Skye Website Services: Web design, improvements and upgrades. Website management, development, training, promotion and
marketing. Specialising in assisting sole traders and small businesses on the Isle of Skye, and the rest of the Highlands
and Islands of Scotland, and other parts of the UK, particularly in remote areas.

Pay Per Click Advertising AKA Sponsored Links / Listings Explained

 

Fundamentally you are bidding for positions in the sponsored listings section of the search engines for search terms by means of which you want visitors to find your website. You produce a small advert which appears whenever the search term in question is entered by a user in the search engine.

 

It is an auction for positions for search terms. The more you are willing to "pay for a click", for a given search phrase, the higher your associated advert is likely to be placed above others when that search phrase is used. Clicks can cost as little as 1p (in Google) although normally there will be some competition for the search phrases so it is unlikely that a 1p bid will result in many visitors. However, it is still theoretically possible to obtain click-throughs for some search phrases for as low a price as this!

 

You will normally see the sponsored listings shown to the right of the main or "organic" listings. Sometimes they appear above the main listings. Because it is so incredibly hard to get a website into the organic listings for most commonly used search phrases these days, more and more businesses are turning to sponsored listings. If you want to read more on this topic, you can view my page on SEO versus PPC on my old website.

 

Pay per click advertising is a tricky affair to manage because:

  1. You have to keep adjusting your bids to rival the competition.
  2. You have to keep thinking of new search phrases to bid on in order to ensure that your adverts show reasonably often.
  3. Your adverts need to be finely tuned in relation to the search phrases which they are related to, otherwise users will not click on them.
  4. If users do not click on your adverts, the PPC provider may ask you to pay more for some of your clicks, ask you to modify some of your adverts, or forbid you from bidding on certain poorly performing search phrases.
  5. You have to specify a maximum budget and when this is depleted your adverts do not show.
  6. The pages on your website to which the adverts are directed must meet certain standards of relevance and other factors.
  7. The PPC management interfaces can be quite complex and there are a plethora of options which can be confusing.

It requires a lot of time and attention and experience to handle these matters, especially in the first few weeks of your campaign. This is why I offer to do it for you (more >), or to train you in how to do it yourself.

 

 

Other Forms of Advertising

 

 

As technology develops, more and more forms of website advertising are becoming available. Please watch this space as I add information about this.

 

 

Training - the DIY Option

 

 

I can also train you in how to do it yourself. This option is only suitable if you have plenty of time. It will save you money, but as you will discover, running an effective PPC campaign is an intricate and complex business.