Villas in Lecrin, it makes sense to target people that have a specific interest in that area.

My view is that it is clearly better to get 20 click thru’s on ‘Villa holidays in Lecrin’ than 1 click thru on the vaguer term of ‘villa’.

If you are planning to spend over £7,000 per year (£20/day) you had better be able to Monitor how well that expenditure is achieving results, and that means tracking from beginning to end. How many people are attracted to the website; of those, how many take a serious interest eg fill in a form, browse around looking for information, and how many of them are finally converted into sales?

Again Google offer tools that help you perform this tracking operation and your own web site statistics tracking software play an important role.

I should mention that Google is not the only supplier of ad words for pay per click services. Overture is probably the second most popular one to use, but personally I find it much poorer than Google because it is it lacks the global reach. However if you do wish to pay for clicks from a specific territory, such as France or America, than it can be useful.