Interesting question for our web company, a question we get quite often. The question itself doesn’t quite apply to our industry. The reason it’s not relevant is because our clients and prospects actually mean something else. What they really want to ask us is What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click or PPC is often misunderstood and mispronounced by people as Paper Clip. It’s the acronym that creates this problem. Having worked in the Pay Per Click industry for years with Lycos.com, I understand the ins and outs of PPC very well. It can be very effective for some businesses, especially if it’s done right. People that work in the agency or website business, hear this at least a few times a month. It comes up when we talk with clients and prospects about their plans for marketing their business AFTER the website is completed. It’s so important to know that you cannot just create or design a website, then expect that you will get a ton of traffic to your website without doing some sort of advertising.
So…the more accurate question is What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click is when you buy ads on Google, or other sources, to drive somewhat qualified traffic to your website. This is done in the hopes that what your clients are looking for is your service, ultimately resulting in possible leads and inquiries to your company. Pay Per Click, PPC, works in a simple way, but it’s far from simple. Basically, you put an ad up, target it toward a keyword or phrase, and ideally that ad shows to someone searching on Google for that phrase. When they see the ad, they click it and it delivers them to your website. You pay for the click. There are other options out there for paying by impressions, or even some that do paying for acquisition or conversion, however those are rare. Most people pay for the click.
The benefits for doing PPC are great, if the PPC ads and campaigns are setup and managed properly. If they are not done correctly, you can waste a huge amount of money quickly, resulting in NO LEADS. You certainly don’t want that to happen. With our knowledge in Pay Per Click, especially my experience at Lycos.com, we can steer you in the right direction. We can have a basic conversation about what your goals are and what you want to achieve. It’s important to note that if you are going to get help from a web company or agency, and if you want to get good results, you will need to have an appropriate budget for online advertising. Expect to spend around $2000 per month, with an additional agency fee of $1200. If you don’t have a $3000 per month budget to spend on PPC, that’s ok, it might just mean that you’ll need to scale back your efforts and you may need to also scale back your expectations on the results that you will get from the campaign.
I always recommend that you only do PPC if you are willing to commit to a 6 month timeframe. You need to be able to get a good set of analytics to review and understand if the overall campaign is working. Adjustments can be made during that 6 month time frame, and they should be made. However the short term fix is not the right approach to PPC advertising. If you are looking to run an ad with PPC for just 2 weeks, it won’t be worth the ROI for the time you put in to get the campaign setup correctly.
