If you’ve been looking to expand your business’ profile on the net you’ve probably come across a range of suggested techniques for marketing: CRO, PPC, CTA, CPI, CRM, B2B, B2C. The list goes on and on but the point is, like a lot of jargon, rendering everything down into acronyms makes it about as clear as mud for newcomers.

To help remedy this problem, we have here the first in a series of articles intended to take a specific technique and explain in simple English what it entails, what its good for and what its limitations are.

PPC

It stands for Pay Per Click and is exactly what it sounds like: you place an add with a website or search company and are then charged per click it gets. Simple right? So how does that work?

The most common method of PPC marketing is via search engines. If you start a PPC account with a search engine like Google or Bing you’ll need to place bids on selected keywords you feel are relevant to your business. Search engine users entering a given keyword will then see the winning bidder at the top of their results page. If they click on your ad you’ll then be charged what you bid. You pay per click your ad is getting.

However, you’ll be happy to know it isn’t just money that determines the winner of these auctions. If your landing page is better designed and your product is a better fit to the search you’ll be given a better Quality Score and can be placed above the higher paying client. After all, Google and co. need to ensure their own product (the search itself) returns useful output for their users. Thankfully this means that large companies can’t just use their financial strength to blow smaller competitors out of the water.

You can also add negative keywords to weed out searches that aren’t likely to convert into sales. If you were selling hiking boots for instance, you don’t want people turning up looking for riding boots, you’ll pay for their click but they won’t buy anything. In this instance setting “riding”, “work” and some other negatives could help refine who is being shown your ads.

The Downsides

It would seem like this PPC malarkey is a no brainer. You can skip the organic growth of your website and simply buy visits instead of engaging in the slow tedious climb towards an organically high search result. Sadly it’s not always the shortcut it first seems. It requires a lot of time and effort, just a different variety to Search Optimisation. Remember, while you are paying per click through to your site that doesn’t necessarily mean every visitor will purchase your product or service. PPC may be great for driving traffic but traffic alone doesn’t guarantee sales. You’ll need to put in significant effort developing and updating closely targeted keywords and well crafted landing pages or PPC’s other major downside will come into play.

It can get expensive in the extreme. Some companies have PPC budgets in the thousands or even millions of dollars. For small, new companies it may just not be economical and without careful attention to keywords you could end up hemorrhaging money with nothing to show for it.

We hope this has explained to you how PPC advertising can be a major tool for a business, allowing a relevant company to jump to the top of search rankings, while still only paying for adverts that successfully drive traffic to their site. Just keep in mind: it is not the best choice for everyone. It is in time consuming to refine the campaign but with poor optimisation costs can easily spiral without any actual results. As a small business owner especially, it could be more economical to focus your effort in the slower (but free) SEO method.

If you’ve enjoyed this foray into the world of digital marketing, you’ll be able to follow the rest of the series in our blog , along with some handy explanations and ‘Hot To’ articles for other digital skills.