PPC 101

PPC 101
23 March 2012 | | Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

What is pay-per-click (PPC)? How does it differ from SEO? Can i use it to market my Dental Practice? These are a just a few of the questions i’ve heard from clients when I’ve mentioned PPC so I’ve decided to put together a beginners guide highlighting what PPC is, how it works, key performance metrics and a few tips and tricks on how to get your campaigns up and running properly.

What is PPC?

Pay per Click campaign involves producing targeted advertisements which are shown in the sponsored listings to the top and the right of the organic results. Advertisers select keywords which will trigger the Ads to show in the search results and pay a budgeted amount when a potential customer clicks through on the Ad, which then takes them to a specific page on the website.

How PPC works

Successful PPC campaigns are built on relevance. To ensure advertisers produce relevant content for users, Google doesn’t only rank adverts based on the amount of money someone is willing to pay. They also use a ‘Quality Score’, which takes into account the relevance of your ad to the searcher’s keyword. Your quality score should be at the heart of your AdWords campaigns and a good one will help reduce your advertising costs.

Google wants to deliver relevant content to its searchers. In a nutshell, relevance creates clicks and clicks create profit. And, from Google’s perspective, clicks to relevant useful sites create loyal search engine users who come back (and keep clicking).

Google’s system calculates quality score for each of your keywords. You can use this quality score to estimate how much you are likely to have to bid for a top position in the add rankings.

What influences your Quality Score?

Every time someone does a search that triggers your ad, Google calculates a Quality Score. To calculate this Quality Score, we look at a number of different things related to your account, like the following:

  • Your keyword’s past clickthrough rate (CTR): How often that keyword led to clicks on your ad
  • Your display URL’s past CTR: How often you received clicks with your display URL
  • Your account history: The overall CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • The quality of your landing page: How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate your page is
  • Your keyword/ad relevance: How relevant your keyword is to your ads
  • Your keyword/search relevance: How relevant your keyword is to what a customer searches for
  • Geographic performance: How successful your account has been in the regions you’re targeting
  • Your ad’s performance on a site: How well your ad’s been doing on this and similar sites (if you’re targeting the Display Network)

 

Keywords

Google offers a variety of match types. Let’s look at some examples, using the keyword Dentist London:

  • Exact match If you chose to advertise against searches for Dentist London your ad would only appear for searches on this exact keyword. Nothing more, nothing less.
  • Phrase match This matches phrases with the keyword in that order. So your advert would appear for Cosmetic Dentist London
  • Broad match – matches Dentist London, London Dental practice and Children’s Dental practice London.

 

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are words you don’t want your ads to appear for. You need to keep adding negative keywords, as you don’t want your ads to appear next to things that are negative to your brand. And you don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks. For example if you are a private dental practice and you don’t offer NHS treatment then you should add ‘NHS’ as a negative keyword. You can use the ‘see search terms’ keyword report to see what keywords are actually triggering your ads, this is a useful exercise to discover negative keywords to your campaign.

Tips on writing ads

Put keywords in your title. Aim to convey your unique selling point (USP) and relevant features in your ad copy. Remember consumers skim read so make it easy to read your ad quickly. Put the primary keyword in your display URL if space permits. E.g www.yourdentalpractice.co.uk/teethwhitening

Structure and organization

Structuring your account correctly will increase the relevance of your keywords and ads which in turn will increase your quality score and lessen your costs per click. If you want to optimise an account, campaign structure is one of best things to target. This is the account structure that Google recommends:

 

Definitions

  • Clickthrough rate (CTR) – this tells you how many clicks your ads are getting in relation to their impressions. The higher the CTR, the more people are engaging with with your ads.
  • Max CPC – the maximum you specify you are prepared to pay per click.
  • Average CPC – the average amount you are actually paying.
  • Ad rank – this is a score based on your quality score and your bid, that determines your average position.
  • Quality score – this is measured out of 10.

 

Location targeting

Location targeting allows your ads to appear in the geographic locations that you specify, as well as additional areas that AdWords suggests. Location targeting helps you focus your advertising on the areas where you’ll find the right customers, and hopefully helps you increase your return on investment (ROI) as a result. For example if you are a Dental Practice in Manchester, you can target via IP address to only show your ads in that region. You can also target by search intent, so if someone types in ‘Dentist Manchester’ but is outside the IP address region then the ad will still show.

Location targeting is very important for Dental PPC campaigns because on the whole your patients will only travel so far for your services. We recently took over an account which had a teeth whitening campaign which had a UK wide targeting which meant that is was getting a lot of wasted clicks!

 

 

 


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