Pay Per Click

Pay-per-Click Advertising (or PPC) is a term used to describe online advertising schemes such as Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. It can bring substantial numbers of visitors at an affordable cost if you know what to do and cost a fortune for no results if you don't. NetSecrets can ensure you achieve the former.

All search engines these days offer a mixture of results. They offer what are often called "natural" listings which are the result of the search engine examining the pages within your site using an automated process called "spidering". Based on what it finds the search engine sees your site as more or less relevant to a range of search terms and your position in the results of searches for those phrases is determined accordingly. This is a slow process and it can take many months for a new site to achieve good visibility and only then if the site has been subjected to "search engine optimisation" (SEO), which is covered here.

Alongside these "natural" results, search engines now offer a means of gaining almost instant visibility for a range of selected keywords and key phrases. At its simplest it can be seen as an auction system. You make a bid, representing what you will pay to receive a visit from someone searching for a given phrase. If your bid is the highest you will be number one in the "sponsored listings" for that phrase. If someone clicks on the link and visits your site you pay the search engine the sum you bid. If someone bids a penny more than you, you drop a position. If you up your bid, you can be back at the top.

There can be several reasons for using PPC as well as or instead of SEO. Firstly if your site has been built using "unfriendly" design techniques PPC can be the only alternative to scrapping your site and starting again. Secondly it can take many months to get well ranked in the natural listings and PPC can bridge the gap by bringing visitors within days of the site going live. Thirdly you can be found for a wider range of keywords than you can normally achieve with SEO. And fourthly you will get some visitors through PPC who, for whatever reason, would not have clicked on the natural listing.

1.0 Step One - Keyword Research

You can't set up a PPC campaign without picking the target keywords carefully. These are the phrases searchers would use to find your site and must be relevant. These are organised into groups and sub-groups of like phrases which form the basis of the individual ads that make up your campaigns. We use a range of tools to build these lists and regularly review them in light of results.

2.0 Step Two - Traffic Measurement

We cannot assess the success of our link building campaigns without measuring the results. There are several packages around that claim to meet this need but most are inadequate. We have in depth knowledge of the well known HitsLink package and use it for all the projects we undertake because we know it works.

Hitslink tells you how many visitors you get, where they come from, what they searched for and which pages they viewed. It looks at specific actions on the site, such as entering an enquiry or placing an order, and tracks the visitors who bought or enquired right back to their origin. So you can accurately see, for example, that this week a specific Google Ad that cost you £50 in clicks brought in 10 enquiries or that an ad in Yahoo! that cost you £100 this month brought in £400 in orders.

As long as we work with you we continually update your HitsLink account to more accurately reflect the activities taking place on your site.

3.0 Step Three - Write the Ads

Research shows that the way a PPC ad is written has a major influence on its success in drawing relevant visitors. Where possible the ad needs to incorporate the keyword searched for; it needs to accurately portray what is on offer to limit paid visits to interested parties only and it needs to be attractive and compelling to the visitor we want. All this with just 95 characters, including spaces, to play with! To work best these need to be miniature masterpieces and great skill is involved in writing them successfully.

In Google it is possible to cycle between one or more ads for a given group of words. This allows us to run 2 ads alternately and to measure their success over a period of time. We can then delete the poorer performer and create a new second ad, repeating the process until we are satisfied with the results.

The greatest success in PPC comes from methodically working on the ads to improve both the click-through rate and the conversion rate.

4.0 Step Four - Landing Pages

It is proven that more visitors convert to customers if the ad takes them to a page relevant to their search rather than to the site's home page. So if the site sells buckets and spades, the ad should take someone searching for "buckets" to the page detailing the buckets on offer rather than to the home page. Often it can be beneficial to produce a "landing page" specific to an ad that offers the visitor options specific to the search they have made.

5.0 Which PPC Engines To Use

The two most important are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing and these are used not only in Google and Yahoo! but in large numbers of 3rd party sites too, such AOL, MSN and the BBC. There are smaller engines such as Miva, Mirago, WebFinder in the UK and many more overseas. We usually start with Google, then Yahoo! and add others if appropriate.

6.0 What Does It Cost?

There are 3 elements to the cost. Firstly NetSecrets charge a one-off fee for keyword research, setting up HitsLink and writing and refining the ads. Secondly we charge a monthly management fee for testing and measuring the results and refining the ads. Thirdly there are 3rd party costs that you, the client, pay direct to the PPC engines for the clicks received. In most cases this is based upon a monthly budget you define but this can be varied (usually upwards) as HitsLink measures the success of the expenditure.

HitsLink costs £100 per annum for smaller sites and from £20 per month for high traffic sites with multiple web addresses.

7.0 Ongoing Support and Promotion

Once all is set up, as defined in steps 1 to 4, your site enters the support and promotion phase.

We agree objectives with you for the growth of the site. This might be expressed as numbers of visitors, numbers of enquiries, order value or a combination of these depending on the characteristics of your business. We then regularly monitor, change and test the ads so that we achieve constant progress towards the objectives. We also identify new opportunities for increased traffic and advise these to you as they emerge.

8.0 Other Services

There are other important services NetSecrets offer to augment the PPC activities and further increase your site's visibility. These include:

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO): This is the process of working on the structure and content of your web site so that it is more likely to be found in the "natural" listings of the leading search engines for keywords relevant to its content.

Site Submission is a service that works hand-in-glove with SEO and aims to get search engines to index more of your pages more quickly so that the improvements made with SEO get results sooner.

Link Building: Links from other web sites can boost your ranking in search engines by indicating that your site is an authority in its field. Links from complementary sites can also bring relevant visitors who will do business with you. NetSecrets can undertake projects to identify potential link partners and negotiate links to your web site that will bring greater visibility and new customers.