Businesses that leverage digital marketing to generate leads and make sales can testify to an array of techniques that have proven effective over time in various situations. If you are looking for a marketing strategy to kick-start your digital marketing journey, even on a tight campaign budget, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is what you need.
According to statistics, PPC ads are one of the oldest and most effective digital marketing tools still in existence today. When done correctly, it can increase brand popularity by up to 80%. Due to its mode of operation, businesses that utilize this marketing strategy can get up to $2 for every $1 spent on ads.
At this point, you might be wondering what pay-per-click marketing is and how you can successfully implement this strategy in your business for maximum productivity. Read on to find out.
What Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a keyword-based model of advertising that allows you to place your ads on an advertising platform by bidding on certain keywords related to your product or services. This is done without paying any initial fee upfront as you are charged when users click on your ad.
In most cases, advertisers who use PPC are paying for ad clicks that direct users to their website. It is important to note that you can also use PPC ads for other things like engagement, impressions, and video views. So if you have an advertising campaign where you wish to use videos, you can also run pay-per-click ads (this time on platforms like YouTube) to boost video views.
When done correctly, PPC advertising can be efficient and cost-effective because you get to showcase your product to millions of internet users around the globe.
The most popular and productive place for PPC advertising is search engines—Google search engines, to be precise. The advantage of running your PPC campaign on Google is that it enables you to display your ads across various platforms.
According to statistics, Google handles more than 92% of searches on the internet. Also, its advertising campaign can reach more than 90% of internet users globally.
Over 1.2 million businesses and one million websites are already part of the Google search network. It is also important to note that PPC advertising can be done on other platforms like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a few others, depending on your marketing strategy.
How Does PPC Work?
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To understand how PPC works, you need to be familiar with these four terms: keywords, click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), and quality score.
Keywords
These are words or phrases that match what your target audience is searching for on search engines.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the number of clicks that your ad receives. The higher the number of clicks, the better.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
CPC represents the amount that you are charged for every click in your marketing campaign.
Quality Score
This represents how much importance Google is attaching to both your PPC ads and your keywords. How much quality score you receive depends on your expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience, and keyword relevance. Ads with better quality scores will get more clicks.
The goal of every PPC campaign is for a website to appear at the top of the Google search engine results page (SERP), and to do that, the factors mentioned above need to be in check. Consumers trust the top results on search engines, and that is why over 95% of users will click on the top four results.
Every time the search engine receives a search from a user, it triggers a bidding process among several ads already competing for the same keyword that a user is searching for. This bidding process is an attempt to rank your ad. Ads with the highest rank make it to the first page for that particular keyword.
Ad Rank = Quality Score x Max CPC
This may look easy, but it requires a lot of work and creativity. You can bid the highest (max CPC) on a particular keyword, but if your quality score is terrible, your ad will not be ranked.
Platforms like Google ads pay serious attention to ad quality, landing page quality, and how relevant that keyword you are bidding on is to your ads.
This system particularly favors startups with a limited budget for advertising. It provides a level playing field for small businesses where they can confidently compete with the big spenders, provided the content of their ad is relevant to the keyword users are searching for.
How to Launch a Successful PPC Campaign
Only Choose Keywords Relevant to Your Ads
Keywords are the core of every PPC campaign. That is because your target audience uses those words and phrases to search for your product or service.
Bidding on irrelevant keywords that are not related to your ad copy or landing page will only result in a low-quality score and low conversion.
To avoid that, you can make use of some popular online keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner.
Divide Relevant Keywords into Categories
Now that you know how relevant keywords are and how to acquire the ones relevant to your niche using Google Keyword Planner, the next step is to group them.
Grouping helps you to select keywords and phrases that mean the same thing and may lead to the same search result. That way, when users search for your services using different search terms, your ads will always show up. That can lead to a high-quality score, better conversion rate, and proper market segmentation.
Create Your Ad Copy and Optimize Your Landing Page
Your ad copy needs to be clear, concise, and compelling enough, as this is what users will come across before deciding if they are interested in what you have to offer.
Your landing page is where customers are directed to after clicking on your ad. It is essential to keep this page optimized by including the necessary sales copy that will lead to your desired call to action.
Determine Your Campaign Budget
You can set a weekly or monthly budget, depending on how much money you have already set aside for advertising. Your overall CTR and CPC will determine the total cost of your PPC campaign.
Always Monitor Your PPC Campaign
Google’s algorithm changes all the time. It does not mean that a keyword performing well at the moment will perform well next week. That is why you need to monitor your campaign for both performing and non-performing keywords.
A non-performing keyword should be eliminated or replaced with a performing keyword to maximize your campaign budget.
Conclusion
PPC advertising remains one of the oldest and cheapest forms of digital marketing in existence today. If your business is leveraging digital marketing to make sales, then PPC can be a cost-effective tool for reaching your marketing goals.
But first, you need to understand how PPC ads work, how keywords are generated, how to arrange your keywords into groups, and also how to monitor your PPC campaign.
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