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A Beginner’s Guide to pay-per-click Advertising
By Chrys Philalithes, Marketing Director and Duncan Parry, Editor
Espotting Media.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising appears on all the major search engines and ISP websites as Labelled Sponsored Links or similar, these adverts are displayed based upon what the consumer searches for and offer an excellent opportunity for you to drive sales leads to your website.

The underlying principal behind this form of advertising is matching up consumers (who are searching) with companies (that provide what they are looking for). So if you search for "computers" on Yahoo.co.uk for example, you see pay-per-click results from Espotting (under "Sponsored Matches") from computer stores.

This advertising space offers an invaluable way for websites, with big or small budgets, to appear on the first page of search engine results. Websites wishing to appear under "Sponsored Matches" decide which search words they want to appear for - so a computer store will choose words like ‘computers’, ‘new PCs’ etc. They only pay when their advert is clicked upon and if they want to appear above a competitor, they increase the amount they are willing to pay for each click.

So using pay-per-click you can target the right consumers - the ones likely to become paying customers.

Setting up your advertising

Search engines sell the ‘Sponsored Matches’ space through third parties, PPC (or CPC, cost per click) search engines. These engines show their results on networks of search engines, ISPs and destination sites.

In Europe, the leading PPC network is Espotting (www.espotting.com). Espotting drives traffic to over 14,000 companies including British Airways, eBay, Direct Line and Procter & Gamble. Through Espotting, you can have your company listed on some of the web’s leading sites including Yahoo! Europe, Lycos Europe, Ask Jeeves and Netscape.

Other PPC engines include US-based Overture (formerly GoTo) and Google, which has recently started a PPC form of advertising (although this works slightly differently).

Relevancy and style rules

All of the pay-per-click engines have guides to the style of your adverts and relevancy which determine what words you can bid upon for your website.

You should use normal English grammar and a normal writing style, as you would in an essay or letter. Avoid excessive capitalisation and exclamation marks - (don’t use ‘CHEAP?!!’ or ‘Buy PCs Right NOW!’) - the editors will change or reject this. Their aim is to make the adverts fit the style of all their partners websites.

Relevancy rules are based on the idea of providing a straight forward, good experience to the consumer (so that hopefully they buy from your site!). To decide if a word is relevant, imagine you are a consumer who knows nothing about your website or business. If you were a consumer and typed that word in a search engine, would you be surprised to see your advert (because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the search)? Would you be able to see why it is relevant by clicking through to your website? If the answer is no to either, then it seems likely the word is not relevant - and even if you are allowed to bid on it, may produce poor results.

To help you start your campaigns, here are some guidelines:

1) Decide on your objectives - do you want to promote your whole site, only a certain product category or even just one (well designed!) page?

2) Research your keywords based on the above, using the tools provided by the PPC engines, so you are only bidding on words consumers are actually searching for.

Don’t focus on just the big traffic words (like ‘computers’); these are important but also expensive and may provide lots of traffic with low sales. Research those less popular, cheaper words (e.g. ‘new desktop PCs’) that suggest more about what the consumer is looking for. Don’t expect to find every single keyword in one go; find the obvious ones and start a campaign you’ll find you think of more over time. Espotting’s Keyword Generator can help you plan your campaign at the following URL:

http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp.

Type in a keyword and it will generate other keywords that include the original, with search volumes.

3) Make your titles work for you. Put the search word in every title (change the word order to make it grammatically correct). E.g. for the search ‘new computers’ - ‘Buy new computers at PC Sales UK’.

Why? This clearly demonstrates to the consumer what your website offers. It can encourage clicks from people who are looking for what you offer and discourage those who are looking for something else. Think of putting the keyword in the title as a filter; it attracts good traffic to your site and deters bad traffic that is unlikely to lead to sales. Many PPC engines suggest this; some insist, so it’s easier to do this from day one especially if your competitor hasn’t. Your campaigns may well outperform his for just this reason.

4) The first five words in your description are the most important as some search engines only show these (because of space restrictions). Get your brand name, domain or a unique selling point here. So with a title of: ‘Buy new computers at Computer Sales UK’, use a description like: ‘Quality new PCs with a 2 year guarantee.’

5) Deep link. Do not send all the traffic to your homepage (unless you have a small site). Link to the page which details the service or product related to that search. Make it easy for the consumer to find what you offer or they will click ‘back’, and go to your competitor.

6) Monitor your bids. Increase them to stay in position one or two (as the search engines only use between 2-5 results PPC). If you find the campaign too expensive, lower your bids on one or two generic words and research cheaper, less traffic (but more specific) terms.


Conclusion

Pay-per-click engines will drive targeted traffic to your website. You only pay for the traffic you receive and can easily appear on all the major search engines. As the signup fees are low compared to search engine optimisation, this means that SMEs can start to advertise their services and products alongside multinationals with large budgets. Make use of this opportunity today!

Search Engine Spy Editor's Note:

For further information about Espotting's coverage and pay-per-click plans visit www.espotting.com for full details.

Other PPC engines in the UK who have results that appear on key search sites include:

www.uk.overture.com

www.webfinder.com

www.mirago.com

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