Category: PPC

We often like to think PPC campaigns begin and end on search engines. It’s a natural conclusion to draw: short, snappy ad copy and a quick link to your home page.

But there is still a very important process going on after that initial click. A visitor still needs to convert to a customer. Past the point of consideration, what they see on this web page will have a huge impact on their decision.

This is where landing pages come in. A bespoke page created for your PPC campaign, it is the designated spot people clicking on your ads ‘land’ on.

Sounds simple so far, but how do you know when you actually need a landing page?

Signs You Might Need A Landing Page

Straight off the bat, let’s dispel a myth: not every company needs a landing page. If you’re a simple and straightforward service with a broad target area, all a landing page does is consume time.

Landing pages are best suited to people looking to do any of the following:

• Cater to a specific area.
• Offer a variety of services through PPC ads.
• Spell out aspects of their offer more succinctly.

All three of these instances are where landing pages come into their own. They’re delivery vehicles for specific and focused marketing.

Signs that you might need a landing page can include:

• When one of your services is massively outperforming others
• When you’re spending the same amount for worse returns in different areas
• When your home page is performing worse than the rest of your site

In all these cases, landing pages can help. But what are their precise benefits?

Benefits Of Landing Pages

Landing pages make your marketing more cohesive. Any PPC management service can tell you: catering a site page to match the messaging of your ads works. It avoids a massive tonal whiplash. It also allows for much more focused copy than your homepage. You can spell out your offer to the target audience.

Targeting is another big benefit of landing pages. Whether it’s a local area or a specific service, different landing pages allow for you to target both. Visitors are always more responsive to this sort of personalisation.

This targeting also extends to your PPC campaigns. Campaigns are segregated into ad groups, and landing pages help you reinforce that. This is a chance to test the performance of your landing pages against one another.

For PPC campaigns, landing pages also save you money. How many people clicked on your ads, crowded to a page that failed to spell out your specific offer, and left? All that is lost money. With individual pages, you’ll improve your conversion rates and reduce your bounce rate.

Landing pages also avoid a few of the perils of home pages. Menus and redirects can distract from the offer. A landing page is a single destination directly spelling out the offer. Engagement is immediate and direct.

In short: landing pages allow for a focused, engaging experience. They allow you to boost your conversion rates and save you money on your PPC campaigns.

But with the benefits clear, are there any good tips for creating a good landing page?

Creating Your Landing Page

We’ve established the importance and benefits of landing pages for your PPC campaigns. Let’s delve into the best practices for creating a landing page.

Pick A Strong Headline: Immediately show your unique value proposition or offer. You should appeal directly to your target audience.

Spice It Up With Visuals: Integrate visual prompts into your landing page. Striking images, engaging videos, or informative infographics all work great. Visuals are excellent for enhancing the effectiveness of your landing page.

Optimise Your Copy: Good copy is focused, concise, and persuasive. What are the benefits of your offer – and why are YOU the one to deliver it? Format your copy with bullet points, subheadings, and short paragraphs.

A Good Call-to-Action (CTA): A strong CTA helps people convert. Make it compelling and action-oriented. It’s a call to action – so address the reader directly to take the action! Experiment with different CTA placements, colours, and wording to better optimise.

Social Proof and Trust Signals: Use testimonials, reviews and case studies. These build credibility. They confirm your offer, and encourage engaging with your brand. Place social proof throughout your landing page to reinforce trust and credibility.

Keep On Top Of Mobile Optimization: Adapt your website to mobile browsing. Use a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions. Test your landing page across various devices and browsers. Ensure a consistent experience across devices.

A/B Testing and Optimization: Check and analyse the performance of your landing page. Test different headline variations, CTA designs, layout structures, and content formats. Identify what resonates best and drives the highest conversion rates.

Streamlined Navigation: Keep your landing page focused and cut distractions. Remove unnecessary navigation menus, links, and extraneous information. Keep the focus on your offer and the desired action you want visitors to take.

Tracking and Analysis: Use robust analytics tracking to track metrics and performance indicators. Track conversion rates, bounce rates, average session duration, and other relevant metrics. Use data insights to iterate and optimise your landing page over time.

Keep Your Tone Consistent: In branding, messaging, and visual elements. A cohesive experience reinforces brand identity and strengthens the connection with your audience.

