PPC
What is PPC?
PPC stands for ‘pay-per-click’, which tells you the first thing you need to know about it – unlike traditional forms of advertising, with PPC you only pay if somebody actually clicks on one of your ads. This describes the payment model used for paid search advertising on search engines such as Google and Bing – you’ll have noticed these search ads showing above and below the organic (non-paid) results when you search for almost anything on Google. This includes shopping ads which appear next to the results, or in the shopping tab (the ones with images and prices for particular products available to buy on advertisers’ sites).
An important feature of PPC, making it very different from other types of advertising, is that when somebody goes to Google to make a search they are expressing intent. Unlike when viewing a banner or magazine ad, they are making it clear they’re looking for the thing you’re offering. This is why PPC can be particularly lucrative when done correctly.
What is our approach to PPC?
The Genie Goals approach to PPC is tech-driven and performance-based. Whether your goal is to drive efficiency or growth, we use our bespoke bidding technology to build a strategy suited to each client. Clarence (our unique, industry leading in-house software) was initially built for our own brands, which needed a technology that could bid within tiny margins to maximise revenue; and when we tested other bidding platforms, we quickly realised we had created something uniquely powerful. Using this technology, along with our structured methodology and a team of expert account managers, we are in the business of maximising performance and encouraging growth.
How does Genie use tech to manage PPC?
Search engines use a bidding model to determine which PPC ads show where on any given search page, shopping result or website. Based on your targets and KPIs, it’s important to bid high enough to drive enough traffic to your site – but low enough that you don’t overspend on advertising. You can bid based on a large number of targeting criteria, including the keyword/search terms entered into the search engine; the device being used; the location of the searcher; the demographics of the searcher, and many others. There can be literally millions of different search terms relevant to your business and it’s impossible for one person to manually calculate the bids for all of these based on the huge amount of data available.
This is where our technology, dubbed Clarence, comes in. Clarence is a bidding tool which automatically does the hard work of calculating the bids for you as though you had an extremely talented and productive team working on your account 24/7. Clarence changes your bids as often as the data is relevant, and we rebuild it around the unique business needs of every new client we work with. Clarence doesn’t just bid though; it forecasts, reports, uses margin data to make sure you’re profitable, deduplicates, manages order cancellations, and much more. We’re always adding new features based on what our clients need.
How do you judge success from PPC?
Before starting any campaign the first question should always be, what are we actually trying to achieve here? After that you can ask, how do we judge the success of a campaign? With PPC, there is a multitude of ways to measure the success of your activity. Whether its phone calls, leads, newsletter signups or something bespoke to your business. If it can be done we will track it, bid on it and then report on it for you.