15 June 2007
Bluelinemedia marketing specialist Ben Jeffery examines how to make your pay-per-click campaign more effective.

Introduction

You might set up pay-per-click advertising to attract more visitors to your site, but to really achieve great results you need to get people to stop clicking.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but the result of putting most people off clicking your ad is that the ones who get through are much more likely to use your product or service.

Pay-per-click advertising needs to be approached quite differently from standard search engine marketing for the simple reason that it costs money. If you target a specific and very popular phrase within your website, you will get more visitors from the free search engine listings, and it doesn't cost you any more to support 10,000 than 1000 visitors a month.

Getting more from your pay-per-click

The difference with pay-per-click advertising is that you are paying for every visitor, and so you want to make sure you get the right ones. Pay-per-click spending means choosing the key terms that will provide a certain number of visitors, enquiries or sales for a certain amount of money. Improving pay-per-click means reducing the amount of money per enquiry. For example, if you spend £100 on a pay-per-click campaign providing 200 visitors and 10 enquiries, those enquiries each cost 10.

To reduce your cost-per-enquiry or cost-per-sale, you need to put people off clicking on your advert. This can be done at every stage of the advertising process - budgeting, choice of terms and ad content.

Pay-per-click budgets

At the budgeting stage, your maximum cost-per-click determines where your advert appears. If you and the next advertiser have a similarly performing ad, the highest maximum cost-per-click gets the highest position. However, the first two positions can often absorb the more general users - people who will click on an ad out of interest, or may just be looking for information. By holding third position, you are likely to avoid these wasteful clicks but still receive visits from people looking to buy your product.

How to choose the best keywords

Your choice of terms is the most important aspect of your pay-per-click management, and it is here that you can really cut down the cost of enquiries and sales. Your terms should be as closely linked to the product or service you provide as possible. Don't be tempted to go for the most popular terms, e.g. "chocolate", as these are likely to attract too wide a range of people. Someone searching for chocolate could be looking for recipes, cakes, brown paint or labradors. Use a more specific term like "organic milk chocolates" and you can be more certain that the person using that phrase will buy your product. The added advantage is that because you are choosing a more unusual term, there are going to be less advertisers competing and so your cost-per-click is reduced.
Writing pay-per-click adverts

The ad content is also a good chance to refine visitors. Don't use your ad text to try to convince someone to buy your product - they have already searched for your product and they know what they want. Explaining the benefits of organic food to someone who has already told you that's exactly what they want is preaching to the converted, and a waste of text. Instead, use your text to refine again the kind of product or service you provide. Distinguish what you sell so that anyone who is looking for something slightly different won't click, and won't cost you money.

By building your pay-per-click campaign around reducing the number of people who actually click through, you will be left with the most valuable customers. You might not get as many visitors to the site, but you will get the best ones, which could mean the difference between paying £100 for a sale and paying £1.

Most web design companies will also provide a pay-per-click management service, and their experience and expertise should mean that the extra cost of management fees is more than compensated for by a dramatically increased return on investment.