What is PPC?
PPC is often referred to as Pay Per Click, Paid Search, or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Advertisers may approach their target audience at a particular time, and on a targeted budget, using PPC. It’s one of digital marketing’s most effective types, and this guide will help you understand this fantastic platform deeply.
The one factor that differentiates PPC from other methods of digital marketing is an auction-based framework in which marketers search digitally for unique keywords from their target customers.
The Difference between PPC, CPC, CPM and Adwords:
I am sure many beginners often become confused by these terms: PPC, CPC, CPM, and Google Adwords. Online marketers and SEO companies often talk about these terms, which would lead to more confusion about which one to choose for your online business. Let’s go in depth and understand what it is all about.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is one of the terms used in online marketing to display ads. Usually, PPC ads cost nothing to display, but the advertiser is charged when a user clicks on the ad. The ad format can be text, image or video.
In some cases, ads are charged per 1000 ‘impressions’ (1 impression = the ad appears one time on a webpage displayed on one person’s computer, which is called CPM.
There is one more term called Cost Per Click (CPC). These two can be nearly synonymous, but CPC is more often used when referring to advertising campaigns you are running as to how much you are paying per click.
I run PPC advertising on the internet. My CPC is running at about $.48.
Adwords advertising is a service offered by Google which uses the PPC system. Adwords is in that category of PPC, along with Bing, Facebook, Adbrite, and lots of other smaller companies.
Businesses of all sizes can use paid search or display advertisements to find interested prospects. This guide will help you understand that process so that you can better serve your customers and avoid wasting advertising dollars. However, if you are not planning to learn everything about PPC (It’s not something you learn overnight, trust me), it might be better to hire a Pay Per Click Marketing Firm.
You will learn:
- The definition of paid search advertising
- The difference between paid search results and organic search results.
- The relationship between paid search advertising and display advertising.
- The benefits of PPC for your digital marketing strategy.
- The PPC Cycle.
Auction-based System
Paid search is an auction-based system, so whenever a search happens, an auction is in motion to decide where your ads will be displayed. It is called paid search because you do pay for the traffic, but you only pay for the traffic that comes to your website.
Targeting Capabilities
You can utilize many targeting capabilities to ensure you are only putting your message in front of relevant users.
- Geography: You can have your ad shown in a specific city, state, or even multiple countries.
- Time of day/Days of the week: You can pick the time you want your ad displayed.
- Mobile/Desktop computers: You can choose to have different ads on mobile devices.
- Individual websites: You can even pick individual websites or ad slots where you want your ads displayed.
Search Engines and Traffic
Pay Per Click Ad texts are advertisements that are displayed when the keywords used in them are searched for by users. PPC ads are created by following the guidelines of the different PPC model runners. All the three search engines which provide this astonishing service – Google, Bing, Ask.com, Yahoo, AOL – have different kinds of parameters for creating ads. If one goes off track and creates PPC ads out of line with the guidelines, then the ads are rejected and there’s also a chance of the search engine perceiving and assuming them to be spam and thereby perceiving the website as inauthentic.
When you make a search on Google or Bing, sometimes you see ads or sponsored results at the top of the pages. These are the “search ads.” In addition, they are often at the very top of the search engine results page.
Often, advertisers use Yahoo, Google, and Bing since they are the largest search engines with 6 billion search queries every single day. Your goal is to take some of the search queries that are relevant to your business and bring traffic to your website so you can get customers.
Display Networks
Other ads are shown on display networks. These networks are other sites that are partnered with Google or Bing to display advertisements. They are commonly news sites or social sites such as Facebook. These websites are places where you can show your ads that are not searched but are more similar to banner ads.
They could be text ads, images, or even video ads and you can choose to have them displayed based on keywords, user interests, contextual targeting, and even remarketing. Remarketing entails someone doing a particular behavior on your website, and then you show ads back across display networks to them.
For example, you might search for “vacation getaway packages,” but then you leave the site and visit another website looking for a computer, but because you did specific actions on the previous website, they might show you ads on that third-party website about getaway packages.
When you look at the display network, you will find many non-search ways you can reach users. While search is a relevant-based industry, display networks come close when you combine all the options.
By examining both search and display in the context of paid search, you can be amazingly precise about when you want users to see your ad, where they are based, and what conditions are involved that make an ad displayed to any one user.
Search ads and Business Types
How do search ads work with various business types? E-commerce companies: You often see the ads focused more on pricing and shipping that is what users in an e-commerce eco system are looking for when they are searching for products to buy online.
Lead Generation Companies: Often your focus, from your ads standpoint, is direct response advertising or getting an actual lead from each click. Therefore, you will often see the description line at the bottom part of an ad is focused on calls to action. “Call us for a free consultation,”or “fill out a form to get a quote for your business.”
Local Businesses: In local businesses, your ads are focused on the fact that you are local, and that users can easily get to your business. You can even do things with search ads such as put your phone number directly into the ads so users can call you on a mobile phone. Start the conversion process without even leaving the search results page.
You can choose and combine many different paid search forms to maximum results. Informational Queries are great to reach users early in their buyer journey. With paid search, you have many different ways to approach this medium of advertising, depending on your business type.
PPC Goals
You can use paid search in many different ways. One way is direct response, where your goal is to acquire customers directly from each ad click. That is a common form of advertising. Another way is using it for branding to increase your visibility and awareness for your company.
Many studies have shown that when ads are commonly in the top results for keywords increase aided and unaided brand awareness for a company.
