Pay Per Click Advertising driving a highly-qualified traffic to your website

This is probably the quickest way to drive traffic to your website but it is at a price. Pay per click advertising is where you pay to be on the results page of a particular search engine. The paid listings usually appear as a series of ads on the right hand side of the results page but more and more search engines are mixing them in with the organic results listed horizontally in the main area of the page.

The main thing about pay per click is return on investment. If we are driving traffic to your website at a cost, then we must have a measure on the return of that investment. If you have an e-commerce website then this may be sales, if not e-commerce then it may be enquiries generated or the number of people who sign-up to a user group or newsletter. The cost per enquiry needs to be calculated against your conversion rate of enquiries to sales.

Quiet Storm have developed a successful model for creating 'pay per click' campaigns with proven results. But as with everything we do, our processes are documented and transparent with all costs, services, performance and return on investment clearly communicated and agreed before the contract commences.

So what does 'Pay Per Click' involve?

1. Keywords and phrases

Consider what words users may search for to find your product or service. A mix of specific and generic words will soak up as many prospective customers as possible. Its not uncommon for websites to have thousands of keywords.

2. Ad groups

For each collection of keywords around a topic or theme, you need to create ad groups. When these keywords are typed into a search engine, they will bring up the specific ad group advert. This is so that you can make the advert specific to a particular audience - the more relevant the advert the more successful it will be. It will also reduce the amount paid in people clicking to see if what you offer is what they are looking for.

For each ad group there will be approximately three adverts, these are rotated so each gets the same level of exposure. The reason for creating three adverts is so that you can test the adverts. Their efficiency can be calculated through the number of 'impressions' compared to 'click throughs' also known as the 'conversion rate'.

The idea is that you can drop off the advert with the lower conversion rate or even remove ad groups that are under performing.

3. Budget

This falls into two areas:

Firstly, you have your budget on the specific keyword. As other companies bid for the same keywords the price may fluctuate throughout the time your campaign runs – but in short the higher their bid, the higher advert will appear in the rankings. Advertisers only pay when the viewer clicks, which makes this option so appealing.

Secondly you have the monthly spend you wish to dedicate to the campaign. It goes without saying that the more expensive the keywords the faster you will burn your budget so it is important to have a good spread of keywords.

4. Reporting

The search engines provide comprehensive reporting analysis so that you can measure the conversion rates of the different ad groups and adverts within the group. This allow you to maximise the return on investment by removing the under performing adverts.

However you MUST have a measure of how successful the lead generation has been and this will require your internal systems to record how many enquiries were generated by the pay per click campaign as a whole (if you have an e-commerce website this should be dealt with by your web stats).

5. Calculate return on investment and budget planning for future campaigns

This is vital, if the cost of the enquiry is too high and your conversion rate per enquiry is too low then:

a) We need to work on the campaign to lower the price of the enquiry - which means we need to increase the click though to enquiry conversion rate.

b) You will need to explore ways your enquiry to sales conversion rate can be increased - are your prices too high, are your sales people good enough, etc.

You can then calculate the return on investment (ROI) by:

Cost of click throughs ÷ Number of enquiries = Cost per enquiry generated

Cost per enquiry generated ÷ Resulting sales = Return on investment

A guide to calculating your ROI on ongoing campaigns or to help you predict, plan and budget:

Number of enquiries generated ÷ cost of campaign = Your enquiry generation £ rate

Your enquiry generation £ rate x Number of enquiries you would like generated = Future budget

Why 'Pay Per Click' works

Some search statistics, which provide some evidence why marketing through search engine pay per click works:

81% of users use search to navigate the web (Jupiter/The NPD Group)

35% of searches are commercial (Piper Jaffray Equity Research)

Google alone gets more than six billion searches a month (Google internal research)

Average cost-per-lead from its system is 27p, compared to around £9 for direct mail (Google)

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