Paid adverts: explained

adminBlog, Business, Marketing

In the previous blog post of our occasional series on SEO for clinics, we talked about the importance of SEO, and how there’s no point in having a website if no one can find it. No matter how packed with information or beautiful-looking your website is, without effective SEO, your patients and potential patients won’t see it. In the last post, we looked at how to rank organically in Google. This time we’ll look at how you can become more visible with paid advertising.

What are paid adverts?

Paid adverts are adverts, within the search engine results, that are positioned at the top of the page. Advertisers can choose whether to pay-per-click or pay-per-thousand impressions and they will be charged accordingly. In this post, we’ll only be considering Google as a search engine.

Example of SEO

Advantages of paid-for listings

Paid Google listings can be a highly effective and cost-efficient way for a business wanting to bring more traffic to their website. Firstly, paid listings bypass the SEO of other websites and are automatically positioned at the top of the page; this means that the ranking of your website will not affect how many people will see the advert. Also, the adverts will only appear when certain keywords are entered into the search engine; meaning that the users, who are seeing the adverts, have all searched for a keyword that is related to your product or service, whether that’s botox or back pain treatment. In theory then, advertising on Google should only bring customers to your website who are interested in your services.

Pay-per-click

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising means that a business bids on keywords and pays a fee every time their advert is clicked. Advertisers bid on keywords, for example ‘physiotherapy clinic’, in order for their advert to appear at the top of the search results when a user searches for ‘physiotherapy clinic’. Whether they are successful depends on how competitive the market is for the specific keyword.

In pay-per-click advertising you choose how much you bid; the more you pay, the more likely your advert is to be positioned at the top of the page. Pay-per-click advertising can be cost-effective for a clinic because the small fee you pay when your ad is clicked is bringing a potential patient to your website.

It is extremely important to build an effective PPC campaign in Google AdWords if you want the adverts to work well for you. An effective campaign doesn’t only look more professional to customers, but you’ll pay less per click if your adverts are relevant and helpful to customers. Building an effective PPC campaign is not a straightforward task and there are a lot of aspects to take into account when planning your campaign. Whether its researching and choosing your keywords, organizing your keywords or optimizing your landing pages, if you want to start using PPC, it’s important to learn how to do it effectively.

Click here to find out more about building an effective PPC campaign.

Cost-per-thousand impressions marketing

Cost-per-thousand marketing (CPM), also known as pay-per-impression, differs from PPC advertising, as a business will pay a fee every thousand times their advert is viewed instead of every time it is clicked. CPM is one of the most commonly used methods of web ad pricing and it is easily measured via its click-through rate (CTR). An advert’s click-through rate is worked out by comparing the ratio of how many times the ad was clicked with the total amount of impressions, for example, if an advert is clicked three times for every 100 impressions then this particular advert has a click-through rate of 3%. However, the success of an advert can’t be measured by its click-through rate alone as it may have still impacted the user without the user actually clicking the link.

If you would like to find out more about cost-per-thousand impression marketing then please follow this link.

PPC vs CPM

Different methods of pricing are more appropriate for some advert campaigns than others and it is very important that a clinic planning to advertise in this way researches each method and chooses the one that will be most beneficial to the business. If an advertising campaign is more focused towards improving brand awareness, then CPM would be more beneficial than PPC, because the clinic’s brand or message is promoted even if users don’t click on the advert.

On the other hand, if an advertising campaign is focused specifically on promoting a product to a niche market then PPC would be a more effective method of pricing. This is because users must click the ad to purchase or find out more about the product or service.