• Pay Per Click Advertising: There's No Shame In Paying For It

SEM | PPC (Pay-Per-Click-Advertising)

PPC: the Details on Adwords, Pay-Per-Click Ads, and Search Engine Marketing.

Definition:

noun-
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, is a form of advertising in which ads are shown to consumers and advertisers are charged when those ads are clicked on. You can also choose to bid for impressions, which charges you per thousand impressions, regardless of how many people clicked the ad.

Huzzah! A handy chart with basic PPC definitions.

Bids

How much you’re willing to spend for someone to click your ad. This is set by you and plays a role in where your ad shows up.

Text Ads

Non-image, text-only ads which can show up on search engines and non-search engine pages.

CPC

Cost Per Click, determined by your max bid and how well your page matches a user’s query.

CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand)

CPM is an alternative to CPC, for CPM you bid for your ad to be shown to people and are charged regardless of # of clicks.

Conversion

Defined by you, this is the goal of your site. It is most commonly a purchase, account creation, or email signup, but can anything else which you want to track.

Keywords

Words and phrases which trigger your ads to be shown. These can be in the user's query or on the page where your ad displays, depending on the method of advertising you choose. You can bid different amounts for different keywords, and more popular keywords are more expensive, generally.

Placements

Specific sites or general types of sites which you want your ads to show up on. You can include or exclude by site name, subject matter, etc.

Why choose ACE for your PPC management company


Over 10 years of Pay per click ads success


We Have a Record of Success,
Using Pay Per Click ads as an Integral Part of our Search Engine Marketing

We’ve been using AdWords since it was first introduced for both our customers, and then to run profitable online shops in-house.

Every service we provide, we have learned and improved and perfected through testing on our own properties and then implemented in our client work.

We have been in business since 2001 without a sales team, without tricking customers into buying services, and without pressuring clients into deals, and that's what we do for our clients as well.

We Know Square Pegs Go in Square Holes And "localization" of Ad Campaigns is a Half Measure, and that "Square holes" is kind of an oxymoron.

Co-founded by a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker, we are adept at creating marketing campaigns in either language, for either country.

We do not just “localize” our marketing; meaning translate ads from one language into another, we come up with unique campaign that are market and demographic specific.

Because “localization” is really shoving a square peg into a round hole, we don’t have writers who write marketing catch, we have marketing experts who have fine-tuned their language skills to best fit the text ad and banner ads that search engine marketing requires.


How Much Does PPC Cost?


PPC Costs

The Most Common Questions we Get Are:

Q: How Much Does PPC Cost?

A: Depends on Relevancy and Bid

How much one click costs depends on how relevant your page is to the search term and how much you bid and how competitive the search term is. On Google AdWords, you can pay anywhere from about $.15 for a very minor search term phrase to $54.91 to rank #1 for “Insurance”. Unless you’re in a highly competitive industry (Insurance, Loans, Mortgage, Attorney, Credit, Degree, Hosting or Claim related), PPC can be an affordable way to drive traffic to your site.

Q: Isn't SEO Cheaper than PPC?

A: Online advertising is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. What works for one company might not be feasible for another. Pay-per-click advertising is probably cheaper if:

  1. You expect a small amount of organic traffic (ie if you sell a niche product or service)
  2. You are aiming for massive traffic numbers quickly; SEO can take months or even years to reach its potential.
  3. You just optimized for SEO. SEO optimization can take months if not a year to reach its full potential, while PPC’s effects are immediate.
  4. Putting all your eggs in the SEO basket can hurt if algorithmic changes cause your site to be deranked for any amount of time.
  5. You need both. But if you can’t afford both, this is where you start.

But Don't Just Take Our Word. Here is What SEO-guru MOZ has to say regarding organic vs paid search:

Be Clever & Run AdWords First

I always recommend investing in AdWords first. What I mean by this is a properly set up and optimized AdWords account. This should have clearly defined campaigns, with ad groups tightly knit to keywords and relevant ads that are directed to relevant landing pages. A well thought out and implemented AdWords campaign will be more beneficial to you in the beginning because:

Budgets:

Small to medium size business just don’t have the budget to smash out on something like SEO in the beginning. In the SEO world today, to optimize your site properly is very costly and results can take three months or more to realize. That’s three whole months with potentially no increase in your company’s goals. Running a PPC campaign will bring visitors to your site, you only pay when someone clicks through. So to start with at least you will get some kind of return and if it is profitable...


