PPC - Search Engine Marketing

Online advertising is a £3.3b economy in the UK (source: IAB 2009) with online ad spend increasingly taking market share from traditional forms of offline advertising as businesses seek to cut advertising costs and target their marketing spend more effectively.

Each of the three leading search engines operates its own online advertising programme (Google AdWords, Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo! Sponsored Search).

Paid-for search marketing operates like conventional media buying, booking on-page advertising space on the search page or on third party websites  (eg banner advertising) or may deliver ads which are contextually relevant to the page or the keywords being searched for (eg: AdWords).

In addition to keyword-targeted ads in search pages, there is a host of potential paid-for channels on the internet available to the online marketeer. Whatever the campaign objectives - sales, leads, audience share - opportunities to promote a website using a suite of rich-media formats and deployed across thousands of possible websites now exist.

Banner advertising can sit alongside mobile handset ads, video content and interactive games, etc. with ad spend carefully controlled and campaign planning facilitated by powerful performance measurement software.

CL5 provides expert and detailed delivery of paid-for campaigns, tactics that are useful in the early stages of an optimisation programme to provide quick, targeted clicks and throughout the campaign to build brand or promote niche products or services.

Pay Per Click (PPC) management

PPC is a particular and powerful kind of paid-for search engine marketing which involves competing in an electronic auction, bidding against target keywords of value for the advertiser.

Pay per click management by professionals is increasingly important as prices for keywords are rising dramatically year-on-year.  Many advertisers are now simply unable to compete in their market without specialist help.

Banner advertising agency - planning and buying

Online advertising can also be delivered on a placement basis, where ad space in relevant internet real estate is purchased in a similar manner to print advertising.

Typically the locations of the advertising will either be contextually relevant in terms of site content, or benefit from high site traffic. Pricing is usually by a cost-per-impression (CPM) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model.

Brokering paid-for listings in high quality portals, industry or trade association website is however acceptable practice and an important part of the media planning process that CL5 can research and action on your behalf.

Ranking position in Google is partly determined by the quality and quantity of inbound hyperlinks to a website. However to protect the quality of their organic search results the leading search engines may penalise websites that purchase links from paid-for link programmes with site blocking or de-ranking.

The value of using an experienced ppc management company such as CL5 is that careful selection of keywords, ad text, distribution, ad format and bid strategy can have a dramatic effect on reducing the overall cost of the ppc campaign and getting a high ROI on the ppc investment.

The display of an advertiser’s advert will be triggered by the search for the particular keyword and whilst the impression of that ad is free, the cost attributed to a ‘click’ on that ad will differ depending on the perceived value of the phrase in the marketplace (eg: ‘home insurance’ will generally cost more than ‘tennis shoes’).