These essential best practices create landing pages that capture attention. Driving engagement and conversions for your PPC campaigns. Remember, effective landing pages are dynamic and evolving entities. They need continuous optimization and refinement to deliver optimal results. Experiment, analyse, and iterate on your landing page strategy.

Landing Pages And PPC

Landing pages and PPC campaigns can be in a symbiotic relationship. The health of one will often dictate the other. Not everyone will need to implement landing pages as part of a PPC strategy. Yet they represent an opportunity to augment and expand on your marketing.

It is important with landing pages to bring a different set of standards than PPC marketing. But despite the visual and technical dimensions, the same analytical tools and testing strategies unite the two.

As the digital ecosystem continues to evolve, the importance of optimising this symbiotic relationship cannot be overstated. By harnessing the combined power of landing pages and PPC, marketers can unlock new realms of possibility, forge deeper connections with their audiences, and chart a course towards sustained growth and success.

Interested in finding out more about how to improve your PPC marketing? Why not contact a professional PPC services company for a free audit?

One of the biggest challenges for marketers and businesses is advertising their business at a limited PPC budget. Where Google ads promise the best cost-effectiveness, you still need to put in additional efforts to better utilize your ad budget; otherwise, you end up wasting your money. 

For most businesses, it’s hard to increase their budget, and they can’t work on an open budget.

Don’t worry! You can have good results even with a small PPC budget.

Here are some tips that will help you make the most out of your small paid advertising budget.

1. Prioritize Goals

An advertiser can have multiple goals, but limited budget limits the campaigns and results you can achieve. So, it’s crucial for you to know which goals are more important to you. Some of the common PPC goals are Brand Awareness, Product and Brand Consideration, Leads, Sales, and Repeat Sales.

So, you need to analyze your business and set the priorities for your goals. Once you know the top-priority goals, then optimize your campaigns accordingly and allocate the budget. Make sure you laser-focus your audience targeting to fetch better results from your campaigns. This way, your small daily budget will only be used for the most important things that benefit your business. You’ll only have restricted traffic through campaigns with this approach. If you want more, then you have to expand your target audience, or you have to increase your budget to get more traction. 

2. Geotargeting

Geotargeting is not only an important aspect of your marketing plan, but it may also help you manage a limited ad budget. Focusing on only the most important target locations is a fantastic strategy to make the most of a restricted budget. 

Because the smaller the geographic area, the less traffic you’ll get, it’s important to strike a balance between relevancy and money.

You should consider adding negative locations in your campaigns where you don’t want to appear, but the similarity of names may trigger your ads. So, hone your ad targeting with geotargeting to better utilize your ad budget. 

3. Bid on Brand Keywords

When a business doesn’t have an organic presence, non-brand clicks are high, and you’re dealing with a limited budget, you should always bid on brand terms. Moreover, the brand clicks are usually less expensive, and you don’t want your competitors to outbid you since they may bid on your brand name. You’ll only have highly relevant traffic with branded keywords, resulting in higher conversion rates. 

4. Write Ad Copies for Better CTR

CTR has a direct impact on your ad’s quality score, and a higher quality score means better rankings at less CPC. There are three factors that contribute to the quality score: Ad relevance, Landing page experience, and CTR (Click-Through-Rate).

So, write better ad copies, so more people click on your site, resulting in a high-quality score and more cost-effective ad campaigns.

5. Use Ad Extensions

In the last point, we discussed how increased CTR could help you with the quality score that will get you better visibility at lower CPCs. Alongside writing amazing ad copies, you can also utilize the ad extensions to promote better CTRs on your ads. 

On Google AdWords, there are dozens of ad extensions available, so no matter what kind of business you operate or what you’re trying to market, there’s likely an extension or two that may help your advertising stand out. You should always add at least 4 ad extensions for each campaign/ad group. 

6. Scheduling

By only showing ads on certain days and at certain times of the day, ad scheduling helps to keep costs under control. If your company is only open during certain hours, it may make sense to limit your advertising to those hours.

If you sell online, you’re always open, but it’s a good idea to check your reporting to see if there are any times of the day when you’re getting any returns.

Moreover, you should consider reducing targeting to certain locations or using a location bid modifier to restrict ad serving in those areas if data suggests hours of the day when campaigns are less effective.

7. Know and Use the Match Types Right

Match types are critical for budget management, especially when budgets are limited.