-Moz, Industry Experts in SEO



And One More Thing: The Halo Effect in internet marketing.

Even if you are ranking high in the organic results, you get about 20% more site clicks because of something called the “halo effect” if you are showing up in both the Paid search ads and the organic results. This one-two punch of SEO and PPC lead people to trust your link more and feel like your product or service is branded. Conversely, statistics show that when companies with organic SEO results increased their PPC spend, they had a median average increase in incremental ad click of 79%.


Other Questions We're Frequently Asked:

Q: Should I be Worried About Click Fraud?

A: Yes, But Not Too Worried

In general, search engines are very good at weeding out (and refunding you for) fraudulent clicks. The area which we concern ourselves with is the accidental clicks made by legitimate customers. Reports show that up to 22% of mobile clicks are accidental. This is money you are spending on people who did not want to see your ad and (likely) immediately closed your site after clicking it.

Q: What if My Ads Are Really Good And They Clicked Way Too Many Times?

A: You won't spend money if you don't want to.

You set the daily budget which you want to spend. While your daily spend might fluctuate and even slightly exceed your daily budget, over the course of a month you will never spend over your monthly budget (30.4 x daily, where 30.4 is the average number of days per month).

Example: You set your monthly budget at $3040. This equates to $100/day. While some days you might spend more than $100, over the course of a month you will never spend more than $3040.

Q: We Did PPC Before and ROI Was Terrible

A: PPC is Like Chess, “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.”

Anyone can set up an Adwords account for their site. It’s even cheaper at the start because they’ll probably give you some free advertising credit to play with. But to really be able to maximize ROI in the long term, to optimize, re-optimize , and re-re-optimize takes a lot of time, energy, and knowledge. The industry-wide ROI for online ads is 218%. But to get close to that number you need knowledge.

Q: Why choose AdWords / Bing / Yahoo P.P.C.?

A: If you're not ranking well organically, PPC can help.

If you’re not ranking highly in organic rankings (See SEO), PPC can be a more cost-effective way to compete for competitive keywords. Since you decide who sees your ad, PPC can be an effective, targeted advertising medium, showing your ad to people who are interested in your product. Also, unlike SEO, the results are immediate. SEO can take months before it goes into effect, and a new business at launch can’t wait months to years for traffic.

Why Use a PPC Management Service


Why Use ACE's Professional PPC Management


Why can't a company do this in-house?

Whether a company does their pay-per-click and AdWords management in-house or hires another company to do it, they need person who does it full-time in order to stay up-to-date on changes, new advertising methods, and to keep optimizing your campaigns. If your business is large enough to hire a full-time person or department, you can do it yourself. Of course, we would still recommend hiring us, simply because we know how long it takes for someone new to PPC to run campaigns effectively. As we’ve said, we don’t do anything for you which we don’t do for ourselves. The PPC learning curve is steep, and we ran a lot of bad campaigns for our shops before getting the ROI we needed.

literal oil rig is literal

The Times Are Changing

When pay-per-click and AdWords advertising was first introduced, clicks were cheap and life was good. Then mid-size and large (and gigantic) companies started buying massive amounts of keyword advertising and driving up the bidding wars for profitable and searched for keywords and the cheap source of traffic small companies had enjoyed became expensive again.

Like anything new, when there is little competition it is easy (and usually cheap). But as competition rises, so does the cost of entry. Think of it like drilling for oil. When oil was first found it literally bubbled up through the ground. Mining methods were crude but returns were still great because it was easy to do. Now it takes a $100 Million off shore oil rig to get what you could previously get by poking a hole in the ground.

Ok, maybe it never quite worked that way, we don't know a lot about the oil industry aside from the fact that fracking is bad, but PPC was seriously less competitive, and a lot easier to at least not lose your shirt on.

PPC Platforms Options


Where Your Ads Can Show: Adwords & Other PPC Services

There are many places your ads can show, depending on your niche, budget, and type of ads

Make no mistake, Google Adwords is king right now in terms of ad spend, clicks, exposure, and almost every other metric. But depending on your target demographic, site purpose (retail, information, etc) there are several other options available.

