What Is PPC?

PPC campaigns are a great way for businesses to see quick results online if they’re wanting to increase their brand’s visibility on search engine result pages. PPC stands for “pay-per-click”. It’s an internet advertising model that gives brands the opportunity to pay only when consumers click on their ads. PPC can be highly beneficial – it allows marketers to get the clicks that they want without spending money on users who aren’t searching for their products or services. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what PPC marketing is and how you can use it in your own business.

How Paid Search Works

When a user performs a search on a search engine, PPC auctions are used to determine which ads will be displayed in the top positions. In order to compete for these ad spots, businesses bid against one another and the quality of the ad, along with the amount of money bid, determines who wins.

Each time a user clicks through to your website from a paid search ad, it costs you money; however, if you properly set up your campaigns with relevant keywords corresponding with what potential customers may type into a search engine when looking for your products or services then each click should lead users directly to the right pages. This will minimise customer losses due to irrelevant information.

PPC campaigns don’t only use keywords to determine what ads are displayed. They also monitor the performance of each ad so that you can optimise it for maximum impact and success. When someone searches for a particular term, if you don’t have this keyword in your PPC campaign then your ad will never appear on Google – which is where most internet users begin their search process when looking online. You need to ensure that your ads’ keywords reflect what you’re selling so potential customers recognise your product or service when the ad appears. Having accurate key words helps increase the likelihood that users will click on your ad.

Keywords

Keywords are central to any PPC campaign, they connect advertiser’s to the user’s queries.

A keyword is a general term used to describe all of the different search queries related to your business or brand. Use of the right keyword match types will determine how closely your ads match search queries.

Advertisers can choose to match keywords with search queries exactly or allow for variations in the keyword; for example different orderings of words, different spellings, or the inclusion of other words.

Additionally, businesses can choose to include negative keywords which will prevent ads from being triggered by search queries containing those terms.

Ads

In addition to keywords, you will need to produce ads for your campaign.

Keywords within ad groups are organised by common themes, and ads are what users see if you win the auction. Ads typically contain meta titles, meta descriptions and a URL.

In SERPs, some ads appear at the top of the page while others may be seen at the bottom. You should test different versions of ad copy to see which performs best.

Paid search advertising with services like Google Ads provide features called ad extensions that augment the appearance of ads.

For instance, sitelink extensions allow advertisers to display relevant pages on their sites in the ad, and call extensions add a phone number that users can use during business hours. Ad extensions help ads to become more engaging and informative for users.

Budget & Bids

Advertisers must select a daily budget they’re willing to spend and determine how much they’d be willing to pay for a given keyword. This is done by setting a campaign budget and max cost per click, while also using individual ad group bids or keyword bids if they wish.

If you want to expand your budget beyond the daily limit, the next day’s allocation will reflect this change. It’s a good idea to set budgets according to the company’s overall marketing strategy, but bids are a way of controlling spending precisely. While all ad groups must have bids, the bid at the keyword level overrides that for an ad group.

Automated bidding strategies are often used by advertisers who wish to quickly achieve a specific goal. These advertisers set the appropriate bid for each auction and allow the platform to determine it.

A variety of strategies can be applied to individual campaigns or portfolios of multiple related ad groups. The actual amount paid per click is contingent on the competition and ad rank, not just maximum bids.

Ad Rank

The highest bid doesn’t guarantee that your ad will get to the top spot on the SERPs. Search engine algorithms also determine which search results are most relevant, and rank ads accordingly.

Search engines have many factors that determine ad rank; with just one of those elements being the bid price. Google also considers ad relevance and quality, the context of the search (for example, what time of day they are searching), and format impact (whether or not it includes extensions that improve the format of the ad).

The Quality Score of your ad also dictates its relevance. Quality Score consists of the ad’s previous click-through-rate, relevance of the keyword to the ad, and your landing page quality.

Targeting

Selecting the right keywords within your PPC campaign is what allows you to show ads to relevant audiences, however there are other targeting options that you can optimise for. These include targeting devices, location, day and time, and demographic. Knowing this, you can optimise your ads for different demographics. For example, you can choose to create ads for 25 year olds who live in a certain location, and you can create slightly different ads that may cater more towards 60 year olds who live somewhere else. This will allow your ads to perform better, as they’ll reach the desired audiences.

Conversions

All of this hard work isn’t about just getting clicks. The real purpose is to obtain conversions. Conversions are the actions that users complete after clicking on an ad, and depend on the type of goal that the advertiser has set, for example purchasing a service, signing up for a newsletter, or placing a phone call.

In order to determine the effectiveness of a PPC campaign, marketers should track conversions and calculate how many of those conversions are coming from paid search. To track conversions, you need to keep a snippet of code in the source code of the conversion page.

The Effect Of PPC

The effectiveness of a PPC campaign depends entirely on how well it is planned and implemented. With the correct research into which keywords your target audience is searching for, which demographics your business is targeting and a sound understanding of how Google chooses its ads, you’ll be able to successfully implement a PPC campaign to boost the performance of your brand.