Guide to understanding Pay per Click advertising

Cost-per-click-advertising
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Pay per click advertising has been around over the last two decades and have seen a lot of transformation. 

PPC has evolved a lot basically the way PPC giants such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Amazon have adjusted their PPC advertising tools constantly to ensure enhanced performances. 

It is always important for online advertisers to follow up and be updated as much as possible in order to be able to run more effective PPC campaigns.

In this post, I will guide you through the process of formulating and running successful PPC or CPC campaigns.

Let’s jump into it…

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

First things first. Let’s understand what is pay per click advertising.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is also known as Cost per click (CPC) advertising. It is an online advertising model used by both the advertisers and the publisher as a pricing model to sell or buy traffic.

The advertiser is required to pay for the traffic sent by the publisher which in most cases is a website owner or a group of websites inclusive of blogs.

Advertisers often buy specific targeted traffic that is relevant to their niche or market type.

Make money blogging

Make money blogging

Pay per click advertising usually sends traffic through banner ads, Text ads, Interstitial Ads, In-App ads across mobile and desktop devices. Other forms of utilizing PPC Advertising are through Pop-Up Ads, contextual ads, links, etc.

Pay-per-click advertising or cost per click advertising is largely controlled by search engine giants such as Google (Google Ads), Bing and Yahoo Bing and Yahoo Ads). These search engines display these ads on their various platforms.

How PPC advertising works will have discoursed in detail below…

The image below shows how Pay per click Ads appear in Google results.

Pay Per Click advertising

Pay-per-click Trends

PPC trends show the evolution process of PPC advertising. The online PPC community could testify that a lot has changed over the past years. In particular, 2018 witnessed a lot of changes in online PPC such as,

PPC Trends

Google rebrands its online advertising from “Google AdWords” to “Google Ads”. This change was accompanied by a lot of features within the system such as creating various types of campaigns, enhancements, and targeting options making creating and targeting campaigns more effective.

Bing also followed the same way in their PPC advertising system making it more convenient to create and manage campaigns with a more efficient reporting system.

LinkedIn on the other hand also implemented a profile targeting system in 2018 while Amazon has received more PPC Ad budget as advertisers noticed more product searching taking place on Amazon.

How does Pay Per Click Advertising work?

PPC advertising or cost-per-click advertising works by using highly technical IT systems designed by various Ad Networks. Although each of these systems works differently, they all have one thing in common which is generating clicks for the advertiser.

PPC or CPC pricing model

Cost-per-click advertising works on two popular models which are known as the Bid-based CPC and Flat-rate CPC.

In each of the models, the advertiser sign’s up with the Ad publishers which in most cases is an advertising ad network.

The registration also includes an agreement that allows each advertiser to indicate or choose how much money they are willing to pay per certain keyword or keyword phrases.

The Ad network system then automatically ranks advertisers’ bids and shows them when a quarry is entered in the search engines.

To break it down further…

Cheap Banner advertising

Cheap online advertising

For search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These Ad giants use a bidding system that allows advertisers to bid for keywords that are related to their niche or market.

The bidding system works in favour of the advertiser that pays higher for a certain keyword or keyword phrase. These Ads are displayed on top or below search results.

On the other hand, website owners or bloggers charge advertisers a fixed amount to place banner ads, interstitial ads, or Text Ads within a given time frame. Ad operates in a similar way such as search engines while also they have the capability to charge a fixed amount per click as well.

Pay Per Click the advertising Checklist

In every project, there are a set of activities that involve proper planning and management for those budgets to be successful. This same ideology is applied to PPC campaigns in order to reap the full benefits of PPC advertising.

This checklist entails how the cost per click campaigns should be planned and managed Daily, weekly, Bi-Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly.

Pay per click check list

Infographic credit: Media Media

Planning Pay per click

Planning your PPC campaign entails the following

Outline Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Budget your estimated campaign spend and the approximate cost per click you expect to spend on your campaign.

Set your target for conversions and acquisitions (CPA)

Define the frequency of measuring your campaign

Daily checklist

Daily monitoring and optimization are done by checking the daily Ad spending and conversions.

