By now most Denver small businesses know about the benefits of pay per click programs like Google Adwords and Bing Ads, in terms of targeting their customers and driving traffic directly to the best page on their website.
One of my goals is to educate all Colorado small businesses about this important advertising tool.
If you are like most business owners, you are focused on clicks. But did you stop and think that even when your ads are not clicked, your ads and name are still seen?
So for businesses in industries that are highly searched with the public and have daily, weekly or monthly repeat customers, such as restaurants, you can really get name recognition firmly entrenched with potential customers.
This incredible opportunity to build name recognition is a built-in benefit of pay per click programs. They are “auction-based”, which means your bids are one of the main influencers of the position your ad shows on the page. To get clicks and visits to your site, you obviously want to be at or near the top with a high bid.
But, if you bid lower, you can still be seen in the same view as the top ads. Ads showing lower from top to bottom on search results pages usually get less clicks. However, they spend less money on bids, and if not clicked, are not charged anything.
Why is name recognition so important?
Customers, whether they are consumers or potential business alliance partners, unconsciously tend to select businesses that they feel a familiarity towards. When a customer hears or sees your business name over and over they are much more likely to choose you when they are ready to make their decisions. Your pay per click program can achieve this, without costing you a cent.
It should be noted that defining your goal to your internet advertising consultant is important because if your goal is not specifically to get name, or brand recognition, then having too many ads show that are not clicked does send a signal to the pay per click programs that your ads are not relevant to the public and therefore your quality score will drop for those phrases.
Therefore, it is important to
a) determine your goals, and
b) segment your campaign phrases.
This will help avoid quality score drops on your most important phrases.
What Does a Pay Per Click Program Quality Score Mean?
For the uninitiated, “quality score” can be viewed as a system the pay per click programs use to keep themselves as useful to the searcher as possible. They have systems in place to reward the relevance between your PPC ad and your website, and the percentage of times viewers click through to your site.
It’s a win-win for both you and the program, because when you achieve better quality scores, you essentially get a bid price discount from Google or Bing.
Let’s say you and another advertiser both have the same bid for the same phrase for your ad. If you have a better quality score, you are positioned ahead of the other ad. But wait. It gets even better.
If your quality score is enough higher than that other company, you can actually be shown higher on the page than them with a much lower bid.
So, it is actually a win-win-win because the pay per click program gets more relevant ads, the searcher doesn’t have to wade through ads that have no relevance at all (as you can imagine would happen if only the highest bidder regardless of relevance could bid on every phrase), and you get a discount.
Colorado PPC advertising consultant Jon Camrud will prepare your advertising campaign to focus on the most important aspect, clicks or views, for your business.