Have your brand where customers can see it

If you need qualified traffic fast, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is still the easiest and most efficient way to target the right audience. PPC goes hand in hand with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as the foundation of search engine marketing (SEM).

We all know that the internet is big. According to Internetworldstats.com, there are an estimated 1.6-billion people online – representing just under a quarter of the world’s population. And people are pretty passionate about being online too – a study published on Net Imperative in December 2008 showed that consumers in the UK would be more likely to give up fresh fruit and vegetables rather than their broadband connection to save money in the recession.

In Africa, we’ve seen a rapid escalation of the number of people online. In fact, the number of people online has risen by 1360% in nine years from about 4.5 million in 2000 to nearly 66 million in 2009. Interestingly, Africa as a region still has the lowest penetration compared to other parts of the world, with only approximately 6.7% of the population having access to the internet.

This said, there are fantastic opportunities online for businesses and brands to reach customers. One of the best ways to do this is to put yourself where your customers are. Social networks aside, search is still a dominant activity on the internet – and it pays to be at the top of the first page for relevant searches. This can be achieved organically (naturally) through SEO. PPC adverts also appear alongside and above organic results. These are an instant way to get traffic to your site, but at a cost.

Pay Per Click advertising works on a kind of auction system. Advertisers bid on keywords that they specify for their ads. They can also choose the match-type – broad, exact or negative matching – which will determine when the ad is displayed.

Advertisers can try different versions of the advert as well as alternate landing pages to test which combinations work more effectively for the maximum ROI. Of course, the trick to good PPC campaign management is also keeping an eye on the bids and tweaking accordingly to keep the average Cost Per Click (CPC) as low as possible. The bid per keyword is a maximum bid, in other words, you will only pay 1c more than the next highest bidder per click. Of course, it’s not as simple as that because Google also uses a ‘quality score’ to determine in what order ads appear. This quality score is calculated using indicators such as the keywords that have been chosen, the quality of the landing page and the click-through rate. So, it’s not always true to say that the ad at the top is costing the most.

That in a nutshell is how PPC advertising works on the search engines. But there is another advantage to using PPC to reach your customers. If you opt into advertising on the content network this means that your ads will appear on 3rd party websites that have opted into the Google AdSense programme. These contextual ads are displayed alongside relevant content on these sites, and are often cheaper per click (although the click through rate is generally much lower than on the search engines). In this way you are able to place your product or service in front of potential customers on their favourite sites.

Other benefits of PPC advertising are that it is completely measurable, easy to manage and results are easy to calculate. Instant results mean than Pay Per Click is a great way to boost a campaign short-term and get qualified traffic to where you want it, quickly. With the online community growing by the minute, it’s in companies’ interests to ensure that they are visible in this virtual market place.