PPC Or SEO???

It’s a common question asked by website owners and customers: is PPC better than SEO or is the reverse true? The simple answer, although it may not appear simple, is that they both have their advantages and they both have their ideal uses. Fortunately, of course, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t use both forms of search marketing in order to generate a marketing mix that drives highly targeted and incredibly active visitors to the pages of your website.

PPC marketing can be used to generate traffic very quickly. While SEO usually requires several weeks if not months before you start to reap the rewards of your efforts, once a PPC campaigns has been established, verified, and funded, it can start to generate traffic immediately to all of the relevant pages on your site. For the new website this offers obvious advantages, and makes PPC the form of search marketing that many new website owners turn their attentions to first.

Combining PPC with other forms of marketing allows you to generate an online marketing mix that offers a consistently high level of traffic as well as visitors that are inclined to perform the desired actions on your site. PPC, like SEO, generates targeted visitors as long as you conduct decent keyword research and ensure that the landing page copy on your website is properly optimised to take full advantage of the traffic as soon as it starts to arrive. Combine PPC and SEO, as well as any other forms of marketing in order to get the best results.

Source : ClickConsult

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Get Rich Quick with PPC and the Cadbury’s Gorilla

The song “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins was originally released in 1981, but, thanks to that advert (which has nothing at all to do with chocolate!), the 26 year old song recently entered the iTunes top 10 downloaded songs. After many, many weeks, it still remains in the top 20. The secret of the songs success is no secret: Wildfire word of mouth catapulted the old song from the obscurity of Phil Collin’s back catalogue to sales that many current and heavily marketed artists would drool over.

What’s even more interesting about a bloke in a monkey suit playing drums is this: On Google.co.uk, the following 9 keywords…

Cabury’s gorilla
Caburys gorilla
Cadbury’s gorilla
Cadbury’s monkey
Cadburys gorilla
Cadburys monkey
Gorilla drums
In the air gorilla
In the air tonight gorilla

… were searched for 21,500 times in October, 2007.

So, who wants to get rich quick with the drum playing gorilla and PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising? I’ll give you the keys to the kingdom, but I want half. What you need to make your fortune is this:

• Any old credit card.
• A Word document that appears to be a reasonably authentic looking certificate. Take your time to carefully write the certificate’s text with a font like this: Authentic, Verifiable Certificate. Copy ‘n’ paste any images of gold ribbons from the internet to make it look more realistic.
• 21,500 photocopies of this document @ around 3p each (or maybe less if you can win a concession for a huge, bulk photocopying order!).
• A shrewd, elementary website with a basic PayPal checkout facility, perhaps.

Create your simple Google campaign with its handful of monkey drumming keywords and ad text that screams:

“Buy An Authentic Certificate That Reveals/Unmasks You To Be Drum-Playing Cadbury’s Gorilla! Great Gift Idea, Buy Online Now”.

Use the credit card to fund the campaign (which should take about 15 minutes to build) with about £100 - £250 (average cost per click for the above 9 keywords was less than 5p).

Finally, set the campaign live — if the novelty value of a funny TV advert can sell chocolate bars and make Phil Collins hip again, surely it can convince people to spend £9.99 (or even £19.99??? if you were feeling adventurous) on a photocopied piece of paper … Ahem, ‘authentic certificate.’

Hmmm, and lets say there is a healthy 10% CTR and a modest 5% conversion rate for those 21,500 searches. Who wants to do the sums and tell me how much profit we could make? Answers in the comments section below, please!

Source : ClickConsult

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The PPC Guy Who Saw The Credit Crunch Coming In September 2007

I remember the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) for keywords like “bad credit remortgage”, “loans for people with CCJs” and “IVA” about a year ago. I was the Account Manager at Click Consult who specialised in PPC campaigns for debt help companies. Back then, there was always some guy with a bit of money and a shoddy website who wanted to a PPC campaign to capture leads from people with poor credit.

As I wrote on the 25th of September 2007 …

It takes an average cost per click (CPC) of £2.56 to £3.84 to be in position 1 to 3 for the keyword “mortgages”. Add two letters to this word – “Re” – and you are going to need deeper pockets. For the keyword “Remortgages”, it takes an average CPC of £9.71 to £14.57 to get your ads in positions 1 to 3. Add two words in front of “Remortgages” and your wallet will really feel the strain. For the keyword “Bad Credit Remortgages”, average cost per clicks for the top three ads are between £17.28 to £25.93.

I also mused …

Could “IVA” be the most costly keyword in the UK? IVA is an abbreviation for Individual Voluntary Arrangement and is nothing more complicated than a person offering their creditors a repayment proposal that would enable the creditors to recover more money than if they chose to petition for bankruptcy. On the August 20th 2007, a click on the keyword “IVAs” with an ‘OK’ quality score rating cost £33.88 to be in an average position of 9.3 on Google.co.uk.

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At the time, I just couldn’t understand it. There was no logic to it. The more debt you were in; the more financial service companies were willing to pay for your clicks. To qualify for an IVA, you need to be in at least £15,000 worth of debt – and ‘IVA’ was the most expensive keyword of all! The more flimsy and precarious your mortgage plan, the higher the CPCs went. No one was interested in Google browsers with a steady income and a sound credit history, but rather everyone was clamouring for clicks from the irresponsible subprime crowd – deep in the red individuals on their third remortgage and with enough credit cards to play solitaire.

So as the credit crunch bites and the banking crisis spreads to the rest of the world economy, I think back to those clients – long gone now – who jumped on the “I want bad credit leads!” bandwagon. It’s simple common sense. Why did they throw so much money at people who had no money? What other outcome could they have possibly expected? Of course, at the time they were motivated by greed and the promise of riches from making poor people suffer as they struggled to pay astronomical interest rates. And now, through a recession … through rising unemployment … through higher taxes to fund billion pound bank bail outs … we are all suffering for their greed.

Source : ClickConsult

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