Beginners guide to Pay Per Click (PPC)

This article aims to give start-ups and SME’s a high-level introduction to the PPC channel, explain how it operates, and outline the numerous options you have on the Google AdWords platform. What is pay per click advertising To increase brand recognition, attract visitors, and encourage transactions, you may develop content or products and advertise it […]

This article aims to give start-ups and SME’s a high-level introduction to the PPC channel, explain how it operates, and outline the numerous options you have on the Google AdWords platform.

What is pay per click advertising

To increase brand recognition, attract visitors, and encourage transactions, you may develop content or products and advertise it to relevant consumers online using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. There are some key tools you can use as a business or marketeer to generate traffic and sales through PPC, like many marketing channels you need the right strategy and expertise to succeed.

How PPC Ads Strategy works

How do Google rank your ads?

Where you rank in relation to your competition is determined by Google’s Ad Rank, which is computed by multiplying two important elements –

• CPC – Cost per click is the offer the highest budget a potential advertiser will consider
• Quality Score – Your click-through rate, relevancy, and the excellence of your landing page all go towards determining your quality score
  You must place the proper bid and produce compelling adverts for your clients if you want to achieve the greatest results.

How are you charged with PPC Ads?

When a user hits an ad, you get charged – the Cost-Per-Click is the term for this (CPC).
Direct payments made to Google for media expenditure make up a sizable portion of their earnings. Your advertisements’ impressions and natural clicks are free. It’s critical to create a plan to reduce wasteful spending and increase budget efficiency.

Paid vs organic search

PPC ads are frequently positioned above organic results and are identified as sponsored or ad listings.

When a user searches for a good or service, a number of advertisements are typically shown, with various types of results based on what you are looking for. Search engine algorithms establish unpaid, natural ranks for organic results, which can be improved using several SEO techniques.

There are four main PPC ad types…

1. Text Search ads

After a user types in a term that corresponds to one of the adverts, a text ad made up of written copy is displayed on the results page. It is closely tied to the campaign’s list of keywords and should be customised to the content of your landing page so that users’ expectations are met if they decide to click on your advertisement.

Ad material must adhere to editorial standards; if it does not, it runs the risk of not being accepted. The editorial policies for Microsoft Advertising and Google AdWords are dissimilar.

Text ads are great for brand awareness and driving traffic.

2. Shopping ads

Shopping Ads don’t employ keywords; instead, they match user searches with product data from your website.
When searching for online-only goods like “nike shoes” or “trainers,” they appear at the top of Google.

They give users the chance to compare products side by side before visiting any websites on Google.
Google Shopping encourages lower funnel conversions for precise terms as well as measures aimed at raising awareness.

Google Shopping ads are great for selling products and increasing product visibility.

Google Merchant Centre

Your product feed’s quality will have the biggest influence on how well your shopping campaigns perform.
The Merchant Center platform allows users to set up Google Shopping campaigns (MC). An online dashboard called the MC lets you manage product data.

The major objective of the MC is to make it possible for companies to upload and update product information, including images and prices.
You may make sure your product feed complies with Google’s feed specifications and update it frequently.

3. Display ads

On the Google Display Network (GDN), a network of websites that display Google ads, advertisements are produced and promoted.

These frequently include picture or video adverts, which are then displayed to visitors who meet your targeting requirements.

If a visitor visits your website, you can show them an image or video ad in an effort to entice them back. This method is known as remarketing. There are many sizes available for banners and videos, and advertisers must adhere while developing their visual creative.

Google Display ads are great for brand awareness and launching campaigns.

4. Video ads (YouTube)

Google’s paid video advertising platform TrueView only charges you if someone chooses to watch your video advertisement.

You can create different ad types including:

• In-stream ads play before or during another YouTube partner’s video. After watching your video for five seconds, viewers can choose to continue watching or stop.
• Video discovery ads display next to other YouTube videos, in YouTube search results, or on Google Display Network websites where your target market is likely to be found.
• Bumper ads play before, during, or after another video and have a length of no more than six seconds. There is no skip button for viewers to use.

