How pay-per-click advertising works?

Research

Comprehensive and effective research is key to any strong campaign launch, but before we start, we first need to agree the goals of the campaign and decide how we are going to measure performance.

Once we have a better understanding of the aims of the campaign, we can build a comprehensive list of relevant keywords that will form the foundation of our campaigns. Usually, we decide on the choice of keywords through an open discussion with you, making sure we understand some of the more specific terminology that is used within your industry. We can also use a range of tools such as the “Keyword Planner” to produce ideas based on search volumes and trends.

When this list has been created, we will use this to form Ad Groups, which are essentially groupings of commonly themed keywords often dictated by your products and services. Each Ad Group will then have its own set of adverts created that will make your brand stand out from the competition with a combination of search-relevant text and calls to action. These ads will take the searcher to the most relevant page on your website for their query, making it easier for them to complete the desired action.

Account Setup

Once we have built the keywords and ads, it is time to setup an account and upload these into it ready to go live.

We always recommend beginning with Google Ads platform, before expanding onto other search platforms, such as Bing Ads once Google has been saturated (each member of our team is qualified to manage on both!).

When the campaigns have been uploaded, we will make the necessary adjustments to your accounts location, network and language targeting and ensure that features such as Ad Extensions, which are key to a good click through rate and quality score, are added to each campaign. We will also ensure that each keyword has a bid associated to it, taking into account the competitiveness of your industry and any targets that have previously been discussed. This bid, combined with the quality of your landing page, will determine where in the search results your advert will appear.

After launch, we manage these bids on a daily basis to ensure they maintain an agreed ROI (Return on Investment) metric.

Tracking

To measure the performance of your account, we will need to accurately track metrics for each keyword, ad and landing page used, to make careful judgements on which we will base our optimisation plans.

These important elements include:

• Keyword performance
• Ad performance
• Historical performance
• Click Through Rate
• Cost per Click
• Quality Score
• CPA
• Geographic performance
• Past conversion rates

We can use the tracking in Google Ads to show us how keywords perform within the search results, but to gain real insight, we combine this data with that from Google Analytics, so that we can gauge site visitor behaviour by each keyword and make judgements on a keywords effectiveness as well as their costliness.

By combining Google Ads and Google Analytics data, we not only have the different conversion tracking functions from Google Ads, but the Goal and Event tracking from Analytics, meaning that the actions that are monitored become far more comprehensive, allowing us to place a more accurate value on each type of visitor.

Launch (The Fun bit!)

Once we are happy that our keywords, landing pages and performance metrics are installed correctly it is time to unleash your campaign on the millions of search engine users.

Launching a campaign usually takes an hour or so, and once we are happy, your ads can start appearing for relevant searches on the same day and statistics on performance can be gathered almost instantly.

We are now working with real data and can see exactly what is working and what is not. Our PPC management team now start to maximise the ROI by tweaking keyword bids, removing any poorly performing keywords and adding any new terms that arise during the initial showing.

Optimisation & Refinement

We often meet clients who say they have “given PPC a go” but it seemed a bit expensive. This is usually because they missed out this stage which is the most vital part of the process.

The daily optimisation of your campaigns is the secret to ensuring a good level of ROI. Our team have saved our clients millions over the years and our management fee should be easily paid for by the savings we can offer you.

Our team are also on hand to adapt your campaign in line with any changes to your business, such as sales promotions, new product/service offerings, events or any other type of activity.

Reporting

Every month, we will provide you with a tailored report on the previous month’s activity, highlighting where performance has been strong, what opportunities lie ahead and what work we will be looking to complete in the next month to improve performance further.

Around this time, we also like to arrange calls to discuss your account’s performance, and to make sure the impact that we are seeing is the same as what you are experiencing. Here we can discuss in more detail about current performance and explain what this data means for your business.

Reports can be scheduled to meet your needs and contain any information, from basic Google Ads performance, to Google Analytics statistics and year on year comparisons, it is completely up to you!