Pay per click (PPC) is one of the best marketing platforms ever invented. It levels the playing field between small and large businesses like nothing else. But it’s also a minefield! Diving in without really knowing what you are doing can waste a lot of money.
Why is PPC so effective?
It’s effective because, as with SEO, it puts your message in front of prospective customers while they are actively thinking about and searching for the products that you sell. Compare that with a social media or TV advert, where it’s the advertiser’s vain hope that a prospective customer might see the message, let alone remember it and then act on it.
PPC, again unlike traditional advertising, is also extremely measurable, and changes have an instant effect. With Google Analytics installed on your site, enquiries or sales can be tracked down to the individual keyword and advert. If you have an e-commerce site, you can even measure revenue gained from each keyword.
Where can PPC be used?
The dominant platform which uses PPC in the UK is Google Ads, which displays adverts on Google’s main search results, as well as partner sites and other Google products. This is suitable for all kinds of businesses — whether you’re a sole trader wanting to advertise locally or an e-commerce site with a national audience.
Why use an agency to manage your PPC campaign?
Although PPC is a great platform, getting great results from it requires both a lot of time and a lot of knowledge. Google make it incredibly easy to set up an account and start spending money, but almost every default setting is designed to maximise Google’s revenue, not yours. Almost everyone who tries Google Ads for themselves stops before long, frustrated by the poor performance.
When we take over an existing campaign being run by a client (or even another agency), we expect to double the return on investment (ROI) immediately. This continues to improve over time, of course, and our results can be 10 to 20 times better than what people can achieve by themselves. We do this through over 20 years of experience, custom written tools and daily work on all our clients’ accounts. We are also a Google Partner Agency.
PPC for small business & sole traders
Google Ads is ideal for smaller businesses for the simple reason that you can target adverts very specifically in terms of geographical area. Usually this is one or more postcodes and a radius around each — 10 miles around CB1, for example. Unlike other agencies, we can also work with small click budgets (down to £200 per month). And, as ever, the keywords your campaign will target will be chosen and refined over time to be as specific as possible for your needs.
PPC for e-commerce
Ads is also very well suited to e-commerce sites, primarily by advertising on Google Shopping. The key here is to make sure that tracking is set up perfectly, so we have complete revenue data with which to optimise your campaigns. We also use a third party tool, Shoptimised, to optimise your product data feed before it reaches Google Merchant Centre. This is where the bulk of the work is done when running a PPC campaign for an e-commerce site. Note that we can work with everything from very small to very large product inventories.
Click budget
In addition to our pricing (below), you will need to pay for the clicks themselves; this budget goes directly to Google and not through us. We work with a monthly budget agreed with you, and guarantee to return any overspend in the very unlikely event that this occurs. This means that you will never spend more than you intended to when we’re running your account. Another key advantage of Ads is that your click budget can be changed from month to month, to take into account seasonality, cash flow, etc.
As to how much you should spend per month, this depends entirely on your business, although what you get out is generally proportional to what you put in. For a tradesperson targeting a local area, just £200 per month could be enough, and we will work to budgets this low. For a large e-commerce site, an appropriate budget might be in the thousands.
Pricing
- £140 plus VAT per calendar month
- £40 plus VAT per calendar month for Shoptimised, if required
- Extra languages can be targeted (at extra cost)
- More geographic regions can be targeted, both nationally and internationally
- Recommended duration: ongoing
- Notice period: one calendar month
This includes all the set up of any accounts that you need if you don’t already have them, including Ads itself, Google Analytics and Google Merchant Centre.
If you are new to Google Ads, as a Partner Agency Google will also supply us with credit to add to your account.
Call us on 0800 644 0196 or email [email protected] to discuss how we can help create a Google Ads campaign for your business now. We can start driving traffic to your site in just 2-3 days.