Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

Sometimes referred to as Pay per Click Advertising, PPC is a powerful way of driving traffic to your website quickly. Literally you could have an idea for a Google Ad and have it live, up and running on the internet within a few minutes.

As well as appearing quickly - it can appear on the first page of Google and even in the very top position - providing you bid high enough.

The downside of PPC is obviously the cost - but many companies successfully use Google Ads (or Adwords) to drive profitable sales. You can spend anything from a few pounds a months to tens of thousands of pounds. The skill is in setting up and managing your Google campaigns correctly to ensure they are profitable.

Why bother with PPC if you rank high in Google anyway?

Well it depends on how many sales you want - there's no need to use Google ads when you rank highly anyway - but if you want to maximise your sales and dominate your sector then you should aim to get visitors from both paid and unpaid search engine listings.

We've only mentioned Google so far as they basically dominate the search market across the world (+70%), but there are other options like Yahoo, Microsoft and Miva. you can sometimes find cheaper ads there, but the levels of traffic are much smaller. If you want to spend your time and money efficiently it's best to start with Google Adwords and take it form there.