Pay Per Click Advertising (or Search Engine Marketing)

Pay per Click Advertising also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an effective way to immediately drive targeted traffic to your website. One of the advantages of Pay per Click advertising over search engine optmisation is that as soon as your website is live you can immediately create a campaign that will drive visitors to your site, so you can start making sales straight away. The most effective Pay per Click advertising platform Yarra Web uses is Google AdWords.

Below is a brief explanation of how Google AdWords works.

What is Pay per Click Advertising?

Pay per Click advertising harnesses search engines such as Google and Yahoo, social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube and other websites to advertise your business.

The main platforms Yarra Web uses for Pay per Click advertising are Google and Facebook. Why? Because Google is the world’s most visited site and Facebook is the world’s second most visited site. Later we will discuss Facebook and social media advertising, but for now we will concentrate on Google AdWords.

Google’s Pay per Click platform is called Google AdWords. If you have used Google to search for anything at all you would probably have seen Google AdWords, the AdWords or sponsored links appear either in a faint yellow or pink box at the top of the search results, or listed down the right hand side of the page, see Image one below.

Image One – A Typical Search Results page on Google with the Adwords Highlighted in Red Boxes.

pay per click

In figure one above you can see I have typed in the phrase “toys for dogs” into the search bar and the AdWords are highlighted in the red boxes that I have drawn over the top of the page. The first AdWords listing in this case is for the “RSPCA Australia Pet Store”. If I, the searcher click on the ad for RSPCA Australia then I will be taken to their pet store website. The advertiser, in this case, the RSPCA will then have to pay a certain amount of money to Google because I have clicked on their ad. This is why it is called “Pay per Click Advertising”.

Probably the biggest benefit of Google AdWords over traditional forms of advertising, for example a television ad, is that your ad is displayed only to people who are actively searching for your products or services. In the example above, I was searching for toys for dogs and up popped the ad for the RSPCA pet store. If the RSPCA had decided to advertise on television, the ad would have been seen by a lot of people but only a very small percentage of those people, if any would have been actively searching for toys for dogs.

How do you Target your AdWords?

The main way to target your ads to the right people are:

Keyword Research: we research the most popular keywords for your industry. For example, if you sell pet supplies, we research the popularity of phrases such as “toys for dogs”, “pet shops Melbourne”, “cat food store” etc. We have tools that can tell us how many times per month each of those phrases was searched for in Google. We then determine which of those phrases are the most popular and which are most relevant to your business and ask Google to display your ad when someone types in one of those phrases.

We also look at the advertiser competition for those keywords. For example if there are 50 other business bidding to display their ads for your keywords we might find it is cost prohibitive to advertise for certain keywords. In other words we find every means possible to stretch your budget as far as possible.
Geographic Targeting: We can then set your ads to display to people only in a certain area. For example, if you are a plumber and only service certain suburbs, it makes sense to only display your ads only to people within those suburbs.
Network & Device Targeting: We can then choose which networks you would like to display your ads on out of the available Google networks and devices. For example, you can choose to display your ads to people using i-phones, or to display your ads on Google’s partner websites.
Demographic Targeting: If you choose to display your ads on Google’s display network (Google’s partner websites) you can also choose a limited number of demographics to target, such as age groups and gender.

How can Yarra Web help you with Google AdWords?

Now that you (hopefully) understand how Google AdWords works, and you think your business could benefit from Google AdWords, feel free to contact us. We can:

Set up a new campaign for your business.
Fine tune your existing campaign for better results

Call us on 1300 554 687 or email us to find out more.

One More Thing - Don’t Confuse Pay per Click with Search Engine Optimisation

As described above, Pay per Click advertising works by paying Google a certain amount of money every time someone clicks on your ad in the search results. When you stop paying then your ads will disappear.

Search engine optimisation works by creating the best possible web design to make your website appear high in Google’s ‘natural’ or ‘organic’search results. In Image one above, the first natural result on the page is the link in blue which says “Home – Toys for Dogs”. This website, and all the websites listed beneath this one, do not pay anything when someone clicks on their website. Also, it is estimated that these natural or organic results receive around 3 times as many clicks as the AdWords or sponsored links which are listed at the top and down the right hand side of the page. Therefore it is essential that a good search engine optimisation strategy is included in your overall marketing strategy, as well as Pay per Click advertising.