Archive for the 'Pay Per Click' Category

The medium of search engine marketing, both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) remains a strong and successful source of traffic and sales for online retailers. That is according to an Internet Retailer survey conducted in April 2010. The survey included 102 consumer brand manufacturers, web-only retailers, catalogers and chain retailers.

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A very interesting adwords development that’s been trialled across the US recently has finally made it to these shores. Essentially what’s happening is that Google are allowing some accounts, initially just ones with particularly high quality scores, to show more than just text in their ads, this can take some surprisingly diverse forms with everything from links and maps, to pictures of products and even videos.

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The workplace is becoming less defined by desks and terminals every day, people are recieveing emails and surfing the internet anywhere and everywhere, increasingly through phones as well as laptops. It’s no different in social life either, a huge number of people now have an incredibly high standard of internet connectivity and computer processing sitting in their coat pockets, ready to use at a moment’s notice, almost no matter where they are. This is why any PPC professional worth their salt knows how to plan a good mobile campaign, and why you should too.

To that end, we’ve decided to let you in on a few of Top Click Media’s main mobile advertising tips, so sit back and prepare for liftoff.

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Today’s comments from a Google staffer that most people do not know what a browser is will have come as a surprise to precisely no one who works in the online sector. It can seem strange in a world that is increasingly reliant on the internet but many people possess a very limited understanding of the online word. Day after day we field enquiries from people who either know almost nothing at all about the internet or have some very strange assumptions. Some of the top misconceptions are that PPC somehow affects natural search ranking, or even that all search ranking positions are paid for.

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Use PPC as your SEO Roadmap

Yesterday I wrote about why someone should use a combined SEO and PPC strategy. Today I’d like to talk a little about how exactly to go about exactly you should go about making PPC complement SEO and vice versa. The first thing I’d like to discuss is using PPC to plan your SEO.

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Okay, first things first, SEO and PPC are incredibly different tools, the people you are targeting are different and the approach has to be completely different. The most successful SEM campaigns incorporate the best elements of both in order to make sure that there are no blind spots in terms of potential clicks.

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This week we’ve been talking about long-tail keywords and how important they are to pretty much all PPC marketing campaigns. What we haven’t discussed yet however, is exactly how best to turn your expensive generic keywords into the more cost effective long-tail variety. Well, we’ve come up with a few tips that should get you on your way.

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#4: People don’t Search Generically

People don’t search in the same way they used to. In the early days of the internet people would search generically, though as people have figured out the internet and how it works, the average search query has increased in length year on year as people recognise the need to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to find appropriate results.

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#3: Buy Phase vs Browse Phase

The next point concerns the attitude of the person searching, are they interested in buying today or are they just researching a purchase for a later date. Obviously you have very little chance of making a profit from someone who is thinking about buying at some point (in the browse phase), whereas somebody who is in the mood to make a purchase in that internet session (in the buy phase) is much easier to convince. If your site is good and your prices are competitive, they’re probably going to spend money.

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#2: Cost Per Click

Okay, this is a big one, as obviously cost per click can make or break any PPC campaign. Let’s stick with the dog food example for the time being to illustrate this. The cost per click of a keyword is determined by the competition for that keyword. A hugely generic keyword like ‘Dog Food’ will naturally have a lot of people bidding on it and so could easily cost over £1 a click for a top five placing.

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#1: Minimise irrelevant clicks

The fundamental mistake made by people who start PPC campaigns is almost always the same, their keywords are too generic. When people come to us they tend to have between thirty and fifty keywords, that target their business sector, but in a really non specific way, for instance if they’re a pet supplies company they’ll have broad match words like ‘dog food’, ‘cat litter’.

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One of the major selling points of PPC over SEO is its immediacy. SEO campaigns are long term strategies that have to be planned far in advance and are difficult to adapt once they get going, PPC can be changed and meddled with limitlessly and instantaneously. If SEO is an oil tanker that takes miles of ocean to turn or stop, then PPC is a speed boat, capable of darting through the waves at will.

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According to a survey carried out by the very capable guys and girls at, Search Engine Marketing blog, seroundtable.com unemployment in the search marketing industry is only 7 percent, that’s 2 percent below the current US (it’s an American blog) national unemployment rate of 9%.

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Contrary to popular belief, Pay Per Click advertising is not really about clicks. As becomes painfully obvious when you look at your company bank statements and see click costs going out but no business coming in, clicks can only get you so far. That’s why pouring your money into keywords with high click-through rates is not always the best idea, unless you can prove that they’re actually making you money.

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