PharmiMike

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be highly effective at raising awareness, and bringing traffic to a newly launched web site, and although Google is the main player, PPC can also be undertaken using other search channels such as Yahoo and Microsoft’s Adcenter, as well as third party advertising services such as Bidvertiser.

PPC advertising provides you with the opportunity to define either keywords/phases or specific websites within the selected advertising “network”, and advertising is typically text or graphic-banner based.

The strength of PPC advertising lies in the ability to accurately target your audience. For example, depending on the channel, you can target by location, and language as well as obviously the keywords you have defined. You can also cap the spend on your advertising, so that you can keep control of budgets.

As you are “bidding” for keywords, the costs for advertising will depend entirely on the selection of keywords and how popular they are. You pay either based on “impressions” (how many times the advert has been seen) or Click Throughs (when someone clicks). Both can work well, but the choice will depend on your objectives as well as your keywords.

PPC advertising is also available now on Facebook and LinkedIn, and should be considered as part of your campaign. You can even target through LinkedIn individuals working at a specific company in a particular location.

So, a good PPC campaign will run multiple advert variations, (to determine most effective wording/format) across a range of channels and be capped to a daily amount. It should also be closely monitored and continuously adjusted to give the best returns. The spend will depend on your budget and objectives, but expect to pay from typically between 50p – £2.50 per click, depending on the keywords/phrases chosen. Choice of keywords is the single most important aspect, so this should be done with care to avoid “wasting clicks”.

PPC advertising can be an expensive way to “buy” traffic; but with a clear objective (such as registrations, or buying something), it can be an excellent way to kick start a new site before the “Organic” search traffic starts to build and to raise awareness.

Its vitally important that you know which bits of your digital marketing campaigns are reaping rewards, therefore you need to track things. Luckily, if you are using Google Analytics for your website analytics package (and you should be), then you can do this.

The answer my friend is in Google UTM codes. Urchin Tracking Monitor codes to you and me (geeklink).. essentially by adding a simple bit on the end of any link back to your website, you can track which campaign was the source. Its up to you to define your campaigns.

For example:

http://www.pharmimike.com/?utm_source=s_site&utm_medium=Mailshot&utm_campaign=New-Product-launch

Useful tool here: Google Analytic UTM URL Builder.

Google’s Own Tool here:

From this extra information Google Analytics can log the campaigns, and you can see which one is working and which one is not.

For example, I use UTM codes on the end of links within Job adverts I place in a number of LinkedIn groups. A different code for each group. That way I can see which groups give me good return on my time investment. If I relied solely on the normal stats, I’d simply get a load of clicks logged from LinkedIn without knowing which group they came from .

The only disadvantage you may notice is the resulting length of the URL, which is no good for Twitter for example, so its worth using a URL shortener such as Ti.ny or Bit.ly

A useful tool for this is a plugin for Firefox called snip-n-tag. as this adds the codes for you and generates a short URL with the result.

Its a good idea to keep track of the codes you use in a spreadsheet or database, otherwise you will soon lose track. Log the date used and the code in your spreadsheet, and you can review your analytics logs with this in mind to made informed decisions about your campaign success rate.

This might sound obvious, but before you undertake ANY marketing, you need to define who it is you are targeting. That might be geographically, demographically, what sector etc. 

PharmiWeb.com currently has a two target audiences:

1. Potential candidates
2. Potential clients

Of course these are split into different segments, by country, by candidate job type (sales, clinical etc), but once you have defined them, you can start to figure out where they hang out…