Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is currently the fastest way to bring a substantial amount of traffic to a website. Pay-Per-Click ads are displayed on the search engine results pages of all the major search engines, generally to the right side of the search results, but sometimes on top or on bottom. When a searcher clicks on a sponsored listing, they are immediately taken to the advertisers website and the advertiser is charged a small fee for that visit. Click charges can be as low as $0.05 cents or as high as $50.00 in some extreme cases. There are several pay-per-click engines, but the main engines include Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
In the early days of PPC, the highest bidder would come up in the top sponsored search position, and thereby get the most traffic. But when Google came out with their pay-per-click program, Google AdWords, they created an algorithm that bases your ad’s placement on bid amount, and a quality score that’s based on relevance and click-through-rate. This meant that someone can boost their position in the Google’s sponsored listings by creating text ads that are more relevant and better targeted. Most of the other search engines have followed suit and PPC has become a much more complex undertaking.
True Pay-Per-Click experts know that it’s not just about getting traffic to your website, but that it has to be targeted correctly and the price has to be right. Traffic alone doesn’t get you sales. For instance, a lawyer in Toledo, OH would do extremely well with keywords such as Toledo Lawyer, Toledo Attorney, and Toledo Law Firm, but the same lawyer would essentially be wasting money if he went after much more general keywords such as Lawyer, Attorney, and Law Firm. He would get plenty of traffic from visitors all across the country, but very few would be looking for a lawyer in Toledo. In addition, keywords are generally much more expensive at the national level than at the local level so it’s likely that he’d be paying a much higher per-click rate for keywords that would yield little to nothing. We have seen dozens of self-managed accounts that were completely wasting thousands of dollars a month on irrelevant and overpriced keywords. Don’t let this happen to you.
Good Pay-Per-Click Management is performed by well-trained and highly qualified individuals that know how to capture traffic from Google and get it to your website at a reasonable price. A good pay-per-click manager can take a PPC account that has been performing poorly and flip it upside-down, getting much more traffic and more sales at a lower cost.
At RicketyRoo Inc we pride ourselves on our world-class pay-per-click management program. When we initially take you on as a client, we carefully select one of four unique bid strategies for your upcoming campaign. To help us decide which strategy is right for your website, we take an in depth look at your website, products and services, and industry before we make any decisions. It’s very important that we select the right strategy from the very beginning so that time and money aren’t wasted trying to figure out the most effective way to manage your pay-per-click campaign. Below are short descriptions of how each bid strategy works.
Budget Based
RicketyRoo’s budget based campaigns are setup to give your website absolute maximum exposure for every dollar you spend. The primary objective of this strategy is to obtain the most relevant clicks possible per your ad spend budget. The secondary objective is to increase the budget for the keywords that are converting and decrease the budget for the keywords that are not converting. This strategy works well for those companies that have fewer than two conversions per day or for those companies that cannot track conversions.
Rank Based
RicketyRoo’s rank based campaigns are setup to give your website the ranking that works most optimally for your website. By adjusting the bid pricing daily on your individual keywords, we are able to target your desired rankings and maximize the performance of your campaign. This strategy works well for those companies that have had proven success at a targeted rank.
Conversion Based
RicketyRoo’s conversion based campaigns are set to increase conversions, while at the same time, lower your cost-per-conversion. To do this, we compare your most recent campaign data to your historical campaign averages. We increase the budget for keywords that perform well, and decrease the budget for keywords that are underperforming. This type of campaign works similar to an ROI based campaign, without having to set specific conversion goals.
Return on Investment (ROI) Based
RicketyRoo’s ROI based campaigns are setup to give you a maximum return on your pay-per-click campaign. To do this, we predefine target goals based upon either cost-per-conversion or return on ad spend (ROAS). We then change the campaign daily to work towards meeting those goals. Below is a brief description about how both types of ROI based campaigns work.
Cost-Per-Conversion (CPC)
CPC based campaigns work best when a client has one product they are advertising online. By rewarding keywords that perform well and penalizing keywords that underperform, we’re able to better allocate your budget to maximize your conversions and reduce your cost-per-conversion. Because the dynamics of the market change frequently due to seasonality, changes in your industry, and customer trends, the redistribution of your budget occurs daily to insure maximum performance.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
ROAS based campaigns work best when a client has more than one product they are advertising online. It works very similar to a CPC campaign, but because each product has a potentially different cost, we cannot simply attempt to reduce conversion costs equally among all of the keywords in your campaign. Different products produce different levels of profits and have to be taken into consideration when maximizing the performance of a pay-per-click campaign.