How to test pay-per-click advertising for just £5

Many businesses steer clear of all kinds of advertising, preferring to plough cash into other marketing methods. That was a sensible approach years ago when the main way of advertising was in the media or directories. The model used to be very simple – you paid a lot of cash for an advert and kept your fingers crossed that it worked!

The world changed with the introduction of the internet and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC is utterly measurable – you only pay when someone clicks on your advert. Yet still many businesses shy away from advertising in this way.

With pay per click advertising you can measure exactly how much revenue you will get for every £1 spent. And since PPC is scaleable, you will then know how much revenue to expect if you double, treble, quadruple your pay per click spend.

The only way to find out if pay per click advertising can help your business to get new customers is to test it. Here’s how to get a successful PPC campaign running for just £5.

Get up to £60 of free credit to trial pay per click

Both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing offer free pay per click advertising to new advertisers, to encourage them to try it for the first time. At present, when you sign up to Yahoo Search Marketing you get £60 of free credit on your pay per click account. And you can use this link to claim a free £30 voucher towards a Google Adwords campaign.

Bid for the lesser searched keywords and terms

With pay per click, the more you pay, the higher up the results your advert will appear. For popular search keywords terms such as flights, each click can cost the advertiser £10 or £20+.

You should aim for the other end of the scale, where clicks cost pennies. The less popular the search term, the less you will pay for it… but of course you will get a smaller amount of traffic. Experiment to find the right balance for your business.

The trick here is to be clever and think laterally, or use a thesaurus. If you sell cheese in Aberdeen, you might find ‘Scottish cheese’ or ‘cheeses Scotland’ expensive. So instead try ‘cheese Aberdeen’, or even use the names of specific districts of the city.

Generally, the more specific you are with your search terms, the better results you will get.

Use negative words

As well as picking search words and phrases that you do want your advert to be shown with, you can pick words you don’t want your search to be displayed next to. For example if you sell Honda motorbikes, you might pick the search word ‘Honda’, and the negative word ‘car’. This will help to extend your budget.

Target specific websites

Both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing display their adverts on thousands of content websites, not just the search engines themselves.

With your pay per click campaign, you can choose for your advert to be shown specifically on these websites. This can be an excellent way to guarantee your advert is seen by the right target audience. And that means that each click is more likely to be someone who is a potential customer, than someone who is curious about your advert and website.

Spend some time identifying which websites your potential customers read, and check if they take adverts from Google, Yahoo! or one of the other search engines offering pay per click advertising.

Check pay per click performance every day

Pay per click systems give you full feedback on the search terms you choose, and the performance of your adverts. Spend five minutes checking how your adverts are working each day and don’t be afraid to tweak.

Minimise click fraud

Keep an eye on traffic to your website from your adverts, especially the IP address of visitors (the IP address is a unique number that identifies a specific connection to the internet). If you notice a lot of traffic from one IP address, it could be a competitor deliberately clicking your advert to blow your budget. A quick search for ‘click fraud’ will give you options for tackling this.

More advice and guides on pay per click advertising

If you're looking for more advice we have a series of helpful articles to help you to maximise the potential of pay per click advertising including;

1. Pay per click advertising for small businesses
2. How to write a killer pay-per-click advert and
3. Choosing keywords for your pay-per-click campaign