Pay-per-click ads are also known as PPC. This type of advertising can be a powerful tool when used correctly. There are several types of PPC advertising, including search, remarketing, display, video, social media, and shopping.
As the name indicates, the idea is that once your ad appears, you’re paying when someone clicks it. You can also get visibility and possible engagements without the cost with well-structured PPC ads.
The following is a guide to how pay-per-click advertising generally works.
The Basics
PPC is an online model of advertising. If you search for nearly anything on Google, you’ll see these ads appearing at the top of the page with the relevant search results.
PPC ads can be used to drive traffic or sales, and you can target them pretty specifically so that you’re making sure your ads are only being served to those who best fit your customer demographic.
Using Google Ads for PPC marketing tends to give the best access to the largest potential audience, and you can set up your ads in a range of ways based on your goals.
The general way PPC ads work includes signing up for an advertising account on the platform, creating ads, and setting the maximum cost you’ll pay for each click.
Then, your ad goes into an auction with other advertisers. These advertisers are bidding on the same keywords as you. The auction determines the order ads are shown in, and then you pay when someone clicks yours.
How Auctions Work
The ad auction is what takes place when someone performs a search. The factors determined during an auction include whether or not an ad account is eligible, the order the eligible ads will appear, and how much a click will cost each advertiser with ads showing.
The first influencer on an auction is the maximum cost-per-click an advertiser sets. This is the most you’re willing to pay, but it doesn’t mean it’s how much you’ll actually pay.
Another thing that influences this process is the Quality Score. Quality Score measures factors including the expected click-through rate of an ad, the relevance to what’s being searched for, and the experience of the landing page that a user will receive once they click on an ad.
What Are the Benefits of PPC?
PPC can benefit advertisers as part of their marketing strategy for several key reasons.
First, you can start to get clicks fast. Once you set up an account and create your ad, approval usually happens in less than a few hours. After your ads are live, as long as you’re eligible to be in the auction and your bid is high enough, you can potentially start receiving clicks.
On the other hand, something like search engine optimization can take weeks or months to start showing any results.
Another advantage of PPC is the fact that you can track and measure your outcomes very easily. You can see your conversions, and you can also dig in deeper to see your ROI for your account and ad groups and keywords. You can use all of this data to make decisions going forward and improve your campaigns.
Keyword Research
While the general concept of PPC ads isn’t necessarily complex, figuring out how to do them well can be. For example, keyword research for PPC is time-consuming but is also what your entire campaign is built around. This is why people will often work with professional agencies to create their PPC ads.
Your PPC keywords have to be relevant so that you aren’t paying for traffic with nothing to do with your business. When you can identify targeted keywords, you’ll get a higher PPC click-through rate and a better cost per click.
Your keyword research also needs to help you identify the most popular search terms and long-term keywords that are more specific although less common. These are less competitive, so they’re less expensive.
After you identify your keywords, you manage your campaigns to ensure they stay effective. PPC ads aren’t something you can set and forget. You have to continue adding relevant keywords and also adding negative keywords.
Negative keywords are terms that don’t convert, and when you add them, you reduce wasteful spending and improve the relevancy of your campaigns.
Finally, you’ll also have to optimize your campaigns with strategies like split ad groups. You break your ad groups into smaller and perhaps more relevant ones to create more targeted text for your ads and more targeted landing pages.
