How much do you think you understand about paid advertising on a scale of 1-10?
Although many small businesses do some form of online advertising, 45% of them do not understand the concept of pay-per-click.
PPC is a tool that every marketer should have in their tool belt. At the very least, they should have a basic understanding of how it works.
Paid advertising can be a great tool to help expand your business. However, there are a few key terms that you should know before getting started. This guide will help you understand pay-per-click marketing so that you can make the most of this tool.
What is PPC?
PPC is short for pay-per-click, a type of online advertising in which businesses pay a small fee each time one of their ads is clicked. PPC ads are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people enter certain keywords or phrases into the search engine. When someone clicks on one of these ads, they are redirected to the advertiser’s website. The fee that businesses pay for each click is determined by how popular the keywords or phrases they have chosen are.
PPC can be effective in bringing in leads if it is done right. If you can create a user journey that is seamless, it could produce a large return on investment for your PPC efforts.
Pay per click advertising is a type of online advertising where businesses pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Pay per click advertising is most common on search engines like Google and Bing, but can also be used on social media sites. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is another type of online advertising where businesses pay a fee based on how many people see their ad.
Pay-per-click ads can be found before and to the right of organic search results. For example, if you search for “cards,” you will see an ad come up.
How to Build a PPC Campaign
Now that you understand the benefits of PPC and have your key terms, you can start creating a PPC campaign on Google AdWords or another platform.
You don’t need to complete these items one by one, but you will need to work through all of them to create an effective marketing campaign.
Set Parameters
You should do this step first, even though I said you don’t need to do the steps in order. Without parameters, your ad will be less targeted and effective.
Ad campaigns should be created with the intent of how they will contribute to the greater goal of the business. Consider what objectives the campaign should achieve such as traffic, sales, brand awareness, etc.then establish a budget for the campaign based on these objectives.
Your ads should encompass a few things:
- Who you want to target
- Theme of your campaign
- How you will measure success
- Type of campaign you will run
Create Goals and Goal Metrics
Your campaign goals will give you an indication of whether your ad spend is effective, depending on how you measure those goals. Your goal metrics should not be confused with your campaign metrics, which we’ll discuss in more detail below.
There are some common goals for PPC campaigns, and we will look at how to measure them.
Brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your company. Display ads can help supplement your copy with engaging imagery. You can measure brand awareness through social engagement, surveys, or direct traffic.
Generating leads is directly related to having a landing page that is relevant and engaging. You will create a separate landing page for each ad group. You can track lead conversions in the Google Ads interface or through UTM parameters if you are using a tool like HubSpot.
Offer promotion can be a great way to attract attention to a limited-time offer, product or service discount, or contest. By creating a dedicated sign-up page or unique discount code, you can track which users came from your ad.
Paid ads can be a good way to measure sales for a product or service. This can be done by tracking how much of the product or service is sold based on the paid ads. This can be done through CMS software or with attribution reporting.
If you want to increase traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure you have high-quality content throughout the site. This will give you a better chance of keeping visitors on your site and eventually converting them into leads.
Choose Your Campaign Type
It’s important to not only know where you will advertise, but also how. There are many different types of paid advertising campaigns, and the one you choose depends on where you can reach your target audience. That being said, you can advertise through various means; you can also try a combination of campaign types as long as you’re consistently testing and revising.
Search Ads are PPC ads that appear on search engine results pages.
Image-based ads that can be placed on external websites, including social media websites, through the Google Display Network or other similar ad networks.
If you want to know how to incorporate Display Ads into your inbound marketing strategy, keep reading. Display Ads can be a great way to catch your target audience’s attention and persuade them to visit your website or take action. When used correctly, Display Ads can be a powerful tool in your inbound marketing arsenal.
Social media refers to any ads that you see on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You can pay to show up in your target audience’s social feed or somewhere else within their profile, depending on the platform.
Remarketing can target people who have previously engaged with your company through some action, such as filling out a form, reading a blog, or visiting a page on your website.
Ads on Google Shopping are based on target keywords and include an image, price, and short product description. These ads appear on a carousel on a search page.
