More frequent, but no less logical

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are both forms of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). While SEO largely focuses on website coding and linking techniques in an effort to appear higher in the natural (free) search results, PPC involves the placement of targeted ads for strategic search phrases. Unlike SEO, which is typically seen a long-term strategy as results are not guaranteed, pay per click allows businesses to immediately reach thousands of potential customers.

Pay per click connects your business with the thousands of people looking for your products and services every day on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Compared to other marketing mediums, PPC can be an incredibly cost-effective way to deliver new leads and sales. It can help increase your market share, increase your brand awareness and develop your online presence. It's an extremely powerful marketing medium which can be tailored to suit your needs.

For businesses with smaller marketing budgets, PPC can be incredibly effective at delivering value on its own. For larger brands, a more holistic approach is ideal, with PPC used to complement other forms of marketing such as television, radio and print. And since web analytics allows such an incredible level of insight, key metrics such as brand searches and return visits can be used to help determine the relative success of each of your marketing efforts.

Although the fundamentals of Yahoo and Bing are essentially very similar to that of Google, market share and popularity is very different. User demographics are also very different for each of the search engines, so depending on the industry in which your business operates, conversion rates can often be very different. For this reason, and to reach a greater number of potential customers, it is often advisable to advertise on Google, Yahoo and Bing simultaneously. The relative performance of each search engine can then be measured, and campaigns adjusted accordingly.

Keywords are what PPC advertisers use to target potential customers. They are the words relevant to your business which you would like your ads to show. Search queries, on the other hand, are the actual searches people type into search engines such as Google, Yahoo & Bing. A PPC campaign might have thousands of keywords, structured in such a way so that only highly relevant ads are displayed whenever a keyword is triggered by a search query.

Exact match gives PPC advertisers an incredible level of control over the search queries which trigger their ads. By specifying that your keyword must be typed exactly, you can be sure what the searcher has typed, and therefore display a highly-tailored ad which matches their needs and requirements. However, since it is impossible to predict every possible search variation, broad and phrase match keywords are often required to increase the reach of PPC campaigns.

Due to massive variations in the types of searches people make every day, it is impossible to add keywords to cover every possible search query. Google's broad match mechanism allows unique ad hoc searches to trigger your ads, although this broad matching can often have mixed results. It is therefore essential to analyse search query data regularly, and add negative keywords to ensure ads only appear for highly-relevant searches.

Long-tail keywords are those highly-specific phrases such as 'luxury apartments in Paris for sale', as opposed to short-tail keywords such as 'apartments in paris'. Due to their highly-specific nature, people searching for long-tail phrases are often further along in the buying cycle and more likely to buy. And since long-tailed keywords can be up to 50% cheaper and convert up to 200% better than short-tailed keywords, it is essential to ensure long-tails account for the bulk of a campaign's clicks.

Every keyword has a different price depending on factors such as advertiser competition, ad ranking, relevancy, click through rate (CTR) and landing page quality. Through their Quality Score mechanism, Google reward advertisers who provide highly-relevant ads with discounts in their cost per click prices. This makes it possible to significantly reduce click spending if highly-engaging and relevant ads are provided for all search queries.

All other things equal, advertisers who bid a higher price for their keywords will tend to be shown in higher positions on the search results page. However, due to Google's Quality Score mechanism, it is possible for highly-relevant ad to appear in higher positions for a fraction of the price of less-relevant ads in lower positions. Researching cheaper long-tail keywords is another strategy to appear in higher positions without increasing click costs.

Although it is possible to adjust click spending at any time to suit your changing business needs, it is often advisable to keep click spending relatively similar to enable efficient budget distribution and allow keyword optimisation to have its full effect. Adjusting keyword bids, rather than daily budgets, is generally a more effective means of spend control, so for best results budgets should only be changed on a month by month basis.

By setting up custom campaign geo-targeting, it is possible to only show ads to searchers within certain towns and cities, or located within a particular radius of your business. However, since a large number of people often include a location name within their search query, it is often advisable to extend the targeting of searchers to a wider market for people making location-qualified searches. Language and international targeting is also possible.

While a comprehensive campaign setup is essential, it is only once the campaign is up and running that optimisation and testing can begin and the PPC campaign can really start to improve. As performance data is collected, keywords, bids, match types, ads and landing pages can be tested to find the combinations which give the best results. And by regularly analysing search queries, irrelevant searches can be filtered out and new keyword opportunities identified for even more tailored ad targeting.