Hints and tips for successful B2B Pay Per Click Advertising

1. Don’t just use Pay Per Click (PPC) - Your on line marketing strategy should include both Pay Per Click Advertising and natural Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) activity. PPC on its own is unlikely to deliver the optimum quality and volume of traffic to your site.
Whilst you must always write copy for your web pages that are focused on being ‘customer friendly’ you should also make sure that your site is also friendly to search engine ‘spiders’. Some examples of this are:

• Use ‘Title Tags’ effectively by including some of your keywords
• Ensure that every page is accessed from at least one ‘static’ text lin
• Don’t use graphic images to display import keywords or messages

To find out more about optimising your site for search engines see our ‘Search Engine Optimisation Tips’

2. Think about where you advertise - There are a great many search engines to choose from where you can be spending your PPC advertising money. Perceived wisdom is to focus on Google, Yahoo and Overture.
Google being the biggest and arguable the most sophisticated search engine provider is probably the best place to start if you are on a limited budget and want to ‘test’ your PPC strategy before broadening you approach to include the other important search engines.

• 3. Focus on what the customer wants from search advertising - Think like a customer – what would you want from entering a search term in a search engine?
• Relevance – The most successful ads will directly connect the user with what they are looking for so make sure that you only advertise on keywords and key phrases that are directly relevant to your product and service offering. Make sure your ads are targeted at potential users.
• Ease Of Use – Choose your adwords and landing pages carefully to take the customer directly to where they want to go – this will help them & improve your conversion rate.
• Benefits – Provide tangible benefits to your customers from using your site such as an information resource or a free advice service.

4. Get the Keywords and Key Phrases right - Make sure that you build a relevant and targeted keyword list. A number of software tools are available to help you do this and some of them, such as the Keyword Assistant from Overture, are FREE! Remember the importance of relevance to both you and your potential customers – you only want to present your ad to those people who want to see it and it can get very expensive if you get a lot of untargeted traffic because you have not been specific enough in your choice of keywords.

It is usually best to start with a relatively extensive list of keywords and then refine this list down based on the results that you are achieving – this way you can ‘test’ your way to the optimum list of keywords.

5. Get organised and know what you want to achieve - Organise your keywords and key phases into specific ‘campaigns’ targeted at different products and services and set measurable goals and objectives for each campaign. Use these metrics to monitor the success of your campaigns and to manage each campaign’s performance once it is live.

6. Get the creative right - As with all advertising the creative message is a key component in the success of your campaign. One of the great advantages of PPC advertising is that you can dynamically ‘test’ the success of different creatives and then refine your creative in a live environment to improve your click through rates and conversions. Some of the key elements of successful creatives include:

• Write copy tailored to each campaign and Ad group.
• Be concise
• Put the keyword in the advert to demonstrate relevance
• Always include a strong call to action (call us on 0800..... or Contact Us)

7. Think about the ‘landing’ pages - Make sure that you don’t lose users when they click through to your site from your ad because you haven’t taken them to the most appropriate and relevant page on your site.
Resist the temptation to get everybody to your home page because you want to showcase your full product and service offering. If the user has to click again to get to where they really wanted to go then you will lose a significant number of visitors.

8. You don’t always have to bid on the most popular terms - When you are building your keyword list the natural inclination is to always bid on the most popular keywords for your products or services – as they are the most popular they are also likely to be the most competitive and therefore the most expensive words to bid on to get a good position in search results. Secondary keywords can frequently deliver significant search volume and can be a lot cheaper to bid on!

9. You don’t have to be 1st - Avoid letting your competitiveness take over and always trying to achieve the no. 1 position in the ad listings. The evidence is that as long as you are in the top 4 or 5 positions you will still get significant click through traffic and these positions are frequently a lot less expensive to achieve!

With Google bidding the most is usually not enough, your ad has to be relevant to the search term so keep your focus on the creative as well as the amount you bid.

10. Test, measure and track everything - One of the great advantages of PPC advertising is that it is so very clearly measurable; Click Through Rates and conversion data can be readily available so use it to make sure that you optimise your ROI and learn about how PPC works for future campaigns.