Learn about the different match types and how they affect ad placement. You may need to experiment with multiple match types in combination with ad scheduling and geotargeting to get the correct mix. When you’re working with a tight budget, you’ll have to think outside the box to get the most bang for your buck. 

Point to Ponder: Google AdWords recently removed the Broad Match Modifier match type, so make sure your campaigns are optimized for it. 

8. Utilize Google Display Network

GDN is an excellent technique to target people while they surf the web. Consider allocating a tiny percentage of your budget to the GDN by solely targeting the locations you serve for service-based firms on a tight budget. Text advertising is one type of display ad, but video, rich media, and graphics are more engaging.

On the GDN, it’s also occasionally a lot less competitive. You can see some fantastic results here using all of the GDN’s placement and targeting choices paired with a careful eye on excluding sites that aren’t appropriate for your campaigns. 

9. Call-Only Campaigns

Advertisers who want to get phone calls from their PPC advertisements should use Call-Only campaigns. Instead of wasting your users’ time by sending them to a landing page form they may never complete, you can run a Call-Only campaign that allows them to call your company directly from your ads. This way, you don’t lose any prospects that you would have if you direct people to some landing page. Moreover, customers who are highly interested in your business will call you, resulting in a higher conversion rate. This isn’t the case with the landing pages. So, better utilize your small PPC budget with call-only campaigns. 

10. Employ “Target Outranking Share”

Your advertising is a waste if it’s not performing well. You may have a small budget, but you should make sure you beat your competition at some keywords to drive some business. You can use the portfolio bid strategies settings to get the upper hand over competitors with the Target outranking share option.

By including the competitors’ domains, the percentage of time to outrank, and the maximum bid, you can make a rule in the Target outranking share option. This way, your budget will be used in an effective way to outrank your competition and drive the potential results in the given budget. You should choose your area’s top competitors. The auction insights report will reveal which competitors are vying for the same search terms.

11. Fine and Bid on New Keywords

Going after completely new keywords is one of the most effective ways to save money on PPC. Mostly, people reduce their spending or bids to economize the advertising, but bidding on new keywords is a better way. Identifying and targeting new keyword scopes and long-tail keywords can significantly improve your click-through rates, resulting in higher Quality Scores and lower expenses.

12. Make a Plan for High Volume/CPC Keywords

You can’t completely ignore the high competition keywords when you are on a small budget, but keywords with a lot of competition and high volume can get expensive and affect your marketing budget. You should consider organizing these keywords into their own campaign and employing “exact match” for the keywords if they have a high volume/high cost. This way, you can better monitor the spending and performance of the campaigns. You can also put a limit on how much you can pay. 

13. Optimize Mobile Bids

Due to the significant shift in search volume from desktop to mobile, your device targeting settings should be on your list of account adjustments. Mobile uses are increasing day-by-day, and even queries that convert from desktops may have started on a mobile device. After you’ve double-checked that your device targeting settings are correct, have a look at your bids. Take a check at your mobile bidding strategy to make sure you aren’t wasting any budget. 

Mobile CPCs, which were once dirt cheap, are progressively rising to reflect more mobile traffic and competition. You may also set mobile bids at the campaign or ad group level, giving you a lot of flexibility in terms of how much you’re ready to pay for mobile clicks.

14. Use the Stacked Bid Modifiers Right

For a single keyword, stacked bidding allows you to bid on two or more match types. For example, you are targeting a keyword with both Broad and Exact match types. Now, you’ll get both greater volume and relevancy due to the combo of match types.

However, if you’re utilizing stacked bidding, you might be overpaying for some keywords, especially if you haven’t checked your account for a long time. You should examine your campaigns for any keywords that you’re targeting with stacked bids. Make sure you are getting reasonable results on the given CPC; otherwise, you need to optimize the stacked bidding or stop it. 

15. Don’t Use Dynamic Search Ads

In the dynamic search ads, your ads don’t appear on the keywords you provide; rather, they’re presented depending on keywords in your landing page’s content. It seems reliable, and it is, but it frequently generates irrelevant impressions and clicks, which you can’t afford on a small ad budget. 

16. Do Remarketing

You’re essentially wasting all of your time, money, and effort attempting to persuade prospects to convert within a single session. Use remarketing to reach your existing site visitors and cart abandoners and make them re-visit your site for final conversion. It’s an effective way to get better results from your PPC budget.

