Using Search Marketing (PPC)

A Search Marketing campaign is designed to target people who are searching Google for similar products and services as those mentioned on your website which you have instructed us to target.

When a potential customer enters one of your keywords your ad may be displayed. If they go on to click on your ad they are taken through to your website. From there the website assumes responsibility for promoting your products/services and enticing the customer to call you or to purchase from your site.

Have you noticed the listings that appear above and down the right hand side of search results on Google? Well, they’re the PPC, or pay-per-click listings.

It is very cost-effective because you only pay when someone clicks through from your ad to your destination web page.

With about 90% of the UK’s online users accessing the Google network, can you afford not to be targeting this market?

You simply decide how much you want to spend each month and BT will take care of the rest.

The Ad Preview tool enables you to view your ads as they would appear on a regular Google search results page, without adding extra impressions. Searching for your ad multiple times on www.google.co.uk could change the position that your ad actually appears on the Google search result page.

To perform a test search with the Ad Preview tool, follow these steps:

• Go to http://www.google.com/adpreview
• Enter a keyword
• Check that the Google domain is www.google.co.uk
• Confirm that the language is English
• If you want to change the default (UK) location to where you're based, add this in to the location field
• Click 'Preview' to view the ads that match to the keyword you entered

If you have a keyword you think is missing from your Campaign then please send an email to support@searchmarketing.bt.com. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or raise a request via the Search Marketing portal.

Note: on rare occasions our AdWords team may reject a request to use a particular keyword on the basis that: a) it is against Google Policy or b) it is very likely to have a detrimental effect on the performance of your campaign.

If you wish to have a keyword taken out of your campaign then please send us a message using Contact us, on the right of this page.

Please send us a message via the raise a query section of this site, giving us as much detail as possible of what you want to update.

This is determined by your campaign settings. We can set up your account to run at whatever hours of the day you wish. The only other factor influencing when you can see your ads will be your daily budget for the campaign. If you have a restricted campaign budget then your ads will be rotated throughout the day to ensure you do not exceed this. It is not best practice to use daily budgets to control your campaign, but in some instances where there is a restrictive budget, or you would rather appear higher, but less often, it might be the only solution.

The daily budget is the maximum daily spend that we set for your search marketing campaign. This is determined by your overall monthly budget - our aim is to spend this budget evenly across each month. If a campaign's daily budget is spent, ads will no longer show for that campaign on that day. Daily budgets are used as a fail-safe to ensure your monthly budgets are not exceeded.

Control of spend levels is maintained through a selection of bid management processes. For example bids can be set for individual ad groups or keywords, each tailored to your budget to make sure that these are set to maximise your return on investment. To maximise your budget's effectiveness, we can schedule your ads to only appear in the most productive part of the day for your business, e.g. ad may only appear 5pm-midnight. This ad scheduling process allows the raising and lowering of bids by a percentage at specified times. As a final measure we can set a daily spending limit on your campaign which will stop your ads showing once your budget is reached.

The points below highlight the key elements that need to be considered within the design of a destination page to support an effective search marketing pay per Click (PPC) campaign:

• Relevant and original content
• Easy to find what your ad promotes, i.e to make sure the page is relevant
• Original and unique content
• Avoid image heavy content (which cannot be 'read' by Google's spiders)
• Keep the design consistent across your site, e.g the layout, colour scheme etc.
• Clear calls to action
• Well organised and clearly laid out with good navigation
• Easy for users to find what they are looking for
• Easy for users to buy your products and services (if you offer online sales)
• Avoid pop-ups
• Quick page load time
• Clear and short enquiry forms (only ask for the most important information)
• Compatibility with all popular web browsers
• Test different colours / images / page layouts / content / promotions

Track both conversions and user behaviour on your site. Tracking solutions such as 'index tools', 'Google Analytics' and 'Google conversion tracking' can be used in conjunction with BT Search Marketing campaigns.

You will have access to an online customer portal and you'll receive monthly reports summarising:

• How often your Google ad is shown
• The number of clicks your ad is generating
• The cost of these per click
• Your top performing keywords

All BT Search Marketing campaigns are built based on market-leading best practices. Campaigns will be regularly optimised in order to improve set key performance indicators (KPIs) each month. This is achieved by keyword auditing and optimisation, creative auditing and optimisation, negative auditing and optimisation, (expanded) broad match investigation, budget/bidding optimisation, brand checking, quality score auditing and optimisation and competitor checks.