By Chris Lee

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising provides excellent opportunities for marketers. Short text ads that appear on Web pages or alongside search results relate to entered words and give marketers access to relevant audiences with measureable results and manageable costs. On the face of it, PPC sounds like the marketer’s dream, but how should companies looking to start running PPC campaigns go about it?

NMK caught up with independent digital media consultant Josh Feldberg, founder of social media case study sharing site Sociable.net, to get the lowdown on PPC best practice.

Briefly describe PPC for the uninitiated. What is PPC?

It refers to the sponsored links you get at the side and top of search. If you type in a certain keyword you’ll see a sponsored link which someone will pay for once you click through on it.

What is the benefit for business of a PPC campaign?

The biggest benefit is it can provide an immediate flow of traffic, especially if you’re just starting out and you’re waiting for a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign to kick in, which can take anything from three to six months and beyond. You could be up and running for a day and you’ll be at the top of search, albeit as a sponsored link.

You can control costs as it works on a bidding system depending on the popularity of a certain keyword. If no one’s bid higher than you [for a particular keyword] then you’ll appear top of the list, but if someone bids higher than you then you then you’ll be knocked off, essentially. It’s a question of working out what you want to pay per click. You don’t pay unless people click through.

How would you monitor and measure the impact of a pay-per-click campaign?

The main providers of PPC advertising are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Advertising. Google Analytics provides really detailed information on the clicks and the amount of people clicking through and you can alter your strategy accordingly to ensure greater return on investment. You can then see how long people are spending on your site, so you need to combine analytics of your ads with that of your site. It provides quite substantial coverage and is quite easy to use.

What is PPC best practice, then, in your view?

What I’ve tended to do is to put in some experimental budget at first covering a number of words and then try and narrow that down. You need to continually analyse the keywords to make sure you’re getting the greatest return. You also need to tailor the wording of your ad to make it relevant to the search word.

The link you include needs to be relevant for that word, too, so create relevant landing pages for each ad. We did some work with Digital Public with NHS Direct aiming to reduce teenage pregnancy and giving contraception advice. We looked at the search words people used and when, also, what is the mindset of someone searching and created ads accordingly. For example, if you type in ‘contraceptive pill’ you get the names of pharmaceutical companies, which is not what most people looking for advice would search for. You also have to account for spelling errors.

Think of it as how you would search on Google and make it relevant.

What other things should you consider to get best value?

You need to find the terms that are highly searched for but there isn’t a great deal of competition on. Timing is also important. With NHS Direct we found it was most effective for us to advertise on a Saturday morning, or a Tuesday morning and bank holiday. Look at when other ads aren’t running as it’ll be cheaper to run ads then, too.

Get into the mindset of the consumer. It’s not about the brand; it’s more about search for specific topic.

What about running PPC in conjunction with an SEO campaign?

After your SEO strategy has kicked in you can still use PPC to target highly specific words. PPC can be used for defined period of time or for advertising certain areas of your website. PPC can cost a lot of money; you want to reduce that over time as SEO kicks in. It’s like a seesaw, one side goes up and the other comes down, you get to the middle as you become more SEO-reliant, but you can always use PPC in the long-term.

Click the link to hear the full podcast on pay-per-click best practice from the author’s blog.