Movers: Click-through rates and changes in the cost

Bid Adjustment: Adjust Ad bids based on top performance and poor converters

Keywords adjustment: Monitor and adjust poor-performing keywords

Weekly checklist

Position: Click performance top versus side

Rebalance: Refine performance anomalies

Keywords: Negative Keywords research

Mobile: Mobile bid adjustment versus desktop performance

Bi-Weekly Checklist

Impressions: Search and update missed opportunities

Ad groups: Split out, narrow, and refine

Ads: Create new Ads, analyze the existing ads and pause poor-performing ads

Placement: Remove or poor performing Ads

Monthly checklist

GDN: Display versus search performance review

Quality: address low-quality keywords scores

Website links: Analyse performance, Add or remove

Analytics: Search for poor visitors and fix metrics

Quarterly checklist

Landing pages: refine copy, and improve conversion rates.

Geo-targeting: location performance and adjust bids

Dayparting: Day of the week and time of the day analysis.

Review: Historical performance analysis.

How to Calculate Pay per click advertising?

Understanding how PPC or cost-per-click advertising is calculated is very simple. This is done by dividing the cost of advertising by the number of clicks from a particular campaign.

The formula is as follows: pay per click ($) = Advertising cost ($) / number of clicks (#). Doing so will give you an insight into how much your PPC advertising campaign actually costs.

PPC Advertising cost OR CPC advertising cost

PPC advertising cost Or CPC advertising cost is simply the specified cost of running a PPC or CPC campaign in a given period of time. This advertising cost can vary based on when the advertiser decides to analyze the cost of advertising compared to the performance of the Ad campaign.

Types of Pay-per-Click Advertising

There are various forms of PPC advertising also known as CPC advertising. They come in various forms of online advertising and the most popular ones are Banner advertising also known as Banner Ads, Text advertising or Text Ads, Interstitial Advertising or full-screen Ads, and mobile and in-app advertising.

The example of these PPC advertising types will be briefly discussed below as follows…

Banner Advertising PPC.

PPC Banner advertising is a form of online advertising that allows advertisers to design banners with promotional information and display them on publishers’ channels.

Banner advertising is arguably one of the oldest forms of online advertising. It is still one of the most popular among online marketers. The reason for this is simply because they are more attractive and eye-catching for visitors.

The most popular banner sizes are the 728×90, 300×250, 160×600, and 468×60 while there are many other banner sizes. These banner sizes are also known to be the most converting ads.

Interstitial Advertising PPC

Interstitial PPC advertising also known as full-screen advertising is mostly used on mobile devices to get the full attention of the visitors. They appear in full screen or mostly cover 70% of the screen with the possibility of closing them down or it automatically disappears after a few seconds.

Cheap Banner advertisingCheap online advertising

Interstitial Ads come in various sizes. The most popular ones are 320×480 and 480×320 for mobile phones while 1024×768 and 768×1024 are more suitable for tablets.

  • Mobile advertising PPC

PPC Mobile advertising has grown significantly in the past five years. This is partly because of the dramatic increase in mobile use by internet users. Google reported in 2015 that mobile search surpasses desktop searches made in their search engine.

This made Google and other search engines lay more emphasis on mobile devices. It presented online advertisers the opportunity to target mobile users and increase their sales and ultimately profits.

Because most people carry their mobile devices with them all the time. online advertisers have also been doing their best to target mobile users while implementing various mobile Ad targeting strategies.

Text Advertising PPC

CPC Text advertising has also come a long way making it one of the oldest and the most popular forms of PPC online advertising. Text ads are mostly used by Google and other search engines.

These text Ads are mostly displayed on the top and bottom of Google search results. Google also displays PPC Text Ads on YouTube and publishers’ blogs and websites all over.

Pay-per-click advertising agency

These are pay-per-click advertising Ad networks such as AdsTargets offering advertisers the opportunities to run their PPC campaigns.

Also, many advertising agencies help small businesses to run, monitor and optimize their PPC or CPC Ad campaigns for a monthly feel. These are all classified as Pay per click advertising agencies.

Benefits of Pay per click

There are numerous benefits brands get from PPC or CPC advertising. Nowadays, most brands have dedicated pay-per-click budgets and put them to use year-round. It is one of the reasons why Google makes over 100 billion dollars and why Facebook makes over 40 billion dollars.

The benefits are as follows

  • PPC advertising gives brands online visibility;
  • It increases their online exposure which makes an impact on their off-line; exposure as well.
  • Brands that engage in CPC advertising increase their sales and conversions;
  • It enables fast growth for brands

Conclusions

We have covered pay-per-click or as you like cost per click here but will be very happy to know what you think about this online advertising concept.

Suggestions with the most recent updates about PPC or CPC are welcome so we can improve the quality of this post and keep it as fresh as possible.

Pay-per-click advertising has been around over the last two decades and has seen a lot of transformation. 

