PPC: Google Adwords

You obviously know about Google and you are probably aware that it is the #1 advertising network in the world. You may not know that there are over 2.5 billion page views a day or 456 million unique visitors a month.

This reach gives Google a unique position in the online world with over 90% of the online searches in the UK being made with the Google search engine. So it's common knowledge that if you want your website to succeed then you should make sure that firstly Google likes your website and secondly that it ranks well for the search terms that you think your potential customers are using.

Types of Search Results There are 2 types of results that Google brings back for a search term; Organic and Paid (Adwords). The organic results are those websites that Google thinks are the most relevant and the Paid results are those that are paying for the privilege of being on the page.

Each page will bring back 10 organic results and up to 10 paid for results. The first 3 results on the page will usually be shown in a lightly shaded box and these are paid for results with the rest of the Paid results shown in a box on the right hand side of the screen.

A new website will take several months to start appearing for the search terms you want organically as Google waits for your website to build up it's reputation and it can take a lot longer to get up into the first 3 pages let alone the first page (read more about our search engine optimisation service). So while you are waiting for your new website to rank organically you could use Adwords to go straight to the first page.

How does it work?

The Adwords system means that you allocate a budget for every day and you pay an amount of money from that budget everytime someone clicks on your advert so the more successful your advert is at attracting potential customers the more money the campaign will cost you. You only pay when someone clicks on the advert so even if your advert appears 1000 times if only 1 person clicks on it then you only pay for 1 click.

The amount it costs per click depends enormously on the search terms so a very niche search term such as 'gold widget maker' might only cost 2p per click while a very popular term such as 'London hotel' will cost over £5 a click for a top position.

The order that the adverts appear on the page is dependent on a few factors but the biggest factor is the amount of money you are willing to pay per click (PPC).

You bid on the search terms you want to appear for in a secret auction where the person willing to pay the most for every click will usually be shown at the top of the page. So a bigger budget will normally get you into the top 3 slots on the page and therefore at the top of the Google results page.

Anyone can set up and run their own Adwords campaign but if you are not sure that you want to do this yourself then give us a call and we will be happy to set up and manage a campaign on your behalf.

We charge a fixed fee for the set up of the campaign which involves a bit of research on our part to work out which search terms are suitable to bid for and their expected costs. Once we have done that we can tell you how many visitors you can expect each month and how much the cost per click is likely to be.