Pay Per Click marketing for trades

Pay Per Click Marketing Part 2

For those that don't know what Pay Per Click marketing is and about how it can work for your business you can read part 1 here

As we know Pay Per Click advertising and Google Adwords Marketing is one of the best ways to drive prospective customers to your website and ones that are already looking for your product or service at the very point they need your service, This is especially great if your site is new and not been picked up and ranked by the search engines yet, which can take weeks.

Using Adwords in your marketing strategy can give a significant boost to your business and is a great return on marketing investment and if you've not tried it yet then do so.

A Sample PPC Ad for an Electrician

Below is a sample of one of the Ad that I ran for my business that did well

Writing an Ad is very simple but an art form in itself, you are limited on the number of characters so your Ad needs to be concise, yet draw the prospective customer in to click on your Ad. 
This Ad I set to only show in Hertford, so only people in Hertford would see it when they entered the Keywords I'd set, you see it's very relevant to them so they would click on it, then all that needed to happen was for them to be suitably impressed and get enough information from my website and call me.

Isn't it just a waste of marketing money!

Here's the thing if PPC doesn't work why are all the advertising companies using it! Google your trade now and see that yell, trust a trader, rated people etc are all using it and then charging 2 or 3 trades people around £12 for that lead, when they would have only paid £1 or £2 for it! 
Most of your competitors are not using PPC, so you will have a massive advantage over them!

The one thing with Adwords is that you can spend a lot of money and get little or no business from it, and I've heard this complaint from trades people many times, unfortunately I've not seen their particular Pay Per Click

marketing campaigns to comment on how they have spent too much with poor results but let me explain some possibilities as to why. 

First though let me clear up one myth and that is that your competitors can click on your ads over and over again and use up your budget, this is known as 'click fraud', However if they try this the Google Adwords program will recognise that the clicks come from the same PC and therefore not count clicks, this means that the competitor would have to use several different PCs and that would just be a waste of time (unless they were mental of course) This is time which would be better spent getting new customers. 

How to waste your Pay Per Click Budget

One way to use a lot of your PPC marketing spend is to set the wrong area for your ads to show, on my old Hertford Electrician site I have Google Adsense (Which allows you to have ads on your site and make money when people click on them) sometimes it shows ads for other electricians, now, my site is for Hertford and the local area only so why would an electrician from say Bath want to advertise in Hertford, it would not be worth them coming up to my neck of the woods for work!

When a a someone clicks on the ads they've lost money, this is because they've either set their ads to show UK wide or even worse, worldwide! 

Another point to note is that they have their Ad showing on Google's display networks, the problem here is your ad will get shown on a site with relevant content to your site but it may not be a great site to get prospects as they may not be searching for your services, therefore your budget may get wasted here when people are just curious and click on the ads.

Setting your bid too high means that your budget could get swallowed up pretty fast, it's best to aim for the second or third spot rather than the top where you'll be paying the maximum cost per click all the time. best to start low and increase the bid as you get reports from Adwords.

Start off your campaign with a few keywords, if you have lots of keywords and largely irrelevant ones your money will again be wasted, on top of this you'll not get good metric feedback. It's much better to focus your PPC campaign.

Making your Pay Per Click work better

Test, Refine, Repeat is what you should be doing with your Ad copy on a regular basis, start off with 10-15 ads and find the top performers, create duplicates and change a word or two test that Ad for a few days to see which gets the most impressions and clicks, then do it again, removing or changing just one word in the ad can reduce your ad spend and get a better return on investment as it may be that one word that influences a searcher to click. You also want to set your ads to show evenly so that you can see exactly how each performs on which day and what time during the day the day. I found my Ads always got more clicks around Wednesday late afternoon and evening. 
When you monitor like this you can set Adwords to show more often and at the best time!

Always be refining and tweaking your ads on a daily basis to see if you can get better results and reduce your spend and increase your ROI.


To your marketing success
Paul Jennings


If you run a trade business in or around Hertfordshire? I run 121 Google Adwords Marketing training for trades that can get you started and with £100 to spend on Google Adwords

And here is Part 3 in the Pay Per Click series about marketing your trade with Facebook ads

Marketing your trade to people who need you now!

Marketing to your future customers that are looking for you NOW! tell them you're here

Have you tried Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising yet? If not, read on as marketing your business with PPC can be a great way to bring in new business quickly.

What is PPC? 