PPC has evolved a lot basically the way PPC giants such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Amazon have adjusted their PPC advertising tools constantly to ensure enhanced performances. 

It is always important for online advertisers to follow up and be updated as much as possible in order to be able to run more effective PPC campaigns.

In this post, I will guide you through the process of formulating and running successful PPC or CPC campaigns.

Let’s jump into it…

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

First things first. Let’s understand what is pay per click advertising.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is also known as Cost per click (CPC) advertising it is an online advertising model used by both the advertisers and the publisher as a pricing model to sell or buy traffic.

The advertiser is required to pay for the traffic sent by the publisher which in most cases the publisher is a website owner or a group of websites inclusive of blogs.

Advertisers often buy specific targeted traffic that is relevant to their niche or market type.

Make money blogging
Make money blogging

Pay-per-click advertising usually sends traffic through banner ads, Text ads, Interstitial Ads, In-App ads across mobile and desktop devices. Other forms of utilising PPC Advertising are Pop-Up Ads, contextual ads, links etc.

Pay-per-click advertising or cost-per-click advertising is largely controlled by search engine giants such as Google (Google Ads), Bing and Yahoo Bing and Yahoo Ads). These search engines display these ads on their various platforms.

How PPC advertising works will have discoursed in detail below…

The image below shows how Pay per click Ads appear in Google results.

Pay Per Click advertising

Pay per click Trends

PPC trends show the evolution process of PPC advertising. The online PPC community could testify that a lot has changed over the past years. In particular, 2018 witnessed a lot of changes in online PPC such as,

PPC Trends

Google rebrands her online advertising from “Google AdWords” to “Google Ads”. This change was accompanied by a lot of features within the system such as creating various types of campaigns, enhancements, and targeting options making creating and targeting campaigns more effective.

Bing also followed the same way in their PPC advertising system making it more convenient to create and manage campaigns with a more efficient reporting system.

LinkedIn on the other hand also implemented a profile targeting system in 2018 while Amazon has received more PPC Ad budget as advertisers noticed more products search taking place on Amazon.

How does Pay Per Click Advertising work?

PPC advertising or cost per click advertising works by using highly technical IT systems designed by various Ad Networks. Although each of these systems works differently, they all have one thing in common which is generating clicks for the advertiser.

PPC or CPC pricing model

Cost per click advertising works on two popular models which are known as the Bid-based CPC and Flat-rate CPC.

In each of the models, the advertiser’s sign’s up with the Ad publishers which in most cases is an advertising ad network.

The registration also includes an agreement that allows each advertiser to indicate or choose how much money they are willing to pay per certain keyword or keyword phrases.

The Ad network system then automatically ranks advertisers’ bids and show them when a quarry is entered into the search engines.

To break it down further…

For search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. These Ad giants use a bidding system that allows advertisers to bid for keywords that are related to their niche or market.

The bidding system works in favour of the advertiser that pays higher for a certain keyword or keyword phrase. These Ads are displayed on top or below search results.

On the other hand, websites owners or bloggers charge advertisers a fixed amount to place banner ads, interstitial ads or Text Ads within a given time frame. Ad operates in a similar way such as search engines while also they have the capability to charge a fixed amount per click as well.

Pay Per Click advertising Checklist

In every project, there are a set of activities that involve proper planning and management for those budgets to be successful. This same ideology is applied for PPC campaigns in other to reap the full benefits of PPC advertising.

This checklist entails how the cost per click campaigns should be planned and managed Daily, weekly, Bi-Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly.

Pay per click check list
Infographic credit: Media media

Planning Pay per click

Planning your PPC campaign entails the following

Outline Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Budget your estimated campaign spend and approximate cost per click you expect to spend on your campaign.

Set your target for conversions and acquisitions (CPA)

Define your frequency of measuring your campaign

Daily checklist

Daily monitoring and optimization are done by checking the daily Ad spend and conversions.

Movers: Click-through rates and changes in the cost

Bid Adjustment: Adjust Ad bids based on top performance and poor converters

Keywords adjustment: Monitor and adjust poor performing keywords

Weekly checklist

Position: Click performance top versus side

Rebalance: Refine performance anomalies

Keywords: Negative Keywords research

Mobile: Mobile bid adjustment versus desktop performance

Bi-Weekly Checklist

Impressions: Search and update missed opportunities

Ad groups: Split out, narrow and refine

Ads: Create new Ads, analyse the existing ads and pause poor performing ads

Placement: Remove or poor performing Ads

Monthly checklist

GDN: Display verses search performance review

Quality: address low-quality keywords scores

Website links: Analyse performance, Add or remove

Analytics: Search for poor visitors and fix metrics

Quarterly checklist

Landing pages: refine copy, improve conversions rates.

