Refresh Cambridge July - PPC management
Refresh Cambridge (which by my reckoning is entering its third year right about now) met last week for a discussion on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management, led by Rob from local agency db|design.
Due to the varying levels of experience in the audience, the Q&A covered everything from the basics of how PPC works through to using Google’s Adwords and Analytics tools together to monitor, tweak, and improve your ad performance.
I wasn’t taking any notes, but here (to the best of my recollection) are some of the areas we talked about:
- The simplest definition of Pay-Per-Click is that it is paying to have your advert show up at the top or on the right of Google’s search results pages. There are other search companies that operate PPC, but for the amount of effort needed to gain the small amount of traffic they deliver it’s usually better to just concentrate on Google.
- Ad spaces are ‘sold’ in an auction system—advertisers bid for spots, and the amount you are willing to pay determines where in the sponsored results your ad will appear.
- There are benefits to appearing in the first sponsored result, even if you also show up in the regular (“organic”) listings as well.
- The best position in which to appear is around the fourth or fifth on the right-hand side of search pages. (YMMV)
- The biggest mistake made by beginners is not having enough keywords. You should have a few thousand at least.
- Once your campaign is running, you can see which keyword combinations perform best, and tweak your bids or keywords correspondingly.
- By using Analytics you can see the performance of your Adword campaigns/keywords, allowing you to make decisions based on conversion as well as the number of clicks.
Rob also shared a little trick with us. There is the option to set a daily limit on your ad spend within Adwords, but setting this to a sensible limit (e.g. you have a £100 monthly budget, so you set a daily budget of £3) will make Google severely restrict how many times your ads appear. Rob recommended setting the daily limit to an extremely large figure—say £10,000—so that your ads are shown much more frequently; you can control your actual spend by manipulating the maximum bids on your keywords.
Filed under: Refresh-Cambridge.
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