Pay Per Click is a form of online advertising used by businesses to attract new customers. The system involves advertisers paying a fee each time an advert receives a click. This allows businesses to advertise their company, or particular products or services.

Some businesses are able to grow their company organically, through word of mouth referrals however unlike pay per click advertising, this method is slow and not predictable. Pay per click provides instant access to a stream of potential new customers looking for a service or product.

PPC is highly effective because it places your business in front of a potential new customer at the precise moment they are searching for your service. In fact, the risk of not using pay per click actually allows competing local businesses to dominate and increase their market share. Without ongoing visibility new customers are lost to other businesses which have a strong presence. Searching online for a business could be a family who have just relocated to the area, or new customers looking for a specific product or service. Are other competing businesses growing their customer base faster and more profitably? What are your practice growth objectives?

Using PPC, you can buy clicks to your website from potential customers who are looking for your services. This is a fast highly targeted advertising method, and does not rely on building organic visibility or backlinks. 

Indeed SEO or search engine optimisation is very slow and unpredictable, in particular for the business sector which is highly competitive at a local level. Pay per click provides a fast effective method to get in front of customers looking for your services.

To succeed with PPC, a comprehensive list of keywords will need to be prepared. Ads will be created with a link back to the website and keywords will be selected. These can include general dental keywords and specific keywords related to products or services.

Whenever an advert receives a click, a cost per click is incurred. For PPC to be profitable, the cost per click must be lower than the new customer income generated, whether this is measured on a per visit or long term basis.

PPC can be described as both an art and a science and considerable work can go into building and optimising campaigns. This includes:

Market and keyword research

Keyword selection

Ad build

Campaign structure

Campaign optimisation

Landing pages

Conversion tracking

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Performance review

Businesses must be aware that the CPC (cost per click) varies considerably even in the same location. For example two companies in the same city could be paying vastly different costs per click if they have differing quality and relevance scores, and different click through rates. For example one business may have dedicated landing pages for each treatment, and send each ad traffic to a different landing page, and another company may send all traffic to the same homepage resulting in a lower quality score.

If a page about a specific product or service provides useful information to the customer and the intent behind their search query then the cost per click will be considerably lower. This also means that profits will be increased, and business growth will be faster because greater results can be achieved with a smaller advertising budget.

Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords) is the leading PPC advertising platform. Within a few minutes, business owners can set up advertising campaigns for display on the Google search and display network.

When a customer makes a search in Google, Google displays a chosen set of ads relevant to the search term entered. Winning ads are based on different factors including the quality and relevance of the keywords and ads, in addition to the bids placed by advertisers.

The ads shown to customers vary according to the Ad Rank of an advertiser – this measures the bid made and the quality score of the advertiser which is determined by the rate of clicks, how relevant the page(s) are and the quality of the landing pages. Google Ads displays the winning ads to potential customers for a cost per click price.

Running successful pay per click campaigns is a specialised area requiring different skill sets. This is sometimes delegated to staff, but as the area is specialised, businesses will achieve the best results when outsourcing their pay per click management. This often pays for itself in the first month alone, due to the instant reduction in wasted ad spend.

Advertising agencies provide fully managed pay per click services and companies choose to outsource their PPC advertising to achieve their sales objectives, while at the same time focusing on their business..

Launching and managing high performing campaigns needs to include:

Keywords – effective keywords must be researched, reviewed and selected in order to attract  ideal customers and meet your customer recruitment goals. This includes grouping similar keywords and building an exhaustive library of negative keywords to avoid paying for paying for wasted ad spend on irrelevant keywords which are never going to attract patients

Quality score – landing pages must be relevant, targeted and focused to potential customers. It is a fact that businesses with higher quality scores can spend considerably less and get more clicks and new customers than businesses with low quality scores

Creative – advertisement copy has to be of interest to customers and include a clear call to action. Google ads are text ads, and image and video ads can be published via the display network

When completing research, the best possible keywords must be reviewed and chosen in order to meet new customer growth targets. Chosen keywords must be:

Relevant – businesses should not pay for visitors who are never going to turn into customers or who are looking for deals and free services. Keywords should be relevant and patient focused –  what are the actual words patients use when talking about a product or service? These words should be included, and irrelevant keywords must be excluded

Comprehensive – search phrases can and should also be included as customers often type in a set of keywords, or a phrase when making a search for a service rather than a single word, or a single word + city name etc

Optimised – campaigns, keywords and landing pages need to be refined and optimised to enhance results and attract ideal customers

PPC Campaign Management

Campaigns need to be tracked and managed on an ongoing basis to ensure effectiveness and success in customer growth. Campaign performance includes:

Research – finding and adding the best keywords, and removing irrelevant keywords. Negative keywords must be identified and tracked in order to reduce wasted ad spend

Testing – ads and campaigns can be tested to track different ad copy and headline performance with website visitors to monitor effectiveness

Managing – dividing campaigns and ads into dedicated campaigns and ad groups for specific keywords or services, in addition to keyword focused ad copy and tailored landing pages

Reviewing keywords – review winning and poor performing keywords so that extra new customers can be recruited for the same or lower ad spend

Patient journey – reviewing and refining landing pages and calls to action (CTAs) to ensure consistency and coherence with customer search terms and expectations, to improve performance and conversion rates

Specificity wins – all traffic should never be sent to the same page. This is a very expensive way to gain new customers. This is because a single page cannot be relevant to every type of search – this approach simply results in very high costs and a low quality score

How many customers are you looking to gain each month? For which services?

See also:
CPC
Advertising
Lead Generation