17. Insert Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are used to prevent your ads from triggering on the search terms that drive irrelevant traffic. It’s an amazing way to increase the relevancy of your ad campaigns that will promote the appropriate use of the ad budget. Negative keyword-optimized campaigns don’t have a wastage of budget and deliver better ROI.

Here you go!

How many of these tips are you already using to better use your ad budget?

Certainly, you are missing some. No worries, implement all these tips and track your performance and ROI against your budget. 

If you are not competent with PPC advertising, then hiring a PPC ads agency is also a way to get potential results from your small PPC budget. Because you can’t do the best optimizations without expertise, and poorly optimized campaigns waste the budget.

So, do what suits you best and make the most out of your PPC budget.

Author BIO: 

Gajendra Singh Rathore is a digital marketing expert and associated with a PPC ads agency Toronto. He is always eager to learn, experiment, and implement. Astronomy is his escape from the outside world.

Can you beat this one?

Snickers have taken their PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this advert that managed to reach 50K audiences in just 3 days.

In addition to this, they even generated a list of over 2,50,000 different misspellings of these words. It was a smart step as the ad managed to garner 5,00,000 ad impressions with a click-through rate of 1.05%.

Smartphone giant, Samsung also dared to come up with a cut-throat advert poking fun at Apple without even mentioning the brand name.

Whenever a user searched for ‘iPhone 6s’, an advert popped up saying, “Awkward… You obviously mean S6 – Samsung.com”.

Later, they took the opportunity to tell visitors what the Samsung S6 had that an iPhone lacked. I think it was a courageous move to turn heads. There’s no concrete evidence stating whether this PPC campaign actually converted iPhone users, but it certainly speaks about Samsung’s innovative content and creativity.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective tools that’s capable of driving traffic and conversion. To create something like the above examples, you need to come up with an innovative approach for a successful PPC campaign.

1. Be wise in selecting your keywords

Keywords play a vital role in your PPC endeavours. They work by bidding on marketing specific keywords to your ad. You have to make sure that you’re bidding on the right keywords that focus on your target audience.

Tools like Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Trends, etc. ushers you with keyword suggestions, giving you a list of the most effective and trendy keywords. Many companies are using the same keywords as yours, but you need to keep this in mind:

It’s important to look for words/phrases linked to the hot keywords and other organic search terms.

Pro tip: Make sure you ask your current clientele and perform thorough online research before finalising your keywords. The next point is an obvious guess!

2. Get your long-tail keywords

Businesses prefer choosing short-tail keywords that are only 1-3 words, such as ‘pre-owned cars’. It’s an easy alternative to make sure that you are bidding to a broad audience and generate more clicks.

On the contrary, long-tail keywords like ‘buy pre-owned cars, India’ is more specific and will appear prevalent to people who’re more likely to convert.

Long-tail keywords are essential because they have:

• Significant search volume
• Less competition
• Less inappropriate search terms
• Higher conversion rate
• High chances of profitable advertising

It’s a better way to connect with your audience and improve your brand value.

3. Learn to be diligent

Time is everything, and everything takes time!

No advertisement will give you results in a few minutes. To yield good returns, you need to invest more planning and innovative approach to it.

Search engines like Google will tell you that their site can help your advertisement run within a few minutes. To make the mark, you need to have a thought-out plan on how you’re planning to send your PPC campaigns to the world.

It would be better to hire a PPC agency to help you create an organized strategy and oversee your campaign’s success after pushing it into the marketplace.

4. Think about adding ‘value’ to your campaign

This one is a solid tactic that works for all marketing niches. Your actual ad copy should have a value-based approach while your keywords can aim at the details and descriptions of what you offer.

Add creativity to your copy by describing the values and benefits of the service to increase your traffic, grow your conversions and enhance your impressions. Don’t follow the crowd and create a copy that simply describes your services as a social media marketing company.

Tell your audience what value your products and services offer and how you’ll be making their lives better.

Ask yourself: Will your products/services solve their problems?

5. Add call-to-action (CTAs)

It’s advisable to end your ad with actionable CTAs. The main body should contain value-based content to reach the right audience. You need to show why people should use your services and what they will be going to get.

CTAs should clearly give the potential to convert and take action after reading. Try to add a sense of urgency in the ad (in a way that there’s something for them to capitalize on it right now!).