The red boxes are the PPC listings or Sponsored Ads

When you search on Google for a product or service, you're shown results for that search, at the top and down the right hand side of the page are shaded boxes and in the top of the box are the words 'Sponsored Ads', the rest of the pages are what are called the organic listings or Google Places listings Read my post about how to get here for free. The 'Sponsored Ads' section is the bit we are concentrating on. 

The sponsored Ads is the PPC section where advertisers have 'bid' for their ad to show, I say bid because advertisers ads enter into an auction to be shown when someone searches for their product or service and depending where they come in the bidding depends where the ad gets shown.

If you were to bid £1 and a competitor was to bid £1.05 and others less than £1.00 your Ad would be shown in second place. Up until this point though it has not cost any advertiser a penny (Except for when you Pay Per Impressions), the time when the advertiser gets charged is when the searcher clicks on the ad, hence the term Pay Per Click.

Your marketing advert 

The ads that you create are limited to a certain amount of characters and you need to make it compelling to the searcher for them to click on it, It also helps to have the relevant keyword(s) that searchers are looking for in the ad itself. 

A relevant ad has more chance of being shown over a competitors (such as electrician in Hertford over just Electrician if the searcher has searched for the words Electrician in Hertford) and more chance of being clicked on by the searcher. When starting your campaign you should create around 10 Ads and test them to see which gets clicked on the most and then you take the best performing ad and create variations and pretty much repeat this tweaking all the time.


Keywords for marketing your trade 

when setting ads, advertisers need to set some keywords, words that are relevant to the business that someone searching for a product or service will type into the search engine, Some keyword examples for an electrician would be;

• Electrician
• Electrical contractor
• Electrical rewire
• Fuseboard change 
• Electrician prices
• Commercial electrician
• Emergency electrician

You can discover more of your own keywords with the Google Keyword tool here

Every word or phrase has a different cost per click, depending roughly how many advertisers there are and how much they are bidding for it therefore where you set your bid can make your Ad show or not be shown in the listings. The people bidding the highest will win the auction and so have their ad shown first.

Please note that your keywords should also be used throughout your website too as it helps in the ranking of your ppc ad as well as getting listed in the organic rankings.

Setting a ppc marketing budget

When setting up your ad, you are asked to set a budget, you may set a budget of £10 per day and let's say you set a bid of £1, once your ad has been shown and clicked on 10 times your ad will stop being shown for that day.

Lets say your competitor sets a budget of £10 also and and set a bid of £1, your ads will stop being shown around the same time, If however you set your budget at £15 your ads will be shown longer so you should get more business than your competitor. 

If however you set your budget at £10 but your bid at 75 pence once your competitor's budget has been used up your ad will start showing at the top later in the day once your competitors budget has been used up. The one thing with PPC is that once your set budget runs out it's like saying right I'm closing the shop - no more sales today. 

One benefit is that if you become busy you can turn it off and when you need more business turn it back on again. One tip is to set your ads so they show all the time at the start and see when you get the most clicks, then re set the times your ads show to only the times you get the most clicks.


Is your website a good or bad marketing tool

I'm going to keep this short, If your website is not good your prospective customer will bounce ie leave your website without an action, in other words you'd have wasted your money on PPC, make sure you have a good and well designed website before initiating a PPC campaign. Of course you could use just your Google Local page if you don't have a website, but in all honesty if you've not got a website then you are losing out!

Marketing on the networks

The three main networks for advertising your site are Google Adwords (the most used) Microsofts Bing and Yahoo Advertising Solutions, Google has more people using it for searching therefore it has more people advertising on it, the other two have less people using them so less advertisers which can mean you spend less or get more for your budget.

Conclusion

This has been a simplified overview of using Pay Per Click Marketing, you can view my Top tips on Marketing with Pay Per Click here. Pay Per Click marketing can be great for getting new business and it is very targeted to the people who need your service NOW!. It can take time to tweak it to get it right, the right ad, the right budget, the right bid etc. It really is a science or art and there are companies that just do this, whichever way you want to look at it. PPC done well means you can get more business than your competitors and spend less than them, this is when it's done well! 




To your PPC marketing success

Paul 



PS. If you run a trade business in Hertfordshire or don't mind travelling to Hertfordshire then you may be interested in my Google Adwords marketing 121 training. For more details on my Adwords training visit my website here

You can read part 2 about marketing your trade with Pay Per Click here

And here is Part 3 about marketing your trade with Facebook ads