Perform Keyword Research
You need to assign a set of keywords to each ad group you create. This is how search engines know when and where to display your ad. You should select between one and five keywords per ad group. These keywords need to be relevant. Your Quality Score depends on it.
Choose keywords that correspond to the main idea of your ad group. If you want to target keywords that don’t fit into one theme, create a new ad group for them.
It is not necessary to stick to the same keywords throughout your campaign. You can change them if you feel that they are not working for you. Also, try to increase your bids for the keywords that are working.
Set Up Google Analytics and Tracking
There is no reason not to install Google Analytics on your website because it is free to use and provides valuable insights into website performance, user interactions, and attractive content. The information gathered from Google Analytics can be used for PPC and other purposes.
How Often Should You Run PPC Campaigns
Using Common Sense for Seasonality
For a majority of businesses, seasonal factors are pivotal to understand and monitor:
- In the United States, holiday season sales around Christmas accounted for at least 19% of annual revenue from 2000–2017.
- Summers are typically slowdown months for businesses. For example, 61% of restaurants notice a decline in patrons by as much as 20%.
If you want your PPC campaigns to be successful, it’s important to use common sense and tailor them to your product. For example, if you sell Halloween decorations, you’re not going to get much interest if you run ads in July. If you perform landscaping work, PPC campaigns will not produce favorable results if they are scheduled in December.
If you want your small business to survive in the digital age, you need to be willing to change with the seasons. This means using analytical marketing techniques to plan ahead. For example, being smart about how you manage your pay-per-click ads can help you make the most of holiday sales while avoiding overspending in a competitive market.
The seasonality of your PPC campaigns can be determined by conducting a 3-month, year-over-year analysis to compare the seasonal increases in your ad traffic.
Hour by Hour, Day by Day
The specific timing for your PPC ads will depend on your target demographic, including age, location, and occupation. You should know your demographic well enough to predict when they will see your ad.
If you want to target college students, you should try to reach them online in the early afternoon or late at night. They may also be more active online during the weekends.
Some experts believe that PPC ads are most effective at certain times of day and on certain days of the week.
Infolinks, a global advertising platform provider, has found that online audiences are more likely to interact with ads during the day, with the most clicks taking place between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.
The time period from 12pm to 1pm represents the peak of the workday in terms of interaction with PPC ads. This is when people are most likely to be using their computers and mobile devices.
To discover the best time to run PPC ads, you need to evaluate the results almost daily to figure out the pattern for success. Through diligent evaluating and testing, your PPC campaign can deliver incredible ROI.
Exercise Your Patience for Maximum ROI
PPC advertising can be a great tool for small businesses, but it takes time and effort to see results. A strong PPC campaign is built on a process of testing and optimization, which means that it takes time to see real results.
Google recommends advertisers analyze 30 to 60 days of data to understand trends within their PPC campaigns. That period allows you to examine a number of different factors, including:
- Keyword quality: AdWords calculates a Quality Score on the fly for each of your keywords whenever they match a user’s search query. Your keyword’s Quality Score may vary based on location, search query and search network.
- Bidding: AdWords runs an auction every single time it has an ad space available — on a search result, or on a blog, news site, or some other page. Each auction decides which AdWords ads will show at that moment in that space. Your bid puts you in the auction.
- Campaign structure: Every AdWords account consists of several components, such as campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Within each campaign you have ad groups that have their own set of ads, and every ad group contains keywords.
All factors need to be analyzed carefully before making optimization changes.
Some experts recommend committing to at least three months to start seeing a return on investment from a pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click can be effective as a short-term strategy in certain situations with specific goals, such as seasonal sales or increasing traffic to an event.
The three-month period allows for several things to happen:
- Google gets to know your campaign better. In order to raise your Adwords Quality Score, you will need to get more clicks and establish a click-through rate.
- You get the data needed to strategically optimize and improve your campaign. The longer a campaign runs, the more data it collects. More data means better optimization.
- You will better understand the quality of your campaign following various tweaks and changes, helping you make better decisions for the current campaign, as well as future PPC ads.
If you don’t regularly optimize your PPC ads, you could end up wasting a lot of money on ads that don’t have a good ROI.
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