What is it?
Google Adwords or PPC is an incredible tool for marketing. Granted, it may not be as exciting as television ads, or ‘of the moment as’ TikTok videos. It won’t win you awards for creativity, or make you employee of the month. In fact, it’s a little bit boring, but if you need something that will drive traffic to your site from day 1, then Google PPC is the way to do it.
If you go into Google and type something into the search bar, you see the ads at the top pretty much every time you do a search. PPC is the reason Google makes so much money – the reason they exist really.
There are 5.7 million searches (at least) every minute of every day, and Google Ads monetises them.
Think about this…
By using PPC, you will get people looking for your product and visiting your site from day one. If they don’t get in touch, or don’t buy, you might not know why, but you do know that THEY ARE LOOKING FOR WHAT YOU SELL – that’s why they clicked on your ad.
But, don’t delude yourself by thinking that clicks are are no good or not real leads. Yes, if 100 people click, you will get some time wasters, clients clicking, competitors, or people looking for jobs. But not all 100 of them.
So if they don’t buy, you need to look at your product, your offering, the presentation of your product, your brand, your service, your process, or your logistics.
Don’t blame them for being the wrong customers – look at your business and try and work out what’s not right.
Remember – they clicked on your ad for a reason, so if they didn’t buy what can you do about it?
Because the one thing you do know is that they were looking.
So, how does it work?
- Customer goes to Google.
- They type in a search term – for example, ‘marketing agency Cheshire’.
- Up pops your ad alongside the ads of your competitors (if they are doing PPC).
- They click on the ad.
- They go to your website.
- You pay Google an amount foe that visit. Tthe amount varies depending on your marketing and how competitive it is – we have had it at 12p, £6 and all amounts in between.
What’s so good about it?
Well, a number of things actually.
- You get people to your site who are looking for your product.
- You get people to your site who are looking for your product there and then.
- It’s cost effective because you know what you are paying and what it does.
- It can be turned on quickly – about 1/2 a day to set up.
- You can set your budget so you know how mych you are spending each day.
- You can spend as little or as much as you want. The least any of our clients spend is around £50 per month, the most about £4,000.
Who is it good for?
Literally anyone at all. It doesn’t matter how niche your product is, or how much you believe that you know everyone in your target market.
You don’t. It doesn’t matter if only one person searches for your highly niche product every year, because when they do, you want your ad to show up. It’s really simple.
We have a client in the B2B sector – very niche, very specific. Very much of the mind that they know everyone in their market.
They picked up a £10 million contract because one Friday afternoon a PA was tasked with solving a problem.
The company had been let down by a upplier, and the MD asked the PA to find an alternative.
They sat down and did what we all do.
They searched on Google, saw the ad, went to the site, and got in touch. That’s PPC.
Last year we picked up a client who had been paying fees every month to an agency for managing their PPC campaign. And every month they got a report saying exactly what the agency had done and detailing the changes they had made
The trouble is, the agency wasn’t telling the truth.
They appeared to have forgotten the ‘change history’ button in Google PPC. The button that, when it’s clicked, shows all the changes that have been made. Unfortunately for them, it showed they hadn’t been into the account for 8 months.
It sounds wrong, it is, and it happens all the time. We’ve picked up loads of clients where the previous agency hasn’t done anything at all for the money for a long time.
Another client spends about £400 on their PPC per month and they say that roughtly 70% of their business comes from it. They are a mix of business to business and business to consumer.
They run a set of consistent ads aimed at specific keywords and every month we tweak the ads, change the keywords, and work on the targeting.
The average click through rate worldwide is 2%. We have hit a peak of 17%.