Tag: Pay Per Click

The Click Experts: Your One-Stop-Shop for all your Tech Needs

Online marketing and software development encompasses many areas such as SEO, e-commerce, pay-per-click management, app development, web design, etc. Whether you’re a traditional brick and mortar shop or a digital marketplace, online marketing is the key to acquiring customers and powering sales. 

In an age where everyone has immediate access to a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, your business should be visible on these mobile advertisements.

If you’re in charge of your business’s online marketing strategies, you might be juggling between hiring an online marketing firm and learning the skills yourself. 

What will you do? 

If you want to make a huge improvement in your marketing investment and grow your business, consider hiring the right digital professionals. 

Why The Click Experts?

We’re tech professionals.

Our digital company works with different types of businesses and industries. Each business community operates differently. This exposure has helped us develop various innovative and successful advertising strategies. 

We’re able to apply our industry-specific expertise to help grow your online presence. Our vast tech capabilities help us tap into your niche’s expertise and insights. We use this knowledge to build targeted and effective solutions.

Our tech expertise includes (but not limited to):

  • Operating Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Data Analysis
  • Software Proficiency

We’re your one-stop-shop for all digital marketing and software development services.

The digital marketing campaign you run will change as it passes through different times of the year. For instance, at the start of the New Year, your focus will be on SEO and branding. 

Your attention will shift towards paid advertising and social media during the festive sale and Christmas. It’s expensive to retain and manage all these professionals under a single roof.

This is where The Click Experts is your best choice. 

Our team includes:

  •  SEO experts
  •  E-Commerce website development
  •  PPC campaign set-up and management
  •  Software and App development
  •  Onsite technicians

Our team has the expertise and skillset to seamlessly meet and exceed all your campaign objectives.

We’ve got the experience!

Digital marketing is a competitive arena where the virtual atmosphere is constantly changing. Wouldn’t you feel more confident leaving your campaign in the hands of an experienced team? 

Our company has more than two decades of experience in developing, planning, and executing marketing campaigns. The Click Experts is a versatile, multi-person engine that will work in unison on your campaign. 

We’ve got PPC, SEO, web development, and software development experts on our team.

We’ve got the track record to prove our skills and talents.

We’ve built a stellar reputation in our industry, but don’t take our word for it. 

Check out what our customers have to say about our work! 

Most of our clients are either repeat customers or referrals. In fact, we’ve got some patrons who’ve been with us for over a decade. 

Now, you can see our work first-hand in Featured Projects.

Outsourcing your digital marketing and software development needs is a recipe for a flexible, cost-effective, and successful marketing campaign. 

Get in touch with The Click Experts today for all your online marketing and technology needs.

The Power of Online Marketing

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Online, or digital marketing, is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies. It includes any effort to spread the word about a company that uses the internet as an advertising medium.

Over the last two decades, online marketing has become an absolute necessity for every business that wants to reach its target consumers. No longer can a company put an ad in the Sunday newspaper and assume that everyone will read it and then go out and buy its product. In fact, these days, if your business does not have an online presence, it might as well be invisible.

Indeed, online marketing has become so pervasive that is has resulted in a paradigm shift in the customer/advertiser relationship – people are now in control of their marketing experience and businesses must use various internet platforms in order to adapt to the changing expectations of consumers who are wanting ever-more sophisticated offerings throughout the purchasing journey.

But even though the balance of power has shifted in favor of the consumer, businesses should not be unmindful of the many advantages that online marketing offers. For example, the use of digital marketing allows brands to market their products and services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. It also allows them to offer customer support all the time, and not just during “normal” business hours. In addition, the use of social media platforms allows brands to receive both positive and negative feedback from their customers, which helps them decide quickly which products are popular and which may need to be put out to pasture.

Another advantage is that digital marketing is easy to be measured, allowing businesses to know the reach that their marketing is making, whether it is working or not, and the amount of activity and conversation that is involved. The results of traditional broadcast marketing simply cannot be measured nearly as accurately.

