If your business is looking for a fast way to get consumers to your website, make purchases, and build revenue, online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the best solutions.
Unlike traditional advertising in print media or billboards that go to a wide audience, are targeted to a specific audience likely to buy. And while there’s no avenue for measuring who responds to traditional advertising, PPC gives you immediate feedback. And PPC tells you the cost of acquiring each new customer.
If you want to control your advertising spending while getting almost immediate results, PPC is an effective and efficient solution.
What is Online Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
PPC advertising is an online ad you create about your product or service. However, many consumers see your ad, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. You can use PPC ads on search engines like Google and Bing or on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to reach thousands of potential buyers.
Although the basic techniques are the same in every channel, this article focuses on search results PPC using Google. The Internet is a place where everyone can find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. You need to advertise on search engines if you want to be the one who responds to these questions.
A simple click can lead to a new client. New clients can also become referral sources. These new referrals can become referral sources. All of this can be done easily with one click. One-click is worth a lot.
Because each click can become such a valuable revenue source, PPC advertising should be part of your digital marketing strategy.
How To Prepare for a PPC Advertising Campaign
Before you run an online PPC ad campaign, you need to get materials ready, delineate your audience, and make sure your business can handle providing the product or service to consumers. And, you’ll need the capacity to answer questions from consumers about your product.
Your ads on search results will generally display as a headline, 2-3 lines of text, images, and shopping ads.
Before you place your ad, you need to prepare to run your ad campaign. You have a number of decisions to make before creating your ad in order to obtain the best results. Here are the basic steps you need to take to create a successful ad.
- Determine your reach: Geographic location helps target your product to the right buyers. Do you want your ads to appear in the zip code, city, mile radius of a city, whole states, or globally? You need to decide where you want your ad to appear.
- Select your keywords: You need to determine keywords relevant to your product that consumers use to search for a solution. If someone enters your term in your list, your ad shows up. Google can help you find appropriate words with their Google Keyword Planner.
- Choose your ad type: Google offers multiple ad types with Google AdWords and the cost per click ranges based on the campaign type you choose.
- Set your budget: PPC works on a bidding system. You pay based on how many other advertisers are bidding on the same words (plus a few other metrics that Google decides). You can set your budget based on daily spending, a maximum price per click, and other variables.
- Write your ad: If someone is in your selected geographic area and they have typed in a word you are bidding for, your ad will appear for them when they search. When you are writing your ad, you want to make sure it’s clear and enticing, stressing the benefit they’ll receive when they make a purchase.
- Decide where to direct people: When someone clicks on your ad, you will need to send them to an online destination. It is important to send them to a page that clearly explains what they will get based on what they searched. This is known as a landing page. Keep it clear and succinct with a strong call to action (CTA) to make the purchase.
Thoughtful, strategic planning will make a huge difference in the success of your ad campaign, realizing the biggest return on investment (ROI) of your advertising campaign spend.
The Six Big Benefits Of Your PPC Campaign
A well-planned, targeted campaign using keywords consumers use when they search will bring you almost immediate benefits. And a monitored long-term campaign will continue to bring you new revenue.
Online PPC advertising has a number of advantages over traditional print media advertising. Let’s look at them one by one.
1. Instant Traffic
With PPC, you can drive traffic to your site instantly. If you start a campaign online, you’ll end up with the right people clicking on your website, even on the same day. You’ll hear social, content, and ‘inbound’ in digital marketing. Although they can be enormously effective, it takes a lot of time to implement and return consistent results.
A substantial distribution budget is necessary to accelerate the return on investment of your content. Otherwise, you might be waiting a while and racking up agency fees and employing your employees in the meantime. Pay-per-click advertising, in contrast, is very fast and generates a lot of information, which can help you make informed decisions.
2. Specific Targeting
Advertising through PPC is the most targeted form of advertising. You can target your ads based on geographic location, searched words, interests, and more.
Because of targeting, you’ll reach new customers quickly. Unlike print advertising, you can reach completely new audiences with unbeatable control. If you are looking to expand your business to include seasonality or time-specific offers, speed is essential to your success.
You may share your blog posts and social media chat with some of your online networks. If there isn’t any budget or show-stopping content, this is pretty dreamlike.
If you’re a small business with little brand recognition or following, you should give your marketing the boost it needs with PPC to reach your target customers.
3. Flexibility
PPC has no contracts, no set fees, and no set demographics. You can pause your PPC campaign if you want. It is possible to increase or decrease your budget as you wish. If you want your ads to show up in a completely different city and to a totally different audience, you can do so. You’ll be able to do all of this within minutes.
You can reach people who have interacted with your business. Advertising can be done when they search, visit other websites, and use mobile apps.
Your remarketing lists can reach people on their desktops and mobile devices. Create lists for specific cases. A list targeted at people who don’t complete transactions but add something to their shopping basket is an example.
4. Defined Budget
It’s up to you to decide how much you want to spend per click, per day, and per campaign through PPC. You also get immediate data on how much each click costs per campaign.
PPC advertising is fully accountable. Data is at your fingertips, and the results are transparent. You’ll know hard metrics such as Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).
This data allows you to adjust your ads and campaigns as needed within your budgetary constraints.
5. Strong Return on Investment (ROI)
With PPC, your advertising is specific and targeted. Because of this, you put your message in front of the right demographics and you aren’t charged unless they are interested (and click).
With a fully targeted and specific landing page designed to follow up on the ad with a strong call to action (CTA). This is the important piece that leads to conversions.
Ads get consumers to your landing page. Your landing page converts into buyers. It’s a one-two combination designed to increase your ROI.
6. Measurable Results
PPC, particularly, provides excellent reporting. The average number of clicks, average cost per click, and performance are all readily available. With PPC, you’ll know that for every dollar invested, you generated X dollars in revenue. Combine the data from the ad campaign with landing page data from Analytics, and you’ll be able to measure your ad performance and return on investment with hard numbers.
These measurable results allow you to test new wording in your ad or on your landing page for even better results. Getting these PPC ad campaigns set up and effectively running can transform your business.
Understand How Bidding Works
In essence, PPC is based on a bidding system, so the person with the most budget gets the most visibility and clicks. Another business may have a higher total budget than you, but you could still outbid them on a certain keyword. That opens up an opportunity for you.
Advertisers bid on the same keywords, and your ad will go into bidding. Search engines use an automated process to determine the validity of your ad and in what order it should be placed.
Search engines rank ads according to:
- The eligibility of the advertiser for the auction
- The order of relevant ads appearing on the page
- The maximum CPC the advertiser is willing to pay per click
When you look at a search result, you’ll see ads at the top of the page that relate to your search. The top ad on the page is from the advertiser willing to pay the maximum cost per click (CPC).
Those ads listed below the top ad, have the next highest bids on the keyword used to match the ad to a consumer’s query. In other words, PPC ads are like an auction. The top place goes to the highest bidder.
The Measure and Test Process for PPC Success
Once you implement your PPC ad campaign, you begin a process of refining to improve results. The best success comes from monitoring each ad and making adjustments.
- measure your original results
- change one element at a time—for example, ad headline, ad text, image, landing page text, landing page CTA
- test results of your change
- measure and compare the new change with the original
As you refine your ad and landing page, you’ll find the perfect combination to bring in the highest results. PPC is not “set and forget.” Your best results come from measuring and testing.