blur is an Outsourcing Services Platform where companies can get their projects (whatever they are) completed quickly and more cost-effectively than anywhere else. It is an international company and relies on at least 8 marketing channels to attract business. PPC is the most important inbound channel and is crucially important for the flow of projects that come through the platform. We use Adwords for both our text ads and our banners and have learnt a lot of tough lessons on what works and what doesn’t.Here is a list of the top 5 lessons we learnt as we went more international and got more ambitious in terms of our target market:

1. Make sure you do your research and that there is indeed ‘search appetite’ for the particular product or service you are offering in a particular part of the world - not everyone wants the same things.
2. What keywords are you bidding on? are they the right terms? In the UK we may talk about ‘staff’ in the US they may use a different term to talk about this (ie ‘Payroll’)
3. Regionalisation of large international areas such as US can be better than targeting a huge area as a whole - eg ‘Service Outsourcing California’ may be more effective that ‘Service Outsourcing US.’
4. Manage your expectations - we sell all kinds of services for medium to large businesses. PPC can be used for this as we are doing but it is more suited to consumer or small B2B marketing - this is it’s comfort zone and where it really grew up. Either way - working with an agency will really help.
5. Manage your PPC spend carefully and look out for non-performing keywords. In medium to large Adwords accounts it is important to monitor this on a weekly basis or you could end up spending way more than you anticipated.

We used Stellar Search to help us squeeze as much out of our PPC channel as we can. Targeting large enterprise companies in the US as we now do is not an easy thing to do but we are sure that we are pushing and contorting Adwords in directions that is rarely challenged. They were also able to get us direct access to the Google US team from which we got more insight and help.Michael Anderson is Head of Digital Marketing and Content at blurgroup.com