Pay Per Click (PPC) & Pay Per Impression (CPM)

There’s two main types of paid online marketing widely available to businesses: pay per click (PPC) marketing and pay per impression/cost per mille (CPM).  In a PPC campaign, you pay for each click you receive whereas in a CPM campaign you pay per thousand times your ad shows up regardless of clicks.  For our clients, we’ve found that using PPC for general marketing is the most cost effective and CPM for remarketing is the most cost effective.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns

While we’re a strong advocate for organic rankings because they are much more cost effective, there are numerous situations where we recommend a PPC campaign to our clients:

• New Businesses: If you have a brand new business it makes sense to invest in PPC to get your website out there immediately; however as a long term marketing strategy this will get extremely expensive
• In Conjunction With SEO: SEO takes a bit of time before you see results, so in some cases when a client needs immediate results we manage a PPC campaign for them until they rank naturally, then they receive all their traffic from organic results
• Large Amount Of Keywords: If you have a small budget and small time frame but want to go after a large amount of keywords, then a PPC campaign would be perfect for you.
• Low Search Traffic: When we schedule your free consultation, we have done some preliminary research into your niche and search metrics.  If your niche has very low search traffic, we’ll recommend PPC ads instead of SEO in some cases depending on the level of competition and cost per click

In these situations, we may recommend a PPC campaign instead of or in conjunction with an organic SEO campaign.  We generally advertise on the Google Adwords and Bing Ads platforms, however can utilize additional platforms as needed on a case by case basis.  As a full service firm, we handle each step of the campaign for you, including:

• Account Setup — setting up billing information, account registration, APIs when needed, and structure
• Keyword Research — identifying the best keywords to target and setting cost bids for those keywords
• Ad Setup — determine a message, writing text ads, and designing graphic banner ads
• Landing Pages — ensuring the landing pages are well optimized for conversions as well as for platform quality scores
• Optimization & Maintenance — monitoring the campaign performance and making adjustments as needed based on our objectives and goals

PPC Certification

We are certified and have passed all required testing by Google and Microsoft to manage PPC campaigns. Most PPC providers and advertising firms are not qualified, so make sure you go with a qualified firm to maximize your ROI and have a smoothly run campaign.

Remarketing / Retargeting Campaigns

Ever visit a website and five minutes later you’re reading the news and see ads everywhere for that website you were just on?  That’s remarketing in action.  A remarketing or retargeting campaign consists of placing a piece of tracking code on your website which allows us to then display specific ads to that visitor after they leave your website.  This allows us to draw more visitors back to your website and encourage them to convert.

Remarketing campaigns are generally CPM campaigns, with a cost ranging from $2 to $5 per one thousand impressions.  These campaigns experience extremely high ROI’s because we’re retargeting individuals who have already been to your website.  As a full service marketing firm, we handle every step of setting up your remarketing campaign:

• Coding — setting up and placing coding on your website to enable to cookie to be placed on a visitor’s web browser
• Ads — writing and designing various sized ads to display to those we are retargeting
• Structure — determining your most valuable website pages and structuring your remarketing efforts around those pages with specific communications and messaging
• Management — monitoring the campaign to ensure it’s running smoothly and making changes when needed

Remarketing is a fantastic newer tool that greatly aids us in driving visitors back to a website if they didn’t convert the first time.

Learning More:

If you’d like to learn more about how our paid online marketing services can help drive additional traffic to your website, the next step is to request a consultation with us so we can analyze your business, understand your objectives, and provide you with a proposal and our recommendations.