Lets figure out how to make more money and create more clients with PayPerClick. While many find it confusing, and many others spend a fortune not knowing what they are doing: in fact, with a little guidance, PayPerClick is a tremendously powerful tool for your business.
There is also several caveats.
But if you avoid the chuck holes, you will be miles ahead with PayPerClick.
There are a variety of PayPerClick options. I am only going to talk about one. Google Adwords. It is 80% of the market or more, and when you get comfortable here you can go claim similar turf at BING and at YAHOO. But Google is the place to start. It offers great tools, rewards smart play and is the best opportunity to make a big difference.
First off, let me introduce you to PayPerClick
- You type keywords into a search engine
- The resulting search engine returns natural listings and sponsored ads.
- Organic listings are served up by the search engine. Ranking well here is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) battle with your competitors.
- Sponsored ads are triggered from matching keywords in that you bid on through your PayPerClick account. (You see sponsored links at the top when you do a search and then down the right margin)
- Placement and position of sponsored links are determined by your bid, by the number of clicks you are getting per impression and your Quality Score . We will skip all the nerdy details here because we are looking at this through strategic eyes. Is PayPerClick worth your interest to know more? The answer should be YES.
- You only pay when a user clicks your ad (thus the term PPC- pay per click)
- The user is directed to the landing page of your choice
Key Reasons Why PayPerClick is Good for You
Google Adwords allows you to finetune getting leads through PayPerClick. Wise marketers who pay attention can do well here. Coupling Adwords campaigns with effective nurturing campaigns can leverage the leads you get and warm them up into paying customers.
There is also a place for the right brain here and creativity. People have these wonderful big brains and they follow unique paths through the Internet to find information like yours. PayPerClick allows you to discover this uniqueness which you might never see relying on SEO. This is why we experiment and test. Make sure you see info on Analytics.
We make stuff up as marketers. We have to. But when we get real data; when we are able to ask questions and survey,
- we can improve our content
- improve our understanding of the market and
- improve our content and our offers.
Google Adwords is the perfect tool, in cooperation with the Adwords conversion tracker and an analytics program- to know what terms people are searching with and what they are looking for with those keywords.
Better data leads to better results.
You cannot optimize your site for all your keywords that are good for you. You can’t create that much content. Using Adwords, you can battle for these keywords when you could never dominate for them with SEO. Adwords- especially the content network- gives you very powerful options to find people who need your help.
Using Adwords and analytics together creates a body of intelligence that can be leveraged in organic search, put to good use in direct mail, can be re-purposed into article writing and speech making and webinars… PayPerClick and good analytics are a good investment. Just make sure you know what you are doing.
There are several Key Mistakes to Avoid
Don’t let a Yellow Page company run your PayPerClick Campaign for you. Suddenly the Yellow Page companies are offering businesses PayPerClick Management and SEO management. They are huge billion dollar companies that see time running out on the Yellow Page book and are thrashing around looking for new business.
They have sales reps, they have a lot of loyal customers- so why not try to sell them PayPerClick management? Makes sense for the Yellow Page investors.
Problem is, what gives them any particular talent for PayPerClick? Their strengths revolve around business relationships with business owners. There are several critical reasons not to hire the Yellow Pages for PPC management.
1. They hide the critical information that is available to the astute campaign manager. We were just talking about the data which can be leveraged. There is a wealth of knowledge about keyword popularity: how people search for what they want- what people are looking for- that you will not get from many management companies. Now they might tell you they are protecting your from complexity. Mostly, they are putting fingerprints on your glasses so you cannot see well. My rant is coming later.
We discussed listening and testing and improving our business processes elsewhere in detail. For now, just remember that this kind of information is too important to let someone else keep you from it because they are doing all the management you need.
Please excuse a short diatribe.
I have listened to Yellow Page presentations with clients before. They are full of hype and rely on myths to promote on-line Yellow Page subscriptions. When you have an understanding of how the Internet works, how search works and how people use the Internet, many of their premises ring false.
However, many clients suck in the magic because of the old fairy tale that when people go to the Yellow Pages they are ready to buy. Has anyone ever seen stats on this? You hear it long enough and people believe it.
OK, I am rambling here, what is my point? The PPC management by the Yellow Pages has to be long on hype and short on execution. Anyone with a clue about PPC can get a better job than trying to work with the Yellow Pages. They use technology and they use cheap labor.
How can I say this? It is the big business model for PPC management. It is good for the Yellow Pages bottom line. It is good for their stakeholders. In my humble opinion, I don’t think it is so good for you.
2. I would expect them to be incompetent in their execution. Why would they be any different than ReachLocal? ReachLocal is another company with a big sales apparatus- big on building commission relationships with ad agencies- but when it comes to managing PPC campaigns- my personal experience with them leaves my head aching and my heart hurting.
Any self respecting PayPerClick expert understands the critical relationship between your content, your ads and your campaigns. Not the big business PPC management model. They treat it like your Yellow Pages model.
What tools did they give you to differentiate yourself in the Yellow Pages Book? Big, Bigger, Biggest. Just write a check please.
Now ReachLocal gives you better results than the Yellow Page book. However, while many of the sales reps are great people, the execution of services is inept. I have a client who for 2 months has been waiting for fundamental mistakes to be corrected in his ReachLocal campaign that Lucille Ball’s dumb younger sister would not have committed in the first place.
3. These big dumb companies are seriously restricted in the options offered to you. The simplest Google PPC strategies are scrapped for simplicity.
4. The PPC talent is far removed from your business. You are far removed from how they actually run the campaign. The statistics are not available to you. This huge gap in understanding leaves a huge weakness even if they were competent.
Remember going to the State Fair and putting money in the machine with the wonderful mechanism that picks up a prize and drops it down the chute? It was so frustrating it was fun.
So big management companies are this big machine cranking technology handles to operate your PayPerClick campaign. Save your fun for the State Fair. Key your own fingers on the controls of your campaign. You can get trustrworthy help- more on that later- but the nerd has to get back on point.
5. And finally, this combines several points. By never seeing the real information, you never get to test and learn and discern and build on what you learn.
You can do much better on your own.
What Should You Do Instead?
Now, I must say there are great companies that are expert at managing PayPerClick campaigns. There are great freelancers too. They are very smart and trustworthy.
Just avoid the corporate types worth multiple millions. We have local talent right here in DFW that can help you manage these campaigns.
Quality management can be time intensive especially if you do not a pro at the manipulation of data. There is a lot of sifting and sorting and changing and it takes time.
Your talent needs to work closely with you to maintain a healthly message to market match.
Stu Langley can help you with the strategic content and setting up and starting a Google Adwords campaign.
PayPerClick is a very natural fit with creating compelling content. They go hand in hand. I do not manage large and complex accounts long term. You might manage just nicely on your own or you might want to find freelance talent to help you with it. That is something you can evaluate as you move forward.
Quality experts at PayPerClick are happy to have you involved, want you to see the data, want you engaged in improving content to get better results. In fact, this a key indicator of who you want to hire. If it is all hype and parsing of phraseology “yes, you get to see keywords used” move on.
But you need to understand what is happening. This is the problem of big agencies managing your account. Unless you know what is happening, you are satisfied with mediocre results.
If you have any questions or would like to have a conversation to help with perspective, feel free to call or email. I would be happy to help with recommendations. I would be happy to detail the pitfalls for you.
Feel free to leave a comment below.