Your CTA should have the following characteristics:

• Have a clear benefit for the target audience
• Have a compelling body content
• Have the power to continue the conversion momentum
• Have the art of provoking to take an action

Even simple CTAs like ‘download now’, ‘sign up today’ or ‘start your free consultation’ is a lot more useful than ads without CTAs. The word ‘free’ states that they have nothing to lose anything to click on the button and fill out your consultation form.

For example: Netflix has mastered the art of adding compelling CTAs. Their website says:

Don’t forget to add a button to help them get started with their free month subscription.

6. Set a budget

Before creating your pay per click strategy, you should start by setting a budget for your PPC business. Don’t hesitate about going big.

It’s obvious for many of you to skimp out on this arena but believe me it can be a game-changer for your business. You will have to invest in order to obtain a significant return.

Several companies tend to become hesitant in venturing off into different marketing areas that they’ve never tried before. This can lead to a sizable return in the first month.

Try to split your PPC ad budgeting for every month and spend more in the first month to establish your brand and then set a budget to use for every month.

7. Understand the concept of the marketing funnel

According to this concept, you need to convert people present at the different stages in the funnel. The first stage speaks about building brand awareness and interest – this is where PPC campaigns want to achieve. Keywords are used to target those who’ve no idea what their business provides.

People present in the latter stages know exactly what you provide and have purchasing intent. They tend to use keywords for people in the commitment stage of the marketing funnel. More the purchasing intent, there are more chances of conversions.

8. Identify your ad groups

To have a better quality score, your ad group needs to be relevant and reliable. Your ad groups should fit a specific purpose. If your business provides both social media marketing (SMM) and search engine optimization (SEO) services, then you can brand them under digital marketing.

However, you’re likely to get more conversions and traffic, if you create a separate ad group for SEO and SMM each.

It’s simple: Ad groups work well when they have a narrow target. A diverse range of keywords will make it difficult to work efficiently.

9. Opt for quality over quantity

Along with the amount spent on creating ads, it’s essential to work on the quality of your ads. You need to get a quality score.

Several tools include your click-through rate, the relevance of the ads to the chosen keywords and the site of the ads.

10. Landing pages are a must!

Never waste money on ads for specific products or services that take you to the homepage of your website. Converting visitors can be considered as a return on investment as you’re making it easy for your customers to click on your ad and take action.

As said above, you should use individual landing pages for your ad groups that are customer-centric. All of your service pages need a different ad group with its own keyword and landing page. If you don’t do this, then you add barriers to your potential customers.

Over to you!

PPC campaigns are the backbone of digital marketing – you need to have the right strategies in hand to bring results from these campaigns. I have learned that in this field, you need to put more effort to get good rewards.

I try to introduce new PPC strategies every year. This time I am focusing on voice search. Not many advertisers are investing in this strategy because of the insufficient volume of voice searches and inaccessibility to recognise search queries accurately.

Did you know?

According to data by comScore, “50% of searches will be mobile centric in 2020.”

Sounds great, right!

My target is to create a winning voice search strategy for my PPC campaigns. How?

• Identify if my campaigns are getting voice searches.
• Attain search query reports from adwords.
• Gauze relevant voice search queries.
• Finalise the keywords.
• Add research-based negative keywords.

I hope this helps you to break new grounds and yield better ROI. Rely on this 10-point list to get started.

The Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing strategy is one used to drive traffic to websites and can be very successful in doing so. The complexities of this model, however, can deter many from utilizing it to its fullest capabilities. If you’re unsure about the ins and outs of paid advertising, this guide to PPC marketing will explain it all.

What Is PPC and Why Should You Use It?

Let’s start with the basics:

Pay-Per-Click is an online advertising strategy in which marketers bid on ads based on the potential value of a user clicking on the ad. As such, charges result only when individuals click. You can find PPC ads on social media pages, in the headers or sides of Google Display Network affiliate pages, or at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Most businesses make use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to achieve high page rankings for relevant keywords. However, while organic SEO is a crucial component to getting your website to reach users looking for businesses like yours, the truth is that SEO alone is often not enough. With the best keywords becoming increasingly competitive and more companies utilizing paid ads, it’s important to use PPC in conjunction with your current SEO strategies.

How to Get Started

Begin an effective PPC campaign with these few key steps.

1.  Set goals. First, ask yourself a series of questions: What do you want to achieve with your PPC campaign? Who is your primary audience? How much are you willing to spend to achieve your goals?

