Pay-Per-Click 101: A Beginner’s Guide To PPC Marketing

Pay-per-click marketing makes up a significant part of advertisers’ strategies, and more brands are seeing the importance of PPC spending. In 2017 alone, 7 million advertisers invested $10.1 billion in PPC marketing, and 40 percent of brands and agencies say that they’d like to spend more on PPC ads. Using sophisticated algorithms to target relevant audiences, PPC marketing is drastically disrupting the marketing landscape. But what exactly is Pay-per-Click marketing, and how can you make it work for your business?

What Is PPC And How Does It Work?

PPC refers to all digital campaigns where advertisers pay publishers and platforms each time their ads get clicked. Search engine advertising is a popular form of PPC, but it’s also used in social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Google Ads and Facebook are the most popular digital ad spending platforms, and according to experts, they will likely remain so in the coming years.

This digital advertising model is a way to buy traffic rather than attract visits organically. But to create an effective PPC campaign, digital marketers need to understand their target audience’s characteristics. For example, if your target audience is young professionals in Austin, you’ll need to understand what their online behavior is like.

In cases like this, hiring an agency that specializes in PPC management Austin would be a good way to get the highest ROI possible, as clicks would be more likely to lead to desired user actions (like buying a product or registering).

The most striking advantage of PPC marketing — especially when compared to cost per impression (CPM) models — is that it only charges you for visits you receive. While CPM models charge brands for simply displaying their ads, PPC doesn’t cost you anything unless someone views your content.

This means that you’re wasting less money on audiences who aren’t interested. You could also set a maximum budget per day so that you can control how much you spend per campaign.

Using PPC Ads On Search Engines

Search engine advertising, or search engine marketing (SEM), is one of the most popular forms of PPC marketing. This lets advertisers show ads based on keywords — or popular queries entered in the search bar. PPC can also let your content jump to the top of search engine results immediately — the kind of results that may have taken you months to achieve. 

Services like Google Ads and Bing Ads use real-time bidding (RTB). These auctions begin whenever someone searches for something on a search engine. If advertisers are interested in showing ads related to the search query, an auction occurs instantaneously for the search engine results page (SERP)’s top spots. The winner of the auction is determined by multiple factors, which include ad quality and the bid amount. 

To be part of these auctions, advertisers simply need to set up an account on platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads. Then they determine where they’d like those ads to appear. For search engine marketing to be effective, advertisers need to choose keywords strategically, taking into account what their potential customers would search for.

By getting this information, advertisers can create ads that are relevant to the search queries, making their spending more effective.

What Is PPC Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a critical part of SEM. An effective keyword is relevant to your business, which means that you should be bidding on keywords that relate to what your business is selling. To make the most of your investment, your keyword research shouldn’t just include the most frequently searched queries, but also long-tail keywords, or longer phrases that visitors are more likely to type into the search bar.

These longer keywords are usually less competitive, so they’re also more affordable.

Because the keywords people search for are always changing, PPC keyword research should be conducted periodically, not just when you make your first campaign. If you just do your research once, you’re likely to miss out on low-cost relevant keywords that could have driven traffic to your site. In other words, your list of target keywords should constantly be adapting. 

How Does PPC Work On Social Media?

Though Google Ads may have a larger reach (around 98 percent of the web), social ads have the advantage of refinement. These ads can be tailored to target specific audiences based on their demographics, interests, and other data gathered by the social media platform. Facebook, of course, is the largest player in the social PPC space.

Facebook also owns Instagram, so these ads work on both platforms. But more and more social media platforms have started hosting sponsored ads — from LinkedIn to Snapchat to WhatsApp.

Unlike search advertising that is led by the potential customer’s search terms, social PPC is more like display advertising. These ads don’t just bring traffic to the site, but also attract likes, shares, and retweets, building more brand awareness. Though every click may not necessarily translate into a sale or sign-up, more people will know about your brand. \

These social ads are usually potential customers’ first interaction with brands, creating desire. After seeing the social ad, users may do their own research and find their way back to your site via an organic search.

How To Use PPC Effectively

As with any investment, you should begin with a goal in mind. How would you know if your PPC campaign is successful? What’s your desired outcome? Who are you targeting? Without a clear sense of your goals, it’s impossible to get optimal results, and you’ll be wasting a lot of resources in the process.

After you’ve spelled out your goals and started your campaigns, it’s important to track your progress and manage it well. PPC can be very expensive if you’re not making data-based decisions. It’s best to start out slowly and see how your initial efforts perform. Once you have data, you can make informed decisions to grow and expand.

If you’re new to PPC marketing, start off with one channel, such as Google Ads, and just a handful of campaigns. You could make several variants of an ad, targeting different audiences or keywords, to see which works best. To get optimal results, it’s best to have a member of your team who can monitor your ads weekly, or even daily.

If your team doesn’t have the bandwidth, it might be a good idea to outsource to a marketing firm.

PPC By Design

What’s great about PPC marketing is that it allows advertisers to see exactly how their ads are performing, as PPC marketing platforms give advertisers complete data. Unlike print and TV ads, these digital ads let advertisers measure just how many people have seen, clicked, and engaged with their ads.

This also lets them see how efficiently their budget is working, and easily lets them tweak their ads to help them perform better.

The better designed your ad campaigns are, the more cost-effective they will be. Both social media platforms and search engines reward advertisers who make relevant campaigns by charging less for ad clicks. This means that your ads don’t just have to catch users’ attention — your landing pages should also be satisfying to users.

You can’t have effective ads without effective content, so don’t lose focus, and keep your target audience in mind.