What Is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising?
PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising has helped brands reach their marketing goals quickly and stay profitable at the same time. It is one of the most effective forms of online marketing technique that is bound to bring positive results, well, only if you know what you are getting into.
Therefore, understanding what PPC advertising is and how it works is crucial to your business success in 2020. And in this blog posts, we are going to do exactly that. We will provide a brief overview of this form of advertising, discuss its benefits, and show you how it works to help you get started!
So, let’s cut to the chase and dive right in!
What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
Pay-Per-Click is an online paid advertising model where the businesses or advertisers pay each time an online user clicks on their online ads. In this, the business is charged only when a user clicks on their ad, hence the name ‘Pay-Per-Click’.
There are many types of these ads. Let’s quickly discuss each of them before we jump onto how the advertising model functions.
1) Search Advertising
This is the most common type of PPC ads we see on the Internet. These can be found on search engines like Google and Bing. Whenever you make a Google search, you will first see the paid search results before getting to organic results. These ads use only text.
2) Display Advertising
These are the ads Google shows on all the websites that have partnered with it. With the help of display advertising, advertisers are able to target their market and choose people who visit websites of a particular niche. You can choose the websites and run specific visual ads on them. These ads use both text and image.
3) Social Media Advertising
The PPC model is also followed on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where advertisers try to connect with the target audience by placing their ads on their newsfeed. These ads use text, image, or video.
4) Remarketing
Online visitors that show interest in a product but do not end up buying it can be targeted on the websites they visit through remarketing campaigns.
This is an effective method of PPC since the people you are targeting already like the products and the ads will give them the push they need to buy them. There’s sequential marketing as well, where the advertisers make use of different messaging, stories, and content depending on how much time the visitor has spent away from the site.
5) Google Shopping Ads
Finally, we have Google Shopping campaigns. These are mostly used by eCommerce website owners. These advertisements provide a sneak peek at the product you are trying to sell. These are generally carousel ads and have high conversion rates.
How PPC Advertising Works?
To use paid advertising at its maximum potential, It is important to understand how PPC advertising works. So, let’s find out how PPC advertising functions.
Let’s take the example of search ads that can be found on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Every time you enter a query on the Google search engine, you will see PPC ads. Now, you must know that an automatic online auction took place for the query you entered, and the PPC ad that won was shown on the search engine result page.
When this happens, there is a combination of factors that are responsible for some ads to win and others to lose. These factors are mainly the bid amount and the quality of the ad. These real-time online auctions are what keeps PPC advertising platforms working.
If advertisers on the Internet have created ads for the query or keyword you will enter on Google, the auction will automatically get triggered and the ads that win the auction are displayed on top of the SERPs.
To run PPC ads, you will have to register to the PPC advertising platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, and others. These platforms will help you design your PPC ads and determine when, where, and who would be subjected to your ads online.
1) Keywords
Everything that happens in PPC revolves around the keywords which are essentially the queries entered by search engine users. So, queries are what users enter on search engines, and keywords are what advertisers use to target them.
To be specific, keywords are nothing but a generalized abstraction of a long list of search queries made by the online users. There are different types of keywords that advertisers can use. These keyword match types are used to increase or decrease the precision while targeting the users online.
2) Advertisements
You will also have to design your ads for the PPC campaign. These ads are put together in different ad groups that have similar sets of keywords and themes.
As we mentioned above, these ads are shown to online users once they win the online auction. Therefore, it is very important that you get these ads right.
The search ads generally contain a headline, a URL, and a description. They can further have sitelink and call extensions to increase their visibility and engagement.
3) Budgets & Bids
But to participate in the auction, you will have to fix the amount you are willing to spend to get your ads displayed for a given keyword. This is done by setting the budget for the campaign or setting the bids for each ad group.
The bids can be at the ad group level or the keyword level.
The budget set at the campaign level will never be overspent over the course of a month. However, it can be exceeded on a daily basis. As you get into this, you will find that the keyword level bids override the ad group level bids.
4) Ad Rank
Bidding is not the be-all and end-all of PPC advertising. It sure helps ads to get displayed over a network, but there are many other factors that come into play.
If we talk about the Google Ads network, you will have to consider factors like bid amount, ad relevance and quality, the context of search, ad format, and more.
Quality Score is the metric you will be looking after while creating a PPC ad campaign. The quality score is determined by the history of CTR, the relevance of keywords to the ad and search query, and the quality of the landing page.
5) Targeting
You don’t want the ads to show up in front of the wrong target audience, right? To make sure your ads are optimized for best targeting, you will have to consider factors like device, location, day and time, and demographic.
Optimizing your ad campaign for these factors will help you run your ads at the right time, at the right place, and for the right people. This will ensure your marketing budget is spent efficiently.
What are the Benefits of PPC Advertising?
Highly Targeted Advertising
As we mentioned earlier, PPC ads involve choosing the right keywords and interests to ensure better targeting and overall results. You are only showing up for searches that are related to your brand or products or services.
Provides Measurable ROI
With the help of PPC ads, you will know exactly what you will get out of the ad campaigns. It eases the process of measuring ROI by providing important performance metrics for the campaign.
Increased Brand Exposure
With PPC ads, you can get the word out about your brand and reach out to people who otherwise wouldn’t even know that your brand exists. Since paid results are shown first on search engines, your brand will get exposed more if you run PPC ads.
Summary
There you have it. Pay-per-click advertising is a great online marketing model, the results of which can boost your business growth through the roof. We hope this piece of content helped you understand what PPC advertising is all about and how it can add value to your brand. Have questions? Feel free to put them down in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you!
Advertise Locally or Globally
Since ads are location specific as well, you can choose the location where your ads will be shown. Thus, you can improve the local visibility or global exposure of your brand on command.
Provides Immediate Impact
Unlike search engine optimization, PPC ads have immediate effects and can boost your business revenue with a single click. However, it does cost you a lot of money because the keyword for your niche might be very expensive.