Since this kind of Internet marketing and advertising model is highly automated and involves money. It‘s is also kind of risky for the advertiser to put his ad for the competitors to click and exhaust his or her budget for the whole month in one day. To prevent the ad from inviting such unnecessary clicks and exhausting its budget, the ads must be relevant to the company and must contain the keywords so that its quality score is not compromised on.Following
are the things that PPC Ads include:
Heading – This is what will be announced the ad or introduce it to the readers. Needless to say that the heading has to be ultra catchy and at the same time very precise so that there are no unwanted clicks.
Description Line 1 – Longer than the heading. It’s the first line of the two description lines which describes what the website is selling. This can also point out some of the offers that website may be offering.
Description Line 2 – Usually, the second description line 2 will be complimenting the first and ending with the call to action. For example, asking the user to buy or utilize the service.
Display URL – This is what is displayed below the URL. It’s generally the name of the website.
Destination URL – The page where the PPC ads will be directing to. Sometimes the display Url and the destination url can be similar if the content of the PPC ads is more relevant to the home page.
Pay Per Click ads are created with a lot of thought in mind. Keywords are divided into ad groups. Ad groups are groups containing similar kind of keywords. Ads are then created for these ad groups using the keywords provided in these ad groups.
The PPC Cycle
It first starts by you:
- Choosing keywords.
- Writing ads for those words.
- Set bids, how much you are willing to pay per click?Ad
- is displayed when someone does a search.User
- clicks on ad and goes to your site.
- You pay the search engine.
- Measure return.
PPC Advantages
One of the tangible benefits of paid search is the inventory resource. You can show up on Google’s search results, YouTube, Gmail, both Google and Bing Maps, and across more than 2 million websites.
You can also choose where in the buyer funnel you want to reach users. You may want to reach the people who are aware of your company and increase interest level in your products. You might want to reach just the users who are in the consideration stage. Of course, if you are in direct response you might want to reach users who are in their buying stage.
If your focus is on lifetime visitor value, you can use other techniques such as re marketing to increase lifetime visitor values. When you look at your business and when you look at your whole buying funnel you can use paid search to direct users based on where they are in that buying funnel and what your goals are for advertising.
The website owner who wishes to promote his business can avail services of popular search engines to advertise about the products and services offered by his business as these are search engines that rank their website and display the advertisements to grab attention of the traffic.
There are many factors that make PPC best over other marketing tools.
1. Cost effective– This method is cost effective as advertiser needs to pay when the advertisement is clicked rather than to pay whenever the advertisement is being displayed.
2. Targets specific audience– This method has very important advantage that it targets the audience that is interested in your products and services.
3. Easy set up – It is possible for PPC companies to create and post advertisements in very less time and in case if any manipulations are required in the ad, those can also be made easily.
4. Immediate results – This PPC is considered as a very powerful tool for internet marketing and is capable of showing immediate results after the advertisement is being posted.
Choosing pay per click will definitely benefits you in terms of traffic and profits. However, it is important to use relevant keywords in the advertisement because your advertisement will appear only if its keyword matches with that of typed by a user to get results for his query.
The Three “Rs” of PPC
These three factors make PPC a level playing field across a variety of company sizes.
1. Reach: You might be a small business targeting a few zip codes. You might be an international business who is targeting multiple countries.
– Advertise on search results which have more than 6 billion daily search queries
– Advertise across display networks, more than 1 trillion impressions/month.
– Show ads across multiple devices.
– Choose the geography where to show your ads.
2. Relevance: People are already looking for you they are typing in keywords. Ads and your website offers are how they are relevant to users.
– Choose keywords that describe your business.
– Can choose exactly when to show an ad.
– Show ads only when someone is looking for your business.
3. ROI: Because it is measurable, you can make sure that you are getting good returns from your paid search.
– PPC is an auction based bid system.
– Pay only when someone comes to your site.
– Use analytics to determine what a visitor is worth so your bids are profitable.
It does not matter if you are a small business, a mid-size business, an enterprise company or if you are involved in direct response or branding. Paid search has options, which can help you reach those goals and play with big companies or small companies regardless of your budget.
Before you start, you should answer these questions…
- What does your company or division do?
- Do you have different product lines?
- What are your product lines?
- Do each of these product lines have different goals to them?
- Who is your primary audience?
- Who is your target market for your products and services?
- Do you need to reach different audiences with different sets of ads or keywords?
- What are you trying to sell or promote?
- How do you want people to react to your ads?
- Do you want them to buy something? Watch a video? Subscribe to your email list? Download a free eBook?
- What results would you like to see? What would you consider a successful advertising campaign?
By first understanding these basics of your business then as you look at all the paid search options that any PPC Marketing Agency can offer, you can see which one is most appropriate or how you might use them differently than others based upon your business metrics.
Pay Per Click Ads VS Pay Per Impression Ads
Another alternative to Pay per click advertising is pay per impressions (commonly known by the term CPI or CPM). The benefit of these ads are you are paid for thousand impressions of the ad even if the user does not click on the ads.
How do you decide whether you go for pay per click ads or pay per impression ads? It is tough to say what number of your website visitors would click on ads and that very much depends on the ads displayed and how close to the content and to the user’s search term the displayed ads are. It also depends on the number of visitors your site has. In a nutshell, if you have a very large amount of visitors (thousands) you should ideally stick with pay per impression ads. Otherwise stay with pay per click ads.
Where to Start?
Honestly answering the above questions should set you on the path to PPC success. Armed with the knowledge in this guide will help you move forward with your business.
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About The Author
Nohman Habib
I basically work in the CMS, like Joomla and WordPress and in framework like Laravel and have keen interest in developing mobile apps by utilizing hybrid technology. I also have experience working in AWS technology. In terms of CMS, I give Joomla the most value because I found it so much user freindly and my clients feel so much easy to manage their project in it.