Geo-targeting: location performance and adjust bids

Dayparting: Day of the week and time of the day analysis.

Review: Historical performance analysis.

How to Calculate Pay per click advertising?

To understand how PPC or cost per click advertising is calculated is very simple. This is done by dividing the cost of advertising by the number of clicks from a particular campaign.

The formula is as follows: pay per click ($) = Advertising cost ($) / number of clicks (#). Doing so will give you an insight into how much your PPC advertising campaign actually cost.

PPC Advertising cost OR CPC advertising cost

PPC advertising cost Or CPC advertising cost is simply the specified cost of running a PPC or CPC campaign in a given period of time. This advertising cost can vary based on when the advertiser decides to analyse their cost of advertising compared to the performance of the Ad campaign.

Types of Pay per Click Advertising

There are various forms of PPC advertising also known as CPC advertising. They come in various forms of online advertising and the most popular ones are Banner advertising also known as Banner Ads, Text advertising or Text Ads, Interstitial Advertising or full-screen Ads, mobile and in-app advertising.

The example of these PPC advertising types will be briefly discussed below as follows…

Banner Advertising PPC.

PPC Banner advertising is a form of online advertising that allows advertisers to design banners with promotional information and display them on publishers channels.

Banner advertising is arguably one of the oldest forms of online advertising. It is still one of the most popular among online marketers. The reason for this is simply because they are more attractive and eye-catching for visitors.

The most popular banner sizes are the 728×90, 300×250, 160×600 and 468×60 while there are many other banner sizes. These banner sizes are also known to be the most converting ads.

Interstitial Advertising PPC

Interstitial PPC advertising also known as full-screen advertising is mostly used on mobile devices to get the full attention of the visitors. They appear in full screen or mostly covers 70% of the screen with the possibility of closing them down or automatically disappearing after a few seconds.

Cheap Banner advertising
Cheap online advertising

Interstitial Ads comes in various sizes. The most popular ones are 320×480 and 480×320 for mobile phones while 1024×768 and 768×1024 are more suitable for tablets.

PPC Mobile advertising has grown significantly in the past five years. This is partly because of the dramatic increase in mobile use by internet users. Google reported in 2015 that mobile search surpasses desktop searches made in their search engine.

This made Google and other search engines lay more emphasis on mobile devices. It presented online advertisers the opportunity to target mobile users and increase their sales and ultimately profits.

Because most people carry their mobile devices with them all the time. online advertisers have also been doing their best to target mobile users while implementing various mobile Ad targeting strategies.

Text Advertising PPC

CPC Text advertising has also come a long way making it one of the oldest and the most popular form of PPC online advertising. Text ads are mostly used by Google and other search engines.

These text Ads are mostly displayed on the top and bottom of google search results. Google also displays PPC Text Ads on YouTube and publishers blogs and websites all over.

Pay per click advertising Agency

These are pay per click advertising Ad networks such as AdsTargets offering advertisers the opportunities to run their PPC campaigns.

Also, there are a lot of advertising agencies that help small businesses run, monitor and optimise their PPC or CPC Ad campaigns for a monthly feel. These are all classified as Pay per click advertising agencies.

Benefits of Pay per click

There are numerous benefits brands get from PPC or CPC advertising. Nowadays, most brands have dedicated pay per click budgets and put them to use year-round. It is one of the reasons why Google makes over 100 billion dollars why Facebook makes over 40 billion dollars.

The benefits are as follows

  • PPC advertising gives brands online visibility;
  • It increases their online exposure which makes an impact on their off-line; exposure as well.
  • Brands that engage in CPC advertising increase their sales and conversions;
  • It enables fast growth for brands

Conclusions

We have covered pay per click or as you like cost per click here but will be very happy to know what you think about these online advertising concepts.

Suggestions with the most recent updates about PPC or CPC are welcome so we can improve the quality of this post and keep it as fresh as possible.

Eugene Agoh

Eugene Agoh

Founder at AdsTargets | Online advertising expert | Search engine optimisation expert | Social media marketing expert.Eugene is a Passionate writer on topics relating to online advertising, branding and generally interested in creating digital marketing content. He is curious about the future of digital advertising.Follow Eugene on LinkedIn @ eugeneagoh

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