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Thursday 16th September 2010 Networking Event & Lunch
12.00 o’clock to 2.15pm
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Richard Suthons Associates
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With effect from 1 September 2009, membership of the Warwickshire Business Club is FREE. The individual annual membership fee of £50 and the corporate annual membership fee of £150 have been scrapped! To become a member, all you have to do is attend just one networking event and this entitles you to free membership of the club.
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Low Cost Advertising: Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) using Google Adwords
by Stefan Drew of Stefan Drew Associates
PPC is unlike traditional advertising where you pay to appear in, for example, the paper with no guarantee of success.
With PPC you only pay when someone is sufficiently motivated by your advert that they react to your call for action. Essentially PPC works by placing your advert at the top of the search engine listings. Once at the top it will appear on screen when a relevant Google, or other search is made, but you only pay if the reader clicks onto it.
You need to “bid” for the key words likely to be put into the search engine and can pay as little as 2p. Clearly those that pay most get higher up the list but if no one clicks on your advert you are not charged and it is a combination of the ability to chose the right keywords and price bid that is part of the trick behind making PPC work. The “better” your keywords the lower the price you will pay. Price however is not the only factor in positioning an advert; the copy and keywords all influence the position and it is possible to pay less than a competitor and stil appear higher up the rankings than them.
Landing page quality is another major factor taken into account by Google when it assesses your Google Adwords campaign and hence where you appear for the price paid.
The ability to write good copy and produce a quality page is as important here as it is in SEO. The two are in fact complimentary.
One of the very positive aspects of Adwords is that unlike newspaper adverting where
you might pay £500-
Like newspaper advertising it is also possible to limit the geographic area you advertise in – you could choose London, New York, Lancashire or Cymru if you wish.
The wider the area chosen the more competition you will have and more you will need to pay to get to the top of the list. However many organisations only need to advertise locally and you can choose to advertise in a given radius around your premises.
When setting up PPC you not only decide how much you bid for your keywords but also
what your total spend will be. At 5 pence per click a £5 maximum spend per day will
buy you 100 self-
Although PPC is simplicity itself there are a number of tricks to determining success. One advantage of PPC is the ability to test two or more adverts side by side. After a while you will see which ones perform best and can either focus on them and delete the poor performers or you can set the system to favour the better responding adverts but still show your poor ones occasionally. This ability to test and measure makes it a useful tool in reaching niche targets and as a research tool.
In terms of research you can run similar adverts but alter one key benefit mentioned. Often referred to as “split testing” this is an expensive process offline but with Google Adwords you can test ideas very quickly and at very low cost in the actual working environment. (There is a distinct difference between Adwords, focus groups and surveys. Adwords demonstrate what people actually do whilst focus groups and surveys indicate what people say they will do or claim to have done.
For example a business might promote conference facilities with the following core text:
Large Conference Centre
In rural setting
Close to M5
www.yoururl/conference
An advariant of this could say:
Large Conference Centre
In rural setting
Plenty of parking
www.yoururl/conference
Another might say:
Large Conference Centre
In rural setting
Overlooking nature reserve
www.yoururl/conference
We can only guess at the benefits that will attract people to click through and a single advert in the press would provide us with little information.
Rotate the above three adverts automatically and you will almost certainly see a preference emerge. You can test as many variations as you wish and this can then be used to help you tweak the content of everything from web pages to leaflets.
Split testing can be extremely complex but if you approach it at a basic level and build skills it can give excellent results and reduce waste at the same time.
I recommend running several adverts, with various keywords, at any one time. The budget can still be minimised but the impact of this method far exceeds single PPC adverts that may not have the best keywords.
As campaigns mature it is then possible to take the best performing keywords and build campaigns around them. This has the virtue of improving the Click Through Rate (CTR), which will then drive down the cost.
Google Adwords are an extremely powerful marketing medium through which thousands of prospects, who are actively searching for what you have to offer, can be encouraged to visit your website. When set up correctly the cost per lead is very low and Adwords have generated very profitable repeat business for me with an expenditure of just pence.
The above may seem amazing – spend a few pence and get a customer that pays you thousands
of pounds -
Stefan Drew is an experienced management and marketing consultant and is well known for delivering outstanding marketing strategies for his clients.
Resource -
Articles written by members of Warwickshire Business Club
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