Text Ads

Text ads are a common form of digital advertising, and show mostly on search engine results pages (SERPs). They can, however, also show in place of display ads on non-search engine pages. They consist of a title, description, and URL. When done correctly, they can be an extremely effective ad medium.

Google Search Network

1 Google's Search Network

Text and Shopping ads can show on Google's search engine results page (SERP) as well as other non-Google search sites (like AOL).

Google Display Network

2 Google Display Network

Text ads can show on Google's Display Network, which consists of over 1 Million sites, videos, and apps.

Yahoo & Bing Ads

3 Yahoo & Bing Ads

Text ads can show on the Yahoo Bing, which consists of Yahoo, Bing, and syndicated partner sites.

Banner Ads

Banner or display ads are images or video which show on non-search engine pages. Search engines has networks of sites on which your ads can show, and they run the ad auctions. You can select certain sites on which you'd like to show, or you can target based on site content, user interests, or site topics. You can also run remarketing ads, in which case you'd show ads to people who were on your site.

Google's Display Network

1 Google's Display Network

Banner ads can show on the Display Network, which constists of over 1 Million sites, videos, and apps.

Facebook Ads

2 Facebook Ads

Show your ads to a very targeted subset of consumers on Facebook, the world's largest Social Network.

Bing Display Ads

3 Bing Display Ads

Display Ads shown on Bing's search engine results page as well on Microsoft properties and products.

Shopping Ads & Product Feeds

Shopping ads (also called product ads) are ads which show on a SERP. They are products related to the search query and only useful for online retailers, as the ads shown only advertise products. These ads have the advantage of being eye-catching and relatively cheaper than text ads.

Google's Shopping Ads

1 Google's Shopping Ads

Engaging ads featuring image, price, and product description which show on Google's SERP in the Shopping section.

Amazon Ads

2 Amazon Ads

Show your ads in various sections on Amazon's product pages. Also creates a standalone product page which directs consumers to your site.

Bing Product Ads

3 Bing Product Ads

Similar to Google's Shopping Ads, but with a more limited reach.
These are the major platforms for digital advertising, representing many Billions of dollars in ad revenue. There are other, niche advertising platforms, such as services which advertise on blogs, which can also be very useful depending on your needs and field. We search out the most effective, best cost-performance ad venues for your brand or product which is another reason to hire a company that does this all the time.

PPC Pricing Policy


PPC Pricing Policies

Our Pricing Policy

Don't be fooled by flat rate payment plans

Our pricing policy is one in which we charge a setup cost and a percent of ad buy. Why do we do this?

Simply put, you get what you pay for. If a company is willing to run a PPC ad campaign for a flat rate regardless of ad buy size, they do not have any incentive to put more time into the larger clients’ campaigns, since they get paid the same amount. Since larger ad buys require more work in order to use the budget most effectively, we are charging both companies the same hourly rate, but working more hours on the larger account, thus resulting in higher costs.

If a company tells you they charge a flat-rate regardless of account size, don’t fool yourself. They’re not going to work more hours at a lower rate for bigger clients. They are going to neglect the bigger accounts. In the end you want someone to work on your account as much as it needs to be worked on. The number of hours they will work on your account before eating up your flat rate is not enough to manage the account. It is only enough to waste your money.

Think of it like any other investment. If you invest a lot of money in a mutual fund, do you want the investment firm to spend as much time managing your money as someone who invested 1/3 as much as you? No. You want your larger investment to mean they work harder to grow it for you. The same is true of this investment-your site.

Why We Don't Offer a Setup-Only Service

We do not offer a setup service, wherein we setup your PPC campaigns and then turn them over to you to run them internally. We don't believe it benefits either side in the long run.

Since we do not take clients competing in the same sector, setting up and then handing off a PPC campaign puts us in a difficult spot. We either honor the self-imposed noncompete condition and do not take any clients related to that industry, or we take clients but run their campaign with all the knowledge and experience gained by setting up your campaign. You could, in effect, have paid for us to set up PPC campaigns for all your competitors.

We also believe an ongoing relationship is best. Paying a company to set up your campaigns but not giving them any incentive to do it well enough to keep your business is the wrong way.

A harmonious partnership is music to our ears.

The greater Los Angeles area is one of the most competitive regional markets on-line.
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