At the correct time, you may connect with a highly engaged audience, and the cost per view is only £0.02. Get access to the advanced analytics package for YouTube, which offers insightful analysis of both performance and content.

YouTube Ads are great for reaching new audiences and generating awareness.

Key benefits of PPC

• Scalability – Increase internet revenues and traffic for your business.
• Reach – the proper people with your campaigns by using targeted advertising.
• Measurable -PPC advertising provides quantifiable ROI, enabling you to determine the precise value of the adverts.
• Transparency – Create a budget that fits for your company and track every dollar spent so there are no surprises.
• Brand recognition – You can expose your company’s name and message to fresh audiences and clients.
• Speed – PPC marketing is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing techniques for traffic and conversions when it is properly managed.

PPC benefits to other channels

Enhancement of secondary goals – Increasing traffic through PPC can help your marketing efforts, increasing the size of your remarketing audience, the number of mailing list subscribers, and engagement.

Amplification of your brand with content – Getting PPC traffic to your content pieces, such YouTube videos, will help. You may maximise the effectiveness of your content marketing approach by combining it with PPC.

An increase in your organic traffic – may result from the fact that users who have already seen your brand through PPC may be more likely going forward to click and interact with organic content. Increases in traffic may result from higher engagement rates and click-through rates (CTR).

Increase in social mentions – PPC traffic generation can result in beneficial side effects like social mentions, sharing links, etc. for your content page. All of these will work to convince Google that your page is extremely pertinent to the subject at hand. Naturally, this will increase your organic traffic.

Potential pitfalls of PPC

• Expense – PPC marketing can be highly expensive, depending on your sector and competition. Certain ad positions can be expensive, and not all businesses find them to be successful.
• Time commitment – Owing to the complexity of most PPC platforms, including Google AdWords, wasted advertising dollars are prevalent. PPC campaigns cannot be created and then abandoned. To achieve the best results, you must put time into optimising and upgrading.
• Expertise – Setting up successful campaigns can require some practise and knowledge due to its complexity. This does not imply that not everyone should learn PPC. Simply put, it means that learning how to increase PPC takes more time and effort than learning how to do other digital marketing activities.

Summary

• PPC advertising allows you to create content and show it to relevant users online to build brand awareness, generate traffic and drive conversions.
• There are four main advertising options for campaigns:
  • Text ads
  • Shopping ads
  • Display ads
  • Video ads
• Pros of PPC – Speed, precision, agility and measurement of your marketing campaign.
• Cons of PPC – Cost, time investment and expertise required to deliver the campaigns.

PPC Terminology

• Keywords – words or phrases that are used to match your ads with the terms that people are searching for.
• Impressions – are counted each time your ad is served on Google networks such as google.com and YouTube. Impressions help you understand how often your ad is being seen.
• Click-through-rate (CTR) – A measure of how often people click your ad after it’s shown to them which can help you understand the effectiveness of your ad. CTR is calculated by clicks/impressions.
  Cost per click (CPC) – The price you pay for each click. The price is dependant on how competitive the keyword is.
• Conversion – The point at which a visitor completes a desired goal after entering the website. This can be filling out a form or making a purchase.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) – A KPI metric used to determine campaign effectiveness. ROAS is calculated by revenue/cost. A ROAS higher than means the campaign is generating more revenue than expenses.
• Quality Score – Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It’s marked out of and depends on your CTR, the relevance of keyword to ads and landing page quality and relevance.
• Search Impression (SI) Share – How often your ad impressions are shown in the most prominent positions (shown as a percentage).
• SI lost to Budget – How often your ad didn’t show anywhere above the organic search results due to low budget (shown as a percentage).
• SI lost to Rank – How often your ad didn’t show due to poor ad rank – low ad positions and low quality scores (shown as a percentage).