Depending on your business type, you’ll then need to determine the overall purpose of the strategy. Common goals include building user awareness of your brand, increasing your sales, generating more qualified leads, and increasing your site traffic.

2. Determine ad placement and type. Will your ads reach your target audience on Google’s SERP, social media, Amazon, or somewhere else? Once you’ve decided on placement, determine which type of PPC ad best suits your campaign. On most platforms, you can choose from several ad types:

○  Display ads can be placed on the Google Display network, social sites, and Amazon, and result in image-based ad placement on a variety of webpages.

○  Search ads, by contrast, are usually text-based and appear at the top of a Google or Bing SERP.

○  Shopping ads are best for eCommerce businesses and display images, pricing, and shopping links on a SERP.

○  Remarketing ads target users who have previously had a predetermined interaction with your page and follow those users with ads.

1. Choose keywords. You’ll need to determine which keywords you want to target so your chosen platform can place your ad. Choose between two and five keywords for each ad group. Perform research to decide which keywords rank high for your audience and have limited competition. Then, pick only those that are incredibly relevant to your page content.

2. Hone ad and landing page copy. Although the keywords you choose will get your ads in front of your audience, the text is what ultimately leads users to click. While considering your target audience, encourage users to interact with the ad and be sure to include the keyword you’re aiming for. Similarly, optimize your landing page to be relevant to your ad and achieve your desired conversion.

Tracking Essential Metrics

Once you’ve set up your PPC campaign, your work is not over. Now, it’s essential to monitor your ads, track performance, and make adjustments to ensure ongoing success. To that end, you’ll need to track these crucial metrics:

• Impressions — the number of times your ad has been viewed.
• Clicks — the number of clicks your ad receives.
• Click-through rate (CTR) — the percentage of ad views that result in a click.
• Cost per click (CPC) — directly correlates to CTR, indicating how much you’ve paid for each click on the ad.
• Cost per mille (CPM) — sometimes used in place of CPC, CPM is expressed as the cost for every thousand impressions.
• Cost per conversion — the cost of your ad divided by the number of conversions you receive.

Tips for Managing Your PPC Campaign

Ultimately, the purpose of monitoring your PPC campaign and gathering the data metrics listed above is so you can make agile adjustments to optimize your strategies. Follow these management tips to keep your PPC campaign productive:

1.  Use management tools. To track the above measurements, marketers utilize the tools provided within the platform hosting the ad. However, most professionals also rely on more comprehensive PPC tools, software, and spreadsheets to record performance data.

2. Adjust keywords as needed. You don’t have to keep the keywords chosen at the beginning of your campaign — swap under performing or overpriced keywords for better ones. You can also use lower-competition keywords that come at a better price.

3. Tailor your audiences. Consider some of the many helpful audience-building features Google offers. There, you can track user behavior to get your ads in front of those already searching in your niche and can even upload current customer lists to avoid ones who already utilize your product or service.

4. Modify bids. If you’ve determined that audience demographics or platform types such as mobile search and desktop search outperform others, you can increase your bids to target them. Conversely, decrease bids for under performing aspects to preserve funds.

5. Run frequent A/B testing. After making any of the above-mentioned changes or any other significant adjustments, it’s important to test your new PPC strategy to ensure you’ve increased your CTR and conversion rate. Otherwise, you’re merely making changes without any idea of whether they were effective.

6. Request help. If the daily ins and outs of crafting and managing a successful PPC campaign prove complicated, consider allowing experienced marketers to manage the strategy. Instead of studying Pay-Per-Click complexities, you can return to your day-to-day responsibilities.

Use PPC and SEO to Create Effective Marketing Campaigns

With effective management and help from an expert marketing agency, you can craft a Pay-Per-Click campaign that will enhance your organic SEO and become an essential component of your inbound marketing efforts. Use PPC and SEO together to increase sales, boost your page traffic, and leverage your brand awareness.

Author Bio :- Alyssa Anderson is the Content Manager at Zero Gravity Marketing (ZGM), a digital marketing agency in Madison, CT. ZGM is known for developing overarching marketing strategies and specializes in Pay-Per-Click, SEO, content marketing, social media, development, design, and eCommerce services.

Pay-per-click or PPC marketing can be a powerful tool that you can add in your arsenal of digital marketing skills. 

If you want to improve your visibility online, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and boost your sales, then PPC can help you achieve these goals. 

