What is PPC Advertising and How Can It Help You?

The growth of the internet has created several new forms of marketing, one of which is PPC advertising. PPC advertising is a strong online marketing method that can drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. If you’re trying to grow your business, you shouldn’t overlook PPC marketing. 

In this article, we will talk about what PPC advertising is and how you can use it to help your business thrive online. 

What Is PPC? 

PPC advertising, which stands for pay-per-click advertising, is an online marketing approach where the advertiser only has to pay when consumers click on their ads. You're paying for each ad-driven visit to your website (or wherever else you link your ad to, like your app or landing page) rather than every impression your ad gets. 

Using this pay-per-click method is often very cost-effective because the visit to your site should be worth more than the amount you're paying for that click. 

These PPC ads appear in different places depending on the platform and type of PPC ads you use. Paid search ads, for example, appear on the search engine results pages (SERP) of search engines like Google. Paid search is the most common form of pay-per-click marketing. By contrast, paid social ads appear in the feeds of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. 

Why PPC Advertising Is Important

Pay-per-click advertising is a relatively new form of marketing that’s very powerful. Investing in this marketing strategy provides many benefits, including:

Effective Customer Targeting

PPC ads make it possible to reach specific groups of customers based on their shared characteristics — a marketing practice known as targeting. 

With effective targeting, you save money by marketing directly to consumers who are likely to be interested in your brand. Google estimates that businesses earn, on average, a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 200% on Google Ads, or $2 for every $1 spent. Targeting plays a large role in driving those returns. 

Every platform has slightly different targeting options. Instagram, for example, may allow you to target consumers based on different characteristics than Google Ads. You’ll have to adjust your targeting parameters depending on the platform you use, but you should always be trying to reach your target audience. 

Quick Results

Traditional advertising, like television and radio, tends to take weeks or even months to drive results. Search engine optimization, though a digital strategy, also takes a long time to start producing results. PPC advertising, on the other hand, can begin directing traffic to your site almost as soon as your campaign goes live — no waiting required. Jump in and make adjustments if there are any issues with your campaign by tracking your results in real time. 

Cost-Effective 

When you use PPC advertising, you have absolute control over your budget and spending. Before your campaign even goes live, you set limits on how much you want to spend per click and in total on the ads. Once you hit those limits, the advertising platform won’t run your ads anymore or charge you further. 

Unlike most other marketing methods, the advertiser pays when someone clicks on the ad — not every time it appears in front of a customer. As a result, you don’t have to worry about wasting money advertising to people who aren’t at all interested in your product or service. 

For example, say your bid is $2 per click. Plenty of people will click on your ad and not buy anything at all from your website. However, if the 10th person clicks on the ad and buys a $100 item from your website, you’ve made a great return on your advertising investment. 

Convenient Tracking and Analyzing

With traditional advertising, it's difficult to know exactly how effective your ads are and what impact they have on your business directly. That's not a problem with PPC ads. PPC ad platforms provide lots of data for you to analyze so you always understand how your ads are performing.  

For example, with Google Ads, you gain access to a comprehensive analytics dashboard for all your PPC ads. In real-time, You can see how many clicks each ad gets, the impressions, conversions, and more. You never have to guess whether your ads have an impact. 

Simple Managing and Adjusting

If you make a mistake or want to make changes to your ads, that's no problem with PPC campaigns. Go in at any time and make adjustments to improve your ads. You can even adjust your cost-per-click after the campaign goes live. 

In traditional advertising channels, by contrast, you lose almost all control over your campaign once the third party takes and publishes your ads. 

Building a successful PPC advertising campaign

Anyone can build successful PPC ad campaigns if they follow the right steps. Make sure you consider the following factors as you develop a PPC campaign. 

• Your goals for the campaign
• The type of PPC campaign you want to run (paid search, paid social)
• The ideal platform for your campaign (Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
• Your budget
• Your target audience
• Your landing page

Start by thinking about what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Knowing what's most important to your business will help you develop a campaign geared toward achieving those goals. Once you know which platform and type of PPC campaign best suits your needs, you can move on to designing your ad. 

Make your ad as eye-catching and enticing as possible to make sure people pay attention to it. A little creativity can help your ad stand out from the thousands of online ads people see every day. 

When a consumer clicks on your ad, the landing page they arrive at must be as high-quality as possible. This page should be organized, have relevant content, and include a clear call to action that tells the website visitor what to do next. 

Paid Search PPC Campaign

Since there are several different types of PPC advertising campaigns, we’re going to focus on paid search as an example. Here are the most important things to know about running a paid search campaign through Google:

Keyword Research

Your keywords are the foundation of your paid search campaign. Spend some time thinking about which keywords to select, as the words you choose will play a huge role in the success of your campaign. 

Remember, your ad will appear when people search this keyword, so only pick keywords your customers are likely to search. Try to put yourself in your target consumers’ shoes to come up with ideas of what they might search for that’s related to your business. 

Don't focus only on basic, one-word terms related to your business. Long-tail keywords (phrases with three to five words) comprise the majority of search traffic, so you should include those in your list as well. Focusing on longer search terms has the added benefits of being less competitive and more affordable.

You may also want to consider negative keywords. If you input a negative keyword, your ad will not appear when someone searches that word or phrase. Negative keywords can be useful if you know there are search terms similar to your keywords that suggest the searcher actually wants a different product. 

Ad Groups

Sometimes, your PPC won’t be a perfect match for the searched terms you’re targeting. One way advertisers get around this issue is by creating ad groups. Each ad in the ad group has related ad copy, keywords, and landing pages. 

When a consumer searches one of the ad group’s keywords, one of the ads in the group will appear. Make sure all the ads in the group have a consistent message to get the most out of this strategy. 

Ad Auctions

Getting your paid search ad on Google isn’t as simple as filling out a form and agreeing on a fee. Google uses ad auctions to decide which ads pop up on the results page when someone searches any given keyword. You need to have more than just the highest bid to succeed, too. Together, these three factors determine whether Google will display your paid search ad:

• Your bid: The more you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad, the greater the chances that Google will select your ad. 
• Ad quality: Google favors higher-quality ads and evaluates quality according to relevance and usefulness. Check your Quality Score (QS) on your Google Ads account to see how Google views your ad. 
• Ad format and extensions: Having an extension like a contact number or location in your ad can boost your ad rank with Google. 

Start Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Grow Your Business

There’s no time like the present to start taking advantage of the many benefits PPC advertising offers. Still not sure how to get started? Optimize Digital Marketing is available to help with all your digital marketing needs. 

If you would like to learn more about PPC advertising and how Optimize can assist you in your advertising campaigns, schedule your free consultation today.