In addition, there are many powerful arrows in the online marketing quiver – any of which may prove to be the one that hits a potential consumer where he or she lives. They include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – a methodology of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – a paid version of SEO where marketers pay for display ads in order to drive traffic to a company’s web pages
• Content Marketing – the creation of valuable media and content made available to potential customers who are searching for information about a particular product or service. It may include articles, blogs, videos, etc.
• Social Media Marketing – using one or several social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., to engage with customers and build relationships
• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) – paid ads on search engines and social media sites
• Affiliate Marketing – a type of referral marketing where companies promote each other’s products
• E-mail Marketing – contacting customers who have given permission to reach them via their email accounts

Most businesses, these days, engage in omni-channel marketing, which employs a mixture of these strategies in a synergistic way, in order to maximize their effectiveness. And it’s a wise advertiser who learns to harness and master the power of online marketing.

How Small Changes in your Online Ads Boost PPC Conversions

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If people are clicking on your PPC ad, but then are not converting to a sale, you’re spending money, but not making any. The point of your entire campaign is to convert lookers to buyers, so in order to create a successful PPC campaign – one that results in enough conversions to make it worth your while – you need to do many things, some big, some small.

Here are some big and some small things that can help you increase the ROI of your PPC campaign by increasing your conversion rate:

• Understand the five general phases of the customer buying cycle: Awareness (Can you help me?), Consideration (What do you do?), Interest (What’s different about you?), Preference (Are you the best value for me?), and Purchase (How much? How long? And When?). Now, make sure that your ad contains elements that appeal to customers in each stage of the cycle.

• Track everything from the beginning. In order to be successful with PPC you need to analyze and adjust constantly. Little changes over time make huge overall improvements. There are plenty of good-quality tracking programs, and some of them provide a lot of in-depth information. The good news is that Google’s free conversion tracking tool will do a great job most of the time.

• Make sure your ad copy correctly describes the product or service you are advertising. And make sure that the content on your landing page is related to your ad copy. And finally, write high quality, engaging copy.

• Test everything. Again: test everything. Test your PPC ad text; text the images you use in your ad, your call-to-action, or anything else that has to do with your campaign. Then test it again against a variation to determine which concept gets better results. Then test your landing page to find out which pages are more successful at driving conversions.

• Be different. Lot’s of PPC ads are the same. Same doesn’t work; same is boring. Instead, try to create emotionally-charged ads with strong triggers that showcase your unique proposition.

• Use the right keywords. The nature and intent of the keywords you’re targeting is critical. Use keywords that are “transactional” and have high commercial intent, meaning they are used by people who are ready to buy. Also, it is crucial to regularly scan for new keyword ideas, and then test them.

• Use re-marketing as a conversion rate optimization tool. Remember: only about two percent of website visitors convert on their first visit. But various studies have shown that re-targeting ad campaigns – showing individuals who have seen your ad but have not yet converted, the same product or service you are offering on websites they later visit – result in a steep rise in conversion rates. You should also offer additional discounts in re-marketing ads that give people a reason to come back and convert.

• New ads can have as big an impact on conversion rates as new landing pages. Keep updating, honing, and improving your message. Small changes to ad copy and your call-to-action can help better qualify website visitors.

• Give people a reason to buy TODAY!!! If you have a sale, push it. If a sale is ending, make a big deal of it.

• Block irrelevant or unqualified searches by finding and then excising negative keywords that don’t align with your advertising objectives.

• Use AdWords extensions or anything else that will help your ads stand out.

• Revise your ad scheduling to run only on days and/or hours that represent the most optimal times to reach your conversion requirements.

Efficient Pay-per Click Techniques Make a World of Difference for Your Business’s Bottom Line

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Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is an advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays the publisher – typically, the website owner or host – each time one of its ads are clicked on by a potential consumer, surfing the web.

Search engines such as Google and Bing allow businesses to buy listings in their search results. When someone searches on a keyword that is related to a business’s offerings, its ad will show up on as a sponsored link or banner ad on a results page, along with the natural, non-paid search results.

