This article will look at Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for Small Businesses and show you how to make the most of your PPC campaign. It will assume you are using PPC on Google.

PPC is a great way to get visitors to your site quickly. These paid ads show up in Google around the organic search results so pairing up an effective PPC campaign with a solid SEO campaign will get you plenty of visitors from search engines.

Where SEO is much more effective at picking up highly relevant converting traffic, it can take a while to build up. Ranking organically in search engines takes time so having a good PPC campaign to get going quickly is one way of picking up visitors and getting your site noticed early.  This is especially good if you have a new site

If your site is already well established, PPC can be used in various ways to gain conversions. Maybe you are running a sale for a particular product which we will call “Super Widget”. Build a page dedicated to this offer and bid on phrases such as “Super Widget Sale” or “Super Widget Discount”. This will bring this offer to those looking for a discount on this mythical item. As the page you have built will be EXACTLY what your visitors are looking for they are likely to go on and convert.

This is why we consider PPC to be relevance based. If your visitors are paying per click you want to see conversions rather than just the clicks themselves. Optimising for PPC if the key to the whole deal and Google has a lot to say on this but remember they profit from clicks, not from your conversions.

Here are some tips for a good PPC campaign...

Set up your Campaign Correctly

Check all the settings for your campaign. Once again the default settings are there to help Google make money, not make you conversions. Read as much as you can and check each slider, tick box and option to make sure you’re getting the best for you. Remember every hour you have a poorly set up PPC campaign, you could be losing money.

Choosing your keywords and finding which work for you, as well as finding the value of a bid is tough and may involve some trial and error. As you progress in PPC it will become second nature.

Budget Correctly

Look at how much your average cost per click is, then look at your daily budget, how many clicks is that? If it’s 5-10 a day is that enough? It would need to be very targeted if you have so few visits. If it’s 100+ are you getting a return on that money spent? If you only get 1 conversion from 100 clicks are you able to let 99 paid clicks go by?

Geographical Targeting

Where do you operate? If you only serve your local town then you don’t need to target the entire country. If someone in a different town or country clicks on your ad that’s money you cannot see a return on so take care when targeting. In the same way, don’t think TOO narrow. You don’t want to lose out on potential business because you were too tight on your location.

Time of Day

If you run a 24/7 worldwide business then your PPC campaign can run 24/7 to allow for all time zones.  But if your business is local and 9-5 then you may not need to operate PPC outside of these hours. This is especially true if your business relies on you to be there, such as you offer telephone support.

Check your Broad Match Settings

If you spend time finding the correct, refined keywords you probably don’t want Google Broadmatching them. This would mean you appearing for variations and plurals etc of the words you have carefully chosen. This can often be low quality, slightly-less-related traffic.

Use Negative Keywords

Make sure you remove words that are not related to your campaign but will often be used.  The example that is always given is if you offer a Cruise, remove ‘Tom’ and ‘Penelope’ as these are not related to the type of Cruise you are targeting.

Brand Name

Remember to bid on your brand name, if you don’t, your competitors might. Also bid on misspellings of your brand name.  Google is usually good at spotting spelling errors but be sure to gather in the visitors that Google missed.

There are many more ways you can benefit from PPC and there are 1000’s of tips around on how to gain converting traffic from your PPC campaign. See what works for your business.

I'm Rob, I work in SEO for Soula, a digital design agency based in Nottingham. Thank you for reading and good luck to everyone in their own PPC campaigns!