But for you to experience these benefits, you need to have a solid understanding of how PPC works first, as well as how you can create high-performing campaigns.

What are Pay-Per-Click Ads?

PPC advertising is a strategy wherein a particular brand places an ad online, and then pays each time a user clicks on it. Therefore, there’s no cost of placing an ad. A cost is only incurred once users start engaging with the ad. 

PPC marketing can be further broken down into two categories:

• Search advertising: Ads that show up on search results.
• Display advertising: Ads that appear as videos, website banners, sponsored social media posts, and other third party sites. 

How does it work?

Let’s say you want to run a billboard ad. Then you have to pay for that spot. Also, if you want to run a commercial on television, you have to pay for that too. 

The internet pretty much works the same way. There will be sites that will offer you a prime real estate. So, if you want your brand to be promoted on those sites, then you have to pay per click or per a certain number of views.

At Voy Media, my PPC agency in NYC, we always encourage our potential clients to give PPC a try since it is a cost-effective way of promoting their business. In fact, one of the most common ways these sites charge for ads is through impression count.

So, if you go for that ad model and then run your ad on a premium site like let’s say, Buzzfeed, then you could end up being charging for every 1000 views of your ads.

That said, it is important to know that PPC ad campaigns have two popular categories: Google Ads and Social Media Advertising.

Google Ads

Usually, in a PPC campaign, you’re paying Google to list your ads on the top, bottom, and right pane of organic search results. If somebody clicks on your ad, then you have to pay for the cost per click. When your budget runs out, Google won’t run your ads until you fill up your fund.

Below are the different kinds of Google Ads:

Search Ads

Search ads is the most common type of PPC advertisement. It is shown above or beside the search results on Google, depending on a user’s search query.

So, when someone searches for the products and services that you’re offering, they might come across your ad. Going with the PPC model, you only have to pay once they click on your ad. 

Display Ads

Display Ads aren’t a precise pay-per-click model, but the process is quite similar.

Whether your ads are text-based or media-rich banners, display ads can be developed to be featured on about 650,000 apps or two million websites. Thus, expanding your audience reach.

Local Search Ads

These are not a separate type of PPC ads, rather they’re a subset of the usual Search Ads. 

Local Search Ads are ads that are location-focused, searching for services and businesses near you through Google or Google Maps. 

Usually, Google will set your campaign live. So, if you’re a local business, or you’re shipping to a particular area, or provide your services to a particular geographical location, then you have to customize Location Targeting in Google Ads. 

Remarketing

These types of ads are usually shown to people who have visited your mobile app or your business site. It helps you to easily reconnect with users that have previously shown interest in your products and services.

These types of ads can either be shown as Search Ads or on the Display Network, then priced to an automatic bidding model. 

You need to undergo a few extra steps to set this up, but it’s worth it, especially if it dramatically boosts your conversion rates and click-through by narrowing down your audience and reaching out to those who have already made a connection with your business. 

Social Ads

Aside from Google Ads, Social ads can also give you unmatched refinement with your audience. Of course, the giant in the world of social PPC is Facebook, with billions of monthly active users. If you’re in the B2B industry, then LinkedIn is a more strategic platform. 

Facebook Ads

There are a wide variety of ads that are available on Facebook and its associated platforms. You can also opt to define your audience based on location, demographics, interests, and more. 

To ensure that you get the most out of your Facebook Ads, you have to install a Facebook Pixel, which lets you collect data from your site visitors. 

If you’re not sure how you can define your audience, then the Lookalike Audience feature lets you asses the commonalities of your existing audience, then target users that are quite similar to them.

LinkedIn Ads

If you’re aiming directly for customers, then Facebook is probably going to get you the best return on investment. However, if you’re in the B2B industry, then LinkedIn is worth considering. 

Although there’s a text-only option for ads in the platform, ads that have images tend to get more clicks, so it helps that you do both. 

You can then pick your audience, skills, job title, demographics, and more. These PPC ads are usually placed on the bottom side of the user’s inbox or LinkedIn homepage. 

Is PPC right for your business?

Because of PPC advertising’s success and popularity, more and more businesses are now considering whether or not they want to take the plunge. 

Sometimes, navigating the world of PPC can be challenging, and you can easily be swept up without first considering your business’ needs. 

So what you need to do is to thoroughly examine your business, as well as your current marketing practices to be able to maximize your PPC potential.