There are two types of PPC advertising – flat rate PPC and bid-based PPC. In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In bid-based PPC, ad placement is sold at auction. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that it is willing to pay for a given ad spot based on a keyword. The highest bid has the best chance to appear first in the rankings.

Whether utilizing a flat-rate, or bid-based model, PPC’s effectiveness as a source of profit assumes that the costs of all the clicks will be substantially less than the overall gain from sales made as a result of the portion of clickers who eventually convert and buy. When PPC is not working correctly it can hurt a business’s bottom line – the cost for ads are greater than the income for sales that close.

Effective and profitable PPC campaigns rely on a broad set of carefully thought-out and well-implemented components: researching and selecting the right keywords; organizing them into ad groups; creating ad text and landing pages that are optimized for conversions; and knowing how to target the correct audience, how to test ads, and how to use the tools and analytics that measure, and can thus help refine, results. Search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks.

Google AdWords is the largest and most popular PPC advertising system, simply because Google gets the most traffic. Every time a search is initiated, Google digs into the pool of AdWords advertisers and chooses a set of winners to appear in the valuable ad space on its search results page. The winners are chosen based on a combination of factors, including the quality and relevance of their keywords and ad campaigns, their click-through rate, the quality of the page to which and ad points, and, in the bid-based model, the size of their keyword bids.

So, in order to become and stay a Google AdWords winner, a business must do the essential work of creating and maintaining its PPC campaigns. Effective techniques include:

• Crafting relevant keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.

• Creating optimized landing pages with persuasive, relevant content and a clear call-to–action, tailored to specific search queries.

• Consistently reviewing the effectiveness of ads by testing them and then optimizing them as necessary.

• Tracking conversions and sales in order to measure return on investment.

• Avoiding keyword bidding wars that end up costing more than an ad’s potential return.

Pay per click is now a basic Internet marketing tool and very few businesses can afford to ignore it. But like any other marketing campaign, a PPC campaign must lift the bottom line, not drag it down.

What are the Differences Between PPC and SEO?

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Current marketing research makes it clear that in order for a contemporary business to flourish, it must have a strong web presence in the most commonly used search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Under the general heading of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two tools that businesses use in their internet marketing campaigns in order to get their brands in front of their target audiences.

Research also shows that, in many cases, the ultimate success of an online business will often depend on the amount of “traffic” it can generate for its web pages utilizing either, or both, of these two modern marketing methods. However, there are several differences between PPC and SEO, and under certain circumstances, one approach may be preferable to the other.

First, let’s look at SEO. SEO is considered an “organic” method of driving web traffic because it is free, and depends on its success by means of its intrinsic value. SEO employs a number of sophisticated techniques whose aim is to propel a website to the highest place possible on the first page of the major search engines, where it will be seen by the greatest number of people. It does this by providing a website that is “optimized” for search engines.

An optimized web site has the most accurate and well-written content, the most “keywords” that people enter when they are searching for something online, and the widest variety of links to other sites. For example, Google, which is the world’s foremost search engine with over 400 million searches per day, employs a complex algorithm that ranks websites according to their level of relevant and accurate information, and how constantly they provide their searchers with continuing value.

SEO is most beneficial for an online business that wants consistent results, a reputation for authority, and benefits that are more affordable in the long run. Ranking high in search engines takes a long time, but most marketing experts agree that the results are worth the cost and effort.

PPC campaigns are more like traditional advertisements because they are paid listings. PPC ads are the ones you see on a search engine that are above or to the right of the organic SEO rankings. They are in the “Sponsored Ads” or “Sponsored Links” section on a results page. The closer they are to the first page of a search engine, the more they cost. Popular PPC systems include Google AdWords, Yahoo Advertising, and Facebook’s advertising platform. The good news for advertisers is that they only have to pay for their ads each time one is “clicked on” and not every time they are merely viewed.

