There are billions of searches on the online space per day on Google and other search engines. To utilize this massive traffic on the search engine, businesses have taken to running Pay Per Click (PPC) ads to drive more traffic or conversions to their website.
PPC is preferred because, with a PPC advertisement bid, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. It is an effective way to get traffic to your website because you only pay when a user clicks on your ad.
That means that you are not paying for impressions or views of random users like you would with other forms of advertising bids.
However, PPC is normally more expensive than other forms of online advertising bid but again, it can be effective in reaching a broad audience.
It is quite easy to create ads today but crafting impactful PPC ads is a skill that takes time to master.
Do you want to learn pay-per-click advertising? This article will take you through a worthy learning process.
What is PPC advertising?
Pay-Per-Click advertising is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their online ads.
There are various types of PPC ads, but one of the most common is the paid search ad. These ads appear when users search for things online using a search engine like Google, especially when they come online looking for something to buy.
This could be anything from a mobile search, using your mobile phone to search “pizza near me” to a local service search (looking for an electrician or a plumber in the neighborhood) to someone shopping for a gift “Mother’s Day flowers” or a high-end item such as enterprise software. These searches trigger pay-per-click advertising.
In a pay-per-click advertising situation, businesses running ads are only billed when a user clicks on their ad, hence the name Pay-Per-Click.
Typically, the cost per click is influenced by an auction system where an advertiser sets the maximum cost the business is willing and comfortable to pay for a click.
Businesses that bid higher (set higher maximum costs per click) tend to get more impressions (instances when an ad is shown to someone). If the ad is convincing enough, businesses that bid more will likely get more clicks than others as well.
Although the bid isn’t the only factor in every PPC algorithm, Google Ads, for instance, measures things like landing page quality and will discount advertisers who have better-optimized pages, allowing them to pay less for clicks.
How Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?
PPC advertising uses search engine results pages (SERPs) as the main medium. Here, Ads are placed on specific keywords or phrases, and when a user clicks on one of them, your ad will be served up.
Unlike traditional banner ads, which are placed next to the content on websites, PPC ads are customized to capture user attention and convert leads into customers.
PPC campaigns can be very successful when they are executed correctly by utilizing effective targeting strategies and paid media platforms like Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising.
When planning your PPC campaign, it’s crucial to consider how much money you are willing to spend per month as well as how many hours you plan on working each day on the project.
You also need to be sure that your target audience is reachable via online searches and has an interest in what you are promoting.
Note that advertisers cannot simply pay more to ensure that their ads appear more prominently than their competitors.
Instead, ads are subject to what is referred to as the Ad Auction, an entirely automated process that Google and other search engines use to decide the relevance and validity of ads that appear on their SERPs.
Once you have all of these insights in place, setting up your targeted ads can be a relatively easy process.
How Keywords Work in Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Your entire PPC campaign is built and woven around keywords, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers constantly grow and refine their PPC keyword list because they have come to realize how crucial it is to their ad success.
If you only conduct keyword research once, when you create your first campaign, you are likely missing out on thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost, and highly relevant keywords that could be driving massive traffic to your site.
Since the PPC bidding system is subject to an ad auction system where search engines determine the validity and relevance of ads on the pages, this means that advertisers must bid on the keywords they hope would “trigger,” or show their ads.
For example, your business deals in electrical appliances. A user wanting to purchase a new Television, IT, or audio might enter the keyword “Consumer electronics” into a search engine to find retailers offering these items.
The moment the user submits their search query, the search engine performs the complex algorithmic calculations on the search query that the Ad Auction is based upon. This determines which ads are shown, in which order, and by which advertiser.
Since you have to pay for each click on your ads, it’s crucial to only bid on keywords that are relevant to your business,
So you can be sure to get good ROI from your ad spend. A keyword tool can help you find the relevant keywords to bid on that are both likely to drive sales or conversions and are not acutely expensive.
How to Optimize Pay-Per-Click Ads
For one thing, a PPC campaign is focused on specific targeted keywords, you end up with more targeted traffic. This reduces the risk of getting the wrong leads thereby improving your conversion rates in the long run.
And, because paid ads are immediately rolled out, even for a new brand, you can easily get results faster than if you had relied on inbound marketing strategies like SEO.
While you can and should still focus on long-term inbound marketing strategies for your site—organic leads will help reduce costs, in the long run, using PPC campaigns alongside these strategies can help you boost sales and justify the cost of running these campaigns in the first place.
Just like we noted earlier at the beginning of this article, PPC takes time and effort to do it right. Several factors can influence your PPC costs, including:
#1. The relevance of the keywords you decide to bid on: Are they the search terms your best audience is using to find products they want to buy or solutions to their problems?
As a tip, craft relevant pay per Click keyword lists, proper ad text, and tight keyword groups.
High click-through rates and by association the relevance of your ad copy, influence your cost-per-click.
#2. The quality of your ads and landing pages: Google awards the best ad placements and the lowest costs to businesses that offer a good consumer experience.
Your click-through rate is a good indication of to signal if or not your ad creative is resonating with users. Creating optimized landing pages with persuasive, relevant content and a CTA, tailored to particular search queries.
#3. Competition: Competitors are like belly buttons, we have all got them. Recognize this fact and realize that the ever-changing presence of competitors will greatly influence your bidding cost, ad position, CTR and you guessed it – CPCs.
#4. Quality Score: Quality Score is Google’s way of rating the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores earn more ad clicks at lower costs.
Benefits of Using Pay-per-Click Advertising
#1. PPC enables a business to win an instant share of traffic from users who search for a specific keyword.
With pay-per-click advertising, you can achieve instant visibility by bidding on keyword searches or customer segments that match your product or service.
Insights gained can then be fed into other marketing activities to compound your results and achieve business growth.
#2. PPC Contributes to Business Goals: This is often the most compelling reason to use pay-per-click advertising as it can help you achieve several business and marketing goals.
These goals range from high-level brand exposure to thought leadership to a hot lead submission.
Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked using pay-per-click advertising
#3. Pay Per Click Is Measurable & Trackable: A key benefit of pay-per-click advertising run through Google Ads is that it’s easy to measure and track.
To do this, use the Google Ads tool in combination with Google Analytics and you are there with the accurate result of your campaign efforts.
You will see high-level performance information, including impressions, clicks, and conversions ( all based on the specified business goals)
There’s no mystery to your pay-per-click performance. Stats are readily accessible and show how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they drive for your budget.
In other advertising bids, the picture is not as crystal clear for attribution of the budget to direct results. So in the aspect of transparency, PPC towers other bids.
#4. Quick Entry: Even if you are a decade behind your competitors in jumping into PPC advertising, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization and before you know it, you are shoulder to shoulder with old hands in the industry.
This is often a big difference in starting up SEO efforts, which requires a lot of time and attention to get the same positioning and traffic that Google Ads offers within minutes of launch.
Conclusion
Pay Per Click advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable method for tons of B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other businesses. By using PPC advertising, businesses can attract traffic to their websites or landing pages.
With PPC channels, advertisers can choose from the various campaigns and customize the campaign for the specific objective that they intend to achieve (You could choose to shoot for Traffic, Lead Generation, or Conversion).
Another advantage of leveraging pay Per Click Advertising on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads is that advertisers can use the feature of remarketing and re-targeting.
It is such a great advertising method that you need to have in your advertising toolbox.
