Should I advertise on Google, Bing or Yahoo? AKA: Pay per Click Marketing
If you are asking yourself this question then keep reading…
The first step is to start by searching for your product or service on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Look to see if your website is listed on the first page and if it is one of the first five websites shown. Don’t count the results that are in the pink or yellow boxes, or on the right side of the page because those are paid advertisements.
If your website is not listed on the first page, it’s time to consider starting a Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign.
Don’t react too quickly and dive right into building your own PPC campaign, do yourself a huge favor and spend some time doing a little homework. Just like hiring an accountant to manage your taxes, managing any type of online advertising campaign requires you to do some of the work, stay up to date with the latest news, be involved and be responsible for the decision making.
Before you start, you should be able to answer the following questions.
- What is your goal?
- How will you measure success?
- Who & where are your targets?
- What marketing messages do you use to reach your targets?
- How much can you afford to spend each month?
- How much time will you give yourself to learn?
- How much time will you give yourself to manage?
- Should you do it yourself or should you hire a PPC expert?
Of course, I usually recommend you find a PPC expert before doing it yourself. More often than not, I have seen business owners and marketing managers try to build and manage their own online advertising campaigns but end up failing. They don’t have enough time to learn the best practices and to stay up-to-date with the latest changes in pay-per-click advertising to get a return on their advertising investment. More often than not, reality falls short of their ambitions and they give up in a few months with nothing but a bad experience to reflect upon.
If you decide to hire a PPC expert, you will still need to answer these questions. Although you don’t need all the answers before talking to the expert, the company you select should help guide you to the answers. If they don’t, hang up the phone and call someone else.
Over the next few weeks, I will be writing in more detail about what it takes to be successful in PPC marketing, in particular Google Adwords. Subscribe now to keep up to date with my PPC blog posts and other digital marketing articles from the team at Find and Convert.