Pay Per Click Marketing – Why What Made Google Rich Can Do the Same For You!

Would you say Google is a reasonably wealthy company? How did that happen? Surely all they do is to provide a free search engine?I love the Google story. They really did set out to create a fast, efficient and user friendly search engine. Now I don’t know if Larry Page and Sergy Brin knew how they would eventually turn a profit, but I like to think that at first they just wanted to build the best search engine, and they really did achieve this. Once they had achieved it, they then needed to make a profit. They then had another masterstroke of pure genius on two levels:1. Offer advertising next to the search results, but only make the advertiser pay if someone clicks on their advertisement2. Let the market decide how much the advertiser should pay for every click that they receiveThose two amazing ideas have made Google rich, probably beyond anyone’s imagination. As an advertiser, there is no risk to trying the advertising as you only pay if it works, and for them the fact that the market sets the amount per click means it will level off at a very profitable level for Google, and you can stop bidding if it becomes too expensive.For those of you who have tried Pay Per Click advertising and it did not work, I would urge you to try again. It can work for every type of small business owner. I have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of both my own and my client’s money on Pay Per Click advertising. Please let me assure you, with one of my mantra’s being “There is no treasure without measure” I would not have carried on spending the money if it was not proving incredibly profitable.For those of you who have never tried it and are worried your competitors will spend all day clicking on your advertisements do not worry. Google has click fraud systems in place. It does work as I mentioned above. It doesn’t matter whether you never click on the ‘sponsored links’, enough people do to have made Google rich so that proves the point beyond any doubt.There are huge opportunities for Pay Per Click marketing. This is where the small business owner can equally complete against the large businesses. In fact, with more focus on your marketing and more intent you can spot new opportunities for Pay Per Click advertising that your larger competitors will miss. I guarantee this as I have done it for many of my small business clients.For those of you who have not yet tried it, pay per click advertisements are the advertisements that appear on Google in the top one to three positions (with an orange background) or on the right hand side of Google search results page.How Does It Work? You target certain keywords, for example I might target “small business marketing” and then you tell Google how much you are prepared to pay if someone searches on that search term AND then clicks your advertisement. Until they click your advertisement you pay nothing, so you only pay if your advertisement works. The amount for each click can be anything from a few pence to £10 or even more for premium products or services.Keyword Research. The first step is to choose your keywords (and this is also the most important step too). Just type Google AdWords Keyword Tool into Google and this free tool will allow you to do this. If you type in a search term into the keyword box it will give you all of the related search terms. For instance, try typing “small business marketing” in and you will see all of the different varieties. Type in your service or product name and you will see some of the potential search terms you could be targeting. This will provide you with alternative search terms too and will also show you the volume of searches. You can easily then select them and add them to your campaign. It takes only minutes to set up a campaign with Google, and you can decide how much you want to spend with them on a daily basis (thereby limiting your monthly expense). You can therefore test it very cheaply.The wonderful thing about Google is that it allows you to limit your spend, but vitally it also tracks and measures your success. For instance, if you set a budget of £1 per each click, if someone sees your advertisement on the top or at the right and clicks on it you will pay a sum of no more than £1. The exact amount will depend on how well your advertisement is working. This is called your click through rate (CTR).Click Through Rate Explained. If your advertisement is displayed 100 times for your chosen search term and two people click through to your website you will have a 2% click through rate.The higher your click through rate is the better your position on the page will be and the more chance you will have of spending less than the £1 that you have bid. Google allows you to test two or three advertisements against each other to see which one performs better.Therefore, you can measure to find your treasure. Once you have found one advertisement is working better than another, you delete the poor performing advertisement and write a new one to improve upon your performance. You continue to do this indefinitely until you have a fantastically well performing key word and advertisement.This is one of the reasons that a small business can often beat the bigger competition as many of the large players will not constantly re-define their advertisements and therefore they have poor click through rates and have to spend more to appear on the page. If you are a small business and can spend a little more time on this you will achieve great results and can really beat the big boys in the market.Pay Per Click marketing really can work wonders for your business. Have you tried it?