PPC is more useful for short sales cycles, limited time promotions, or new websites that need to get immediate exposure. A business can get a first page listing almost immediately – if it is paid for. On the other hand, PPC campaigns disappear as soon as a business stops paying for them, which means their existence is usually much more temporary than an SEO listing. However, if there is an adequate budget, and sales need to be made quickly, a PPC ad can be very effective.

Research shows that PPC ads have a slight edge in conversion rates (the percentage of users who buy a product or otherwise do something else based upon their searches) over SEO listings, because the people who click on them are conducting more specific searches and, thus, are more likely to act. PPC ads are also appropriate when a website isn’t particularly designed for SEO.

Why Should You Have Your Pay-Per-Click Account Managed?

Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is a system of marketing where ads are inserted into a user’s online experience and an advertiser pays every time that ad is clicked. In some PPC scenarios, that amount is a flat rate set out in advance. However, the most common format, including that used by Google, is for the advertiser to bid on certain “keywords”, with ads shown on an auction basis. The highest bidder’s ad is shown first, followed by the next highest and so forth. Google’s PPC programs are called AdSense and AdWords. AdWords ads are displayed during a user’s search, while AdSense ads are displayed on an actual website. For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing primarily on AdWords accounts. Publishing an AdWords ad is easy. One must set up a Google account, then set up an AdWords account. One must then write an ad, following certain guidelines, and choose one or more “keywords” for the ad. “Keywords” are specific words or phrases that describe what kinds of searches an advertiser wishes to target. For instance, “pizza delivery in San Diego” is an example of a keyword phrase that a pizzeria in San Diego may wish to target. An advertiser then bids on their chosen keyword(s), enters a payment method and sets an advertising budget, and publishes their ad, and voila! Their ad is now “live”. This couldn’t be easier process.

However, easy and effective are not the same thing. “Just because someone can quickly and easily buy a basketball doesn’t mean they can play like Kobe Bryant,” Tim, a  PPC account manager with The Click Experts, recently pointed out to me. Having a professional company like The Click Experts manage your Adwords account is important for several reasons, he continued. For one, choosing keywords correctly is very important. If they are too vague, an advertiser risks diluting their advertising money targeting unqualified clients. On the other hand, If they are too specific, an advertisers risks not having them displayed to those users they may be wishing to target. In addition, choosing the keywords carefully can minimize advertising costs while maximizing exposure. Since Google works on a bidding process, keywords are very subject to the vagaries of an open market. Popular keywords are more expensive, with some top words fetching over $50 per click. Choosing a specific keyword, however, can allow an advertiser to carefully target the audience for their ads without having to pay a fortune, since bids can also be as low as $0.10. Knowing how to choose a keyword, and how to correctly arrive at an appropriate bid for that keyword, can mean the difference between paying out a significant portion of the budget for unwanted clicks or making sure as many clicks as possible are made by qualified customers looking for exactly what an advertiser is offering.

Another key reason for having a professional like Tim manage your account is because Google is constantly making small and subtle, or occasionally even large, changes to its policies regarding PPC accounts. One important area Tim highlighted for me was the use of synonyms. When Google first starting in the PPC business, ads were only displayed on searches exactly matching to an advertiser’s chosen keywords. However, in a bid to generate more revenue and (one hopes) help advertisers target more qualified customers, Google changed its policy and began matching ads to synonyms of the keywords. In fact, says Tim, Google often changes its policy regarding the use of synonyms, with the general trend toward more and more permissive use. This can lead to more dilution and waste of advertising dollars. By actively managing an account, professionals like the team at The Click Experts can ensure an advertiser’s budget is being judiciously spent on clicks by users who are actually being actively targeted. In fact, in many cases, depending on an advertiser’s budget and they keywords targeted, The Click Experts can save the advertiser more money in wasted clicks than the account management actually costs.

Clearly, a manged PPC account should be seriously considered by every business desiring to develop and maintain an online presence. PPC, especially when combined with professional website development, effective content management, and a correctly targeted and executed SEO campaign, can deliver a steady stream of qualified, reliable customers who can bolster the revenue stream of a business. Why not see for yourself? Contact us today for a free quote and see what The Click Experts can do for you!

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