What is PPC?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is perhaps the best known, yet least understood & often most poorly optimised of online marketing channels.
Put simply, PPC is the placement of adverts on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) to capture clicks from searchers. Using an auction-based system, advertisers bid on the highest Cost Per Click (CPC) they are willing to pay to show their ad for each keyword they wish to bid on.
At its simplest, and with the notable exception of Google, the highest bid is listed first on the search result page, second highest is second, and so on.
Google is an exception to this simplification as it takes many other factors into account to determine the final positioning of the ad, often placing ads with lower bids higher than more expensive listings. You can read more about this process in the 'How do We Do It' section above.
Paid listings are generally highlighted to searchers so they should be aware that the listing is an advert, rather than a listing from the natural results thrown up by the search engine's algorithm.
Based around a simple auction system, PPC is usually seen as a way to 'turn the traffic tap on'. The logic goes: just get the chequebook out and we'll give you hits.
At QueryClick, we don't look at PPC like this at all.
There are a wealth of optimisation oppotunities available with any PPC campaign. Not least of which is matching searcher intent to the ad you show to the landing page ultimately visited. Each step in this process has numerous areas of opportunity and tripfalls to be negotiated.
Consider how much more effective an ad would be displaying the day's discount on a pair of end of line shoes when matched to a search term like "discount men's brogues", using a landing page with a clear display showing the discount and the total amount saved next to a 'buy now' button, compared to just advertising your brand name and landing visitors on your home page - forcing them to navigate through to the product pages.
While highly technical in execution, delivering this matching of intent to product for up to tens of thousands of search terms at a time is easily achievable without the need for often costly automated bidding programmes and QueryClick have excellent experience in running campaign budgets of up to $100,000 per month with great success.
However, significant increases in traffic due to campaign optimisation are not limited to large, multinational campaigns, as shown by our case study for a UK brand which delivered 900% uplift in traffic and 150% increase in conversions for no additional agency spend when the client transitioned to QueryClick's expert PPC team.
If you'd like to find out if we can do the same for you, don't hesitate to get in touch with us today.
How Can PPC Help Me?
QueryClick's customer focused keyphrase research helps us segment your PPC campaign into service or product groups, which are further segmented by location & audience
We then segment based on value or feature call to actions, and develop granular adgroups with extensive negative keyphrase matching.
The benefits of our approach are:
- Reduce spend & increase traffic with an expert PPC review
- Capture traffic closer to conversion with highly targeted AdGroups
- Run campaigns with fine-grain budget control
- Minimise waste via comprehensive negative keyword lists
- Synergise with your SEO campaign for smart keyphrase spending
- Stop wasting money with broad match or keyword insertion tools
In short, if you're looking to make your ad spend go further, and you want to improve the quality of your traffic to drive up sales or enquiries, then we can help.
How Does QueryClick Do PPC?
With a deeply segmented campaign structure, we can:
- Control budget flow to each product or service offering and all variations of each, by location, by audience type & by call to action.
- Run multiple AdGroup creatives, regularly eliminating the poorest performing ad copy
- Introduce time or price sensitive call to actions by user segment to test performance
- Filter our top performing products by location & revise budgets based on time of day
- Track through to conversion the most valuable user segment to target with supporting display network creatives via Doubleclick AdPlanner
- Ensure sufficient budget is allocated to raise quality score via clickthrough rates for most efficient ROI
- Precise targeting of negative keyphrase lists to eliminate inadvertent ad-matching due to regional variation in terminology.
As you may have guessed by now, this approach is the opposite of broad match and is the antithesis of keyphrase insertion tools: so there's no fancy automated bidding solutions available with QueryClick's PPC strategies just good, well-researched, strategies, implemented via Google's API to ensure your QualityScore is the absolute best it can be.
As a result, we can bost some of the most remarkable campaign improvements out there for clients switching to QueryClick from other agencies, making a free enquiry about what we can do for your campaign today a no-brainer.
With the structure we advocate, there's also no reason why you can't capture your most valuable audience without resorting to 'innovative' ROI number-crunching PPC tools which often escalate budgets to unsustainable levels without improving traffic - and often even reducing the number of actual clickthroughs.
Within this detailed campaign structure we have full control over where budget is spent, ensuring sufficient traffic for high quality scores, while constant copy clickthrough tests improve AdGroup CPAs, and weekly campaign performance reviews allow us to weed out underachieving keyphrase terms.
In addition, using our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) expertise, we can better convert the traffic driven by your PPC & SEO campaigns, lowering your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and raising your CPC threshold to further drive relevant, high converting traffic to your site.