Accurate measurement

One of the great things in general about digital marketing as opposed to non digital is that you can measure the impact very accurately. Once we set up a campaign and Analytics we can see the number of clicks and impressions an ad gets, click through rates, search terms that generated the click, number of people who bought or enquired and much more. We put together regular reports that show exactly how a campaign has performed. This can help customers gain a full understanding of how everythings performing and give us valuable insight on how to improve the campaign.

In real terms that means we'll be able to tell you at the end of the month how many sales you received, how much each sale cost and often which keywords produced the sale.

Varying budgets

The budget you'll need to make an impact will vary from industry to industry. We have clients with average costs per click at under £1 and others which go as high as £60 a click. The majority of businesses we've worked with have had budgets between £500 and £2000 per month but we've also worked on campaigns that spend tens of thousands per month.

The best way to find out how much you may need to spend is by getting in touch for a quote. We can carry out some keyword research and then provide you with estimates of how many sales or enquiries you could expect for different budget levels.

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Making it work

Often when I mention PPC to clients they express their concerns about possibly wasting money on ads. What if it doesn’t work? Is a common question. That’s why we always recommend starting out with a small budget to test the market, ads, keywords and landing pages of the site. Once data starts to come in we can analyse the performance and if it's lacking take steps to improve it.

With the majority of sites it will take a month or two to get the campaign running at an optimal level.

PPC can allow you to bypass the big sites

Our PPC services can allow your business to make sales independently of any of the big players in your industry, and allow you to compete. One example we’ve worked on is for a rental property in the Outer Hebrides. We created a PPC campaign to bring in new orders for tourists looking for accommodation. We got to the point within the first few months where the campaign was bringing in a steady flow of bookings at an acceptable cost per conversion. The client in fact remarked that other property owners had been vocal about not having many bookings in the off season while enquiries had maintained at a regular level for the client.

The client had also been using Airbnb to bring in bookings but was dealing with more competition on that site than with Google. Large corporations like Airbnb and Amazon may be paying for ads also and even though they have large budgets available they may not be devoting much to the ads showing in your area.

It's ideal for testing out a new business

If you are thinking of starting a new business Google Ads can be used to first test the market to measure interest. This will help you to figure out if it is worth investing time and money in the business. With PPC you can target a specific city or country and get real people clicking onto your website to help you judge its potential. This is a much more cost effective scenario than setting up the business, spending lots of money on all the things that entails and then finding out that there’s no market for you to head into.

Start and stop your campaigns

You may have a service or product that is time sensitive, such as the summer wedding season or concerts. One of the benefits of PPC ads is that your campaigns can be started and stopped regularly depending on when they are needed without incurring extra costs. The Google Ads system also allows you to set a schedule for when your ads will show, or for when to increase bids to get more clicks.

Hypothetical example

Let’s look at a hypothetical example of how a PPC campaign could help a small business.

Example: Garage selling MOTs. In this example we have a garage selling an MOT service. The garage needs more customers so they create a PPC campaign in the Glasgow area targeting the following keywords:

Keyword	Avg Monthly Searches	Avg Cost Per Click
MOT Glasgow	390	£2.56
MOT garage glasgow	40	£3.33
MOT garage near me	50	£2.30
MOT test centre	40	£3.07

The table above shows an example of the kind of performance that could be reasonably expected from a PPC campaign. If the website manages to achieve a 20% conversion rate then advertising costs of £282 could bring in turnover of over £1097. In this case it would also be worth remembering that a new customer may end up returning for regular services and other work. This also shows why conversion rate optimisation (CRO) techniques are so crucial. CRO can actually make your campaigns more profitable.

Big Surf Digital example

We use PPC campaigns for our own business. One of the benefits of PPC ads is that they're not just good for bringing in more sales for small purchases. They can also help with bringing in large projects. One such case was a property company in Glasgow looking to create their own lead generating presence online with the aim of selling houses. Our ads were running for some popular Glasgow SEO terms, which brought in one such enquiry.

We ended up setting up a test PPC campaign, Conversion Rate Optimisation and full SEO and PPC campaigns. This produced a constant flow of quality leads, a newly designed high converting website and top ten rankings across Scotland.

In conclusion, our PPC services can start getting you more business today.

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