PPC for your business - a few things you need to know

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and this is a paid-for way of using search engine results to drive traffic to your website instead of relying on organic search results.

If that still sounds like gobbledygook to you, then think of it like traditional media, where there is editorial, which is written by a journalist and is unbiased (which is like organic search engine results) and paid adverts (which is like PPC). The organic results when you search for something online, are those without any note next to them, and the paid are the results you normally see at the top and bottom of a Google search page, marked “sponsored”.

The adverts work by charging you every time someone clicks on your advert through to wherever it is linked to - usually a landing page on your website. If you have a really good PPC set up, and a very relevant, well-thought-through website, it will be a great investment, because the traffic coming to your site will be converting into paying customers. So if a click costs, say £25 but it is bringing you a sale worth £150 in profit to you, you are getting a great return. Here are some key reasons to consider PPC:

Customers are likely to click on your ad

Because PPC is based on key words, it ensures your advert appears to people searching for what you are offering and generally, because the adverts are relevant to them, people searching online don’t mind and are very likely to click on the advert rather than ignore it, because it fits their needs.

It helps you get in front of the right customers

As an advertiser, using PPC allows you to ensure your advert is only seen by people it is relevant to – by using keywords only people looking for what you have to offer will actually see the advert so it’s a very targeted approach.

Google rewards you the better your ad works

The more your ad works, the greater number of click-throughs you get, and the lower your costs will be from Google – it’s a real win-win all round.

PPC is incredibly flexible

If you set up an ad campaign on Google or Facebook or anywhere else online, and it doesn’t get the results you are looking for, it is very easy to go in and change the wording, change the call to action or adjust the audience you want to see it - unlike a print ad which goes out just once and is permanent. You can also stop any time you like, or adjust when it appears. So if you are not able to respond to customer visits at a weekend, for example, you can set it so they don't appear during those hours.

You can use PPC for different reasons

Your pay per click advert can be set up to encourage people to call you, send you an email, book for an event or simply to like your business page – there are many different options when you set up a PPC campaign and you can also have more than one running at the same time.

How can LCM help?

If you would like to speak to our PPC campaign experts at LCM, to see if this is the right approach to take for your business, then please do give us a call. We will be happy to talk through what you are trying to achieve. We will ask you guided questions to find out if you need our kind of input, or if another route is best for you.