Paid Marketing

Freelance Website Services from Paul Chester
Independent, Impartial, Bespoke Solutions

You don’t need to use Paid Marketing to promote your website
but it can be a great method to accelerate learning, growth and sales

Paying for Ads : How this can help your business

I’m a big believer in the ethos that a website should be treated as a business in its own right. This means, like any business, it should be marketed to attract visitors, build brand awareness and generate sales or leads. Paid marketing comes in many forms but I’m going to focus, for now, on the 2 main channels I use: PPC is Pay Per Click, typically through Google AdWords, its network for bidding on keywords to have your ads placed above and below the organic search results and Social Media Advertising on networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where you can target an audience with your ads to generate site visitors, sales or social likes and shares.

By using paid ads, you can accelerate the process of generating sales or leads for your website business. You can learn a lot about your audience, buying habits, your website and, if managed properly, paid marketing can become a very cost effective way to not only kickstart a new business but also implement as a long-term strategy.

Platforms, Analysis and Optimisation

When you’re considering paid marketing, there are a variety of platforms to choose from but whilst they are different, they all have a common mechanism for optimisation.

The good thing about paid ads is that the data generated is much more succinct than you’d get with SEO so when it comes to budgets and bids, whatever the platform, it can be analysed to identify the success paths and through a process of learning from this, you can optimise the best value areas and recognise where to achieve the best value and ROI.

I’ve run many campaigns on many platforms so have a deep knowledge of how to limit spend, focus on ROI and optimise campaigns through data analysis so hiring me to manage your paid marketing usually means my costs can be offset through increased sales for your business.

Straight Forward Paid Marketing Services from Me to You

  • Free consultation & business marketing review. I’ll connect with you to understand your business and online goals.
  • Analysis of your market & competitors
  • Comprehensive keyword research
  • A variety of advertising platforms
  • Continuous Analysis and Improvement
  • I can provide Full Service or work with your own resources
  • Clear pricing, agreed up front, no hidden costs
  • No lengthy contracts

Pay Per Click with Google AdWords

Google AdWords is the most popular platform for paid search and it can be an excellent platform for quick learning and audience segmentation. It can, with research and optimisation, return a positive ROI for your business.

The platform is flexible with many options to focus your spend in the right areas. When I’m working with clients on a PPC campaign, I take time to understand the goals and undertake full market analysis to ensure you have the full picture of potential costs.

Once running, I’m a data-junkie, analysing and understanding the flow of clicks-to-sales, optimising on quality and continuously testing ads, keywords and audiences to focus the campaigns on the best performance.

The changing landscape of Google Results

Google experiments with their search results, they also display different layouts depending on what you’re searching for. The current layout typical of ‘shopping intent’ shows 3-4 paid ads at the top of the results, 2-3 ads at the bottom of the page (after the organic results) and a bunch of Google Merchant results (a type of AdWords ad focused around E-Commerce sites).

You’ll see this layout change depending on what Google thinks your intent is when searching, what device you’re searching on and sometimes where you’re searching from geographically.

When considering Google AdWords, it’s important to consider where your ad shows up in this mix. It might be a natural assumption that bidding the highest to get to the top of the page is also the ad position that will give you the most clicks – that is usually true but, these will usually be the most expensive and you will also find that in most industries, this is also the least value as many people click the first Ad position then ‘bounce’ back to Google to try another ad in the list.

So it is vital to test and identify the best position for your ad and understand what people do when they click through to your site.

The ad you show will also have an effect on the click-through-rate (CTR) and you had better be sure that the keywords you’re bidding on are right for your intended audience or you’ll be burning your money instead of achieving your goals.

Making PPC Work for you

Optimising AdWords to achieve your goals is something that can be learned. I like to educate my clients on the basics and in many cases, this is all that is required but, in a larger campaign you’ll need to focus intently on every aspect of the plan and ensure you are improving quality, relevancy and, of course, reaching the goals you want.

PPC Advertising

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) The Umbrella Term for all Paid Marketing Channels

There are, as ever, a bunch of acronyms related to SEM. Not all platforms are the same, sometimes, the same platform offers different solutions for distributing your spend.

PPC

Stands for Pay Per Click. This model is typical of platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Ads (Microsoft’s equivalent platform). Users are charged a per-click price based on bids placed on keywords.

CPC

Cost Per Click relates to the price paid for the clicks on ads shown; whatever platform, is always a useful data point to identify value, also a metric that can be improved on through optmisation.

CPM

This is the cost-per-thousand impressions. Some networks offer options for delivering ads on a CPM basis instead of a PPC/CPC method; depending on your business, this can be a cheaper option. Platforms such as Google AdWords offer both PPC and CPM models.

CTR

Click-Through-Rate is the metric used to identify the frequency of clicks vs. number of displays. Many things can affect this metric including ad position, ad text, images and context.

Where I can Help

Selecting the right platform and pricing model is important. Different platforms can have different audiences and if you’re spending money on advertising, you’ll want that to go to the right place as quickly as possible.

I’m very experienced in breaking down the barriers to entry into these markets, analysing the competition and both the setup, measurement and ongoing optimisation of campaigns across multiple platforms.

I can help you focus your advertising spend on where you get the best value for money.

Concerned about Performance? A PPC Audit is what you need

If you’re already running a paid marketing campaign it may be worth having it audited. This is something I’ve done many times over and I’ve seen some really bad examples of campaigns in my time! Inexperience can cost you dearly, as can individuals and agencies that fail to optimise campaigns correctly. A simple audit will check the efficiency of the campaign setup, spend and performance and it can pay real dividends to bring in some expert advice.