You've heard of pay per click advertising, heard it can do great things but you're unsure how it all works and how you and your business can take advantage of it. Does that sound about right? Well, pay per click advertising on Google is the main thing we do at Marketise and our eye-catching adverts are probably what we're best known for.

When somebody see's a pay per click advert that appeals to them and they click on it, they're then taken to the website of that advertiser. The advertiser only pays when their advert is clicked upon and a visitor is brought across to their site, with every keyword search phrase having a different cost per click depending on how many other businesses also want their adverts to be triggered by the same search phrase.

It sounds complex but the basic's really aren't - here's how it works :

Step 1

Choose the search phrases (known as "keywords") you want your advert to be found by. This process is called "keyword mining" and is one of the most crucial areas of pay per click advertising as it quite literally forms the foundations for your advertisement campaign. Yet unfortunately it's also often the most overlooked area with little effort paid past the most obvious keywords.

To illustrate that point let's say you operate a small hotel in St Ives, Cornwall. Your obvious first choice keywords would probably look something like this:

hotel St Ives
hotel in St Ives
St Ives hotel
hotel in cornwall
Cornwall hotel
hotels St Ives
hotels in St Ives
St Ives hotels
hotels in cornwall
Cornwall hotels

However with a little bit of thought, research and effort that list can easily be expanded with other relevant keywords to the business. For example:

1/2 board St Ives
1/2 board Cornwall
half board St Ives
half board Cornwall
full board St Ives
full board Cornwall
accommodation St Ives
accommodation Cornwall
valentines day offers Cornwall
short stay holidays cornwall

Get the idea? And the more keywords you have in your keyword list, the more adverts you have out there in your market place and the broader in scope your pay per click advertising campaign becomes. The key is making sure you only include keywords that are highly focused to your products and services.

At Marketise we invest a great deal of time at the outset of any campaign on the keyword mining process applicable to your business. There is a true skill to it and the results of our efforts deliver an extremely broad and detailed pay per click advertising campaign.

Step 2

Write the advert. Google don't give you much space to work with so it's always best to keep your adverts engaging, punchy and ideally pushing an offer or promotion (and if you don't run regular promotions, we'll be nagging you to!)

Think about it, when you're searching for something on Google what would you typically respond to? An advert that looks like all the others or something that looks like this:

St Ives Finest Hotel
Family Run With Stunning Views/Food
20% Off Oct Bookings - Be Quick!
YourHotel.com

Writing adverts that really grab attention is at the core of what we do at Marketise. Genuinely, we love it. Sometimes we employ humour, sometimes we'll name-drop or sometimes we'll use blatant shock in our advert text. But it's always done in a way that grabs attention and delivers your message so you have the best chance of getting the viewer to click on your advert, arrive at your website and be exposed to your full sales message.

And that can only happen if the adverts we write leap out of the screen, grab the viewers by the throat, shakes them around a bit and then drags them over to your site...!

We write high-impact adverts for every keyword in your campaign making sure each advert is highly focused. For example, Valentine's Day weekend related keywords would trigger an advert to appear that pushes your Valentine's Day special offers.

It takes a lot of time to write all the different adverts, but it's time well invested because a highly focused sales message will always deliver you the best chance of making a sale.

Step 3

Finally, reporting and tracking. How can you tell which keywords are yielding you actual sales/enquiries and which keywords are yielding nothing?

We send you weekly spreadsheet reports that show the activity on your pay per click advertising campaign for the preceding 7 days. The reports show you which keywords generated the most clicks across to your site, how much those cost you and what the average advert position on Google was.

By discussing the data on the report with you each week we can stay on top of your campaign and make any adjustments the report shows is necessary.

With an e-commerce website we can also track the precise keywords which generated sales, making the process of choosing which keywords to continue to use for your pay per click advertising pretty much transparent. It does depend on a simple feature on your site though, so check with us to see if we can do it for you.

We hope that you've found this explanation of pay per click advertising useful and informative. If you're ready to get going then take a look at our Offers page, choose the package you want, call us on 0844 448 0444 and we'll get cracking on a bespoke pay per click advertising campaign for your business.