Pay Per Click, otherwise known as PPC, is a form of search engine marketing (SEM) where the advertiser pays for clicks on an ad. With PPC, you only pay when people interact with your ad — meaning you attract people who are interested in your offer. It helps you get quality leads.
A PPC advertisement is most common in search engine results page (SERPs) like Google or Bing Ads and social channels.
It helps in setting campaign goals such as increasing sales, generating leads, and promoting brand awareness.
Where do you find PPC ads?
They are the results you see before and to the right side of organic search results. For example: – Check out the ad that came up when searching for “Hair Plugs”.
What are the top PPC marketing platforms?
Some things that you need to consider while choosing the correct platform are the availability of keyword terms, where your target audience spends their time, and your advertising budget.
1.) Google Ads : – formerly known as Google AdWords and is considered as “The King of Paid Advertising”receives 3.5 billion queries per day, giving you plenty of opportunities to target keywords that will get your potential audience to click.
2.) Bing Ads: – these come after Google Ads with 12 million queries per day. Yahoo! and Bing have combined their advertising forces which expanded their audience reach. The perk of using Bing Ads over Google Ads is a slightly lower Cost Per Click (CPC) at the expense of a larger audience.
3.) Facebook Ads: – Facebook Ads are popular and effective as paid ads due to their specific targeting options. Facebook allows you to target users based on interests, demographics, location, and behaviors. Facebook also allows for native ads, which means ads are introduced and blended into the social feed. Not to mention, you can use Facebook Ads to advertise on Instagram as well.
Steps to get started with PPC Advertising
1.) Set Parameters: – You want to put your ad campaigns into the context of your ultimate business goals. Consider how your paid campaigns will contribute to those goals. Then, think about what you want to accomplish with your ads — whether that be visits, sales, brand awareness, or other — and how much you’re willing to spend to accomplish that goal.
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?
2.) Create Your Goals and Goal Metrics: – Let’s touch on some common PPC goals and how to measure them.
• Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your company. It might be a good idea to look into display ads for this goal so you can supplement your copy with engaging imagery. You can measure brand awareness through social engagement, surveys, and direct traffic.
• Lead generation is the direct result of having a relevant and engaging landing page to follow your paid ad. Since you will create a separate landing page for each ad group, you should be able to easily track lead conversions either in the Google Ads interface via a tracking pixel, or through UTM parameters.
• Offer promotion is great if you’re running a limited time offer, product or service discount, or contest. You should create a dedicated sign-up page or a unique discount code so you know which users came from your ad.
• Sales can be measured by how much of your product or service is sold based on your paid ads. You should be able to track this through quality CMS software or attribution reporting.
• Site traffic is a great goal if you have high quality content throughout your website. If you’re going to spend money getting people to visit your site, you want to have some level of confidence that you can keep them there and eventually convert them into leads.
3.) Choose Your Campaign Type: – There are many different types of paid advertising campaigns, and the one that you choose depends on where you can reach your audience. Try a combination of campaign types as long as you’re consistently testing and revising.
•Search Ads are the most common type of PPC and refer to the text ads that show up on search engine results pages.
• Display Ads allow you to place ads (usually image-based) on external websites, including social. There are several ways to buy display ads, including Google Display Network (GDN) and other ad networks.
• Social refers to any ads that you see on social media, including Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn and Twitter. You can pay to show the ads in your target audience’s social feed or somewhere else within their profile, depending on the platform.
• Remarketing can use either cookies or a list of contacts that you upload to target people who have previously engaged with your company through some action. That action could be filling out a form, reading a blog, or simply visiting a page on your website.
• Google Shopping is most effective for ecommerce sites. Your ad — including image, price, and a short product description will show on a carousel on a search page based on your target keywords.
4.) Perform Keyword Research: – Each ad group you create needs to be assigned a set of keywords to target — that’s how search engines know when and where to display your ad. The general rule of thumb is to select between one to five keywords per ad group, and those keywords should be extremely relevant — your Quality Score depends on it. Select keywords that are closely aligned with the specific theme of your ad group. If you find keywords you want to target that fall outside of one theme, you should create a separate ad group for them.
5.) Set up Google Analytics and Tracking: – The tool provides you with insights into how your website is performing, how users are interacting with your pages, and what content is attractive to visitors. The information you can gather from Google Analytics can be used for PPC and beyond.
Best Practices for a Quality PPC Strategy
1.) Ad Copy: – Bidding on targeted keywords will get your Ad in front of the right people; good ad copy will get those people to click on your Ad. Like your keywords, your ad needs to solve for intent of the searcher — you need to give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for and make sure that is clear through the words you use.
Search ads are comprised of a headline, a URL, and a short description, and each of these have limited character requirements to follow. To make the most of this space, make sure your ad copy does the following:
• Speaks directly to your target market
• Includes the main keyword that you’re bidding on
• Provides an actionable CTA so the searcher knows what to do next
• Makes the offer appealing
• Uses language that matches your landing page copy
2.) Audiences: – Google allows you to tailor your audience so you save marketing “dollars” and get in front of the right people. You can upload a customer list so that you don’t waste money on people who have already bought from you. Google also has options for prospecting audiences.
3.) Bid Adjustments: – allow you to increase or decrease your bids based on performance. You can even make these adjustments based on different categories, like device, demographics, language, and more.
4.) Sitelink Extension: – allow you to supplement your ad with additional information.
5.) Conversion Tracking: – monitors how your landing page is performing via a tracking code that you place on the page where people land after completing your form (usually a “Thank You” page). By enabling this feature, you’ll be better equipped to make adjustments that can improve your conversions.
6.) Keyword Monitoring: – You can place higher bids on the keywords that are creating the best results for your campaign, and “defund” or eliminate others.
7.) Negative Keywords: – A negative keyword list tells search engines what you don’t want to rank for, which is equally as important as what you do. You might know some of these upfront, but likely you’ll determine these keywords by what isn’t performing so well within your campaign.
Useful terminology in understanding PPC campaigns
• Clicks refer to the total number of clicks you receive on an ad. This metric is affected by your keyword selection and the relevance of your ad copy.
• Cost per click (CPC) measures the price you pay for each click on your ad.
• Click through rate (CTR) is the percentage of ad views that result in clicks. This metric determines how much you pay (CPC). CTR benchmarks vary by industry.
• Impressions are the number of times an ad is viewed. Cost per mile (CPM) is determined for every thousand impressions. Impressions are most relevant for brand awareness campaigns.
• Ad spend is the amount you are spending on your ads. You can optimize this by improving your Quality Score.
• Returns on ad spend (ROAS) is the ROI of your ad campaign. This metric calculates the revenue received for every dollar spent on ads.
• Conversion rate refers to the percentage of people that complete the call-to-action on your landing page and become a lead or customer.
• Cost per conversion refers to the cost to generate a lead. This is calculated as the total cost of an ad divided by the number of conversions.
• Quality Score (QS) determines ad positioning, so it’s an important metric to keep an eye on.
Conclusion
At Head45 Dental, believe paid advertising is an effective tool that should be a part of your inbound marketing strategy no matter how long you’ve been in business. PPC just might be the boost you need to get an edge on your competition — or at least ahead of them in the SERPs.
We deal with every aspect of digital marketing, inbound marketing and advertising. We’ll help you understand and work with you to grow your future business needs with correct and efficient marketing tactics. We help you drive forward strategies with tools that build up a strong base with our PPC expertise and in-depth know-how.
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Find out how we can help your business – get in touch today.