Choosing a pay per click agency

Pay per click (PPC) advertising agencies can help you start your PPC campaign and attract quality sales traffic to your website. A good place to start your search for an agency is to open your favourite search engine and search for one in your area. If you find a name in the top ten generic results and again in the top three sponsored links, you could click through and see whether the landing page matches your expectations.

Before contacting an agency, consider the skills and competencies you expect of an agency and your marketing goals and objectives.

There are certain similarities with traditional advertising agencies – eg you’ll want prospective PPC agencies to provide testimonials and customer references or case studies. See our guide on how t0 choose and manage advertising agency.

However, PPC agencies must have different skills and a different mind set. Ask prospective agencies whether they’re accredited as a Google AdWords Qualified Company, a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and/or a Microsoft adExcellence member.

A good agency should have proven experience in the particular complexities of a stand-alone PPC campaign and Internet marketing campaigns that include PPC and other online marketing strands – eg banner adverts. They need to be able to show:

• an understanding of the pros and cons of the top PPC providers
• a good grasp of your market sector and competition
• proven experience and the necessary technology to set up, manage, track and analyse PPC campaigns
• a creative approach to PPC essentials – keyword research, bid management, daily budget, website optimisation and advert writing
• excellent strategic analysis and web analytic abilities
• how they set and achieve agreed targets
• how they plan to report to you and how often
• how they intend to maximise and measure your return on investment
• how they intend to charge you (eg a flat fee, a percentage of the campaign expenditure or on the basis of campaign performance)

Writing the advert is a critical point in your pay per click (PPC) campaign. You need to attract targeted leads and you have barely 100 characters to

Writing the advert is a critical point in your pay per click (PPC) campaign. You need to attract targeted leads and you have barely 100 characters to do this. Your copy needs to be compelling and you must attract the right buyers – ie those who want your product or service.

PPC gives you the flexibility to run different adverts in different regions, at different times of the day – or night – and target your copy to specific audiences. Because of the immediacy of the internet, you can prepare several adverts and test which works best, changing them every day if necessary.

Adverts have four short lines, the most important of which is the web address from which potential customers will click through to the landing page on your website.

Key points to consider when writing your adverts are to:

• include your keywords
• use phrases that relate to your keywords
• be specific – if you only serve a particular city, include it
• offer benefits – if you have a time-limited offer, say so
• your URL is part of the advert – make your keywords part of it
• keep your copy simple

Tracking your pay per click campaign results

The major search engines offer online analytical tools so you can track the growth of your pay per click (PPC) campaigns. You can also take on a PPC agency to carry out these critical tasks on your behalf and provide you with real-time reports. See the page in this guide on choosing an pay per click agency

Typically, such tools will allow you to see:

• how visitors find your website.
• how they navigate through it.
• how they become customers.

When you analyze these statistics, which you can view as graphs, summaries and other data, you will be able to improve your online results.

• In some cases, the tools are more sophisticated. For example, the Google Analytics tool will allow you to:Assess whether your conversion rate differs between regions – the conversion rate is the number of visitors to your site that actually become customers during their visit.
• Find out where your customers live – if you find a heavy density in a particular region, you could then target a campaign to draw them back as return customers.
• Examine and optimize your landing pages – you can then make an informed decision as to whether to improve their design or pare them down until they match the proposition described in your keyword adverts.
• Count how many steps there are from landing to conversion – establish whether you could reduce this number if you are losing visitors along the way.
• Establish where drop-out visitors are going when they leave your site – if it’s to a competitor, check how your copy, landing page and number of steps to conversion compares with theirs.

do .gov links helps in better ranking of your site

There is always an misconception that .gov sites or .ac.uk sites have more than link from normal domain.

People often tend to think that .gov sites or .edu sites gets the page rank automatically. So even if you get that .edu or .gov link and people don’t click to that link then you are not going to get any page rank at all. All the links are treated in the same the manner, whether it is .gov or .edu or .info sites. In short gov sites do not carry any more weight other than raw page rank scores being higher.

So in order to have better page rank is to look for other good quality and relevant sites to cultivate link regardless of being .gov or just a normal domain.