Pay Per Click Advertising | How Can it Help You?
Online advertising has become more effective and widespread in the 21st century. It is becoming an increasingly easier way to market your business than traditional methods. It allows you to market your business online in many different ways from going after a large group or targeting a smaller, more specific market. So, what is Pay Per Click (PPC) and how does it work? Search Engine Journal posted an article that explains the basics of PPC:
“Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that lets advertisers place ads on an advertisement platform and pay the host of the platform when their ad is clicked. The goal of the ad is to lead the user who clicks to the advertiser’s website or app, where the user can complete a valuable action such as purchasing a product.
Source: SearchEngine Journal
Search engines are popular host platforms as they allow advertisers to display ads relevant to what users are searching for.
Advertising services like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads operate with real-time bidding (RTB), where advertising inventory is sold in a private automated auction using real-time data.”
What Does PPC Do?
The primary goal with PPC advertising is to get someone to click on your ad and then for them to do something on your website or app. Whether it is buying a product, starting a subscription, or filling out an information form, all of these are positive actions created by PPC. These actions are called conversions because you are converting the click on the advertisement into something beneficial for your business. The next piece of PPC advertising is how to acquire advertisement spots:
“Every time there is an ad spot on a search engine results page (SERP), an auction takes place for the keyword instantaneously.
A combination of multiple factors, including bid amount and the quality of the ad, decide the winner who will appear in the top position.
These auctions are what keeps the gears of PPC moving. They begin when someone searches for something on a search engine.
If there are advertisers interested in showing ads related to a user’s search query, an auction is triggered based on keywords that are bid on by advertisers.
The ads that win the auction then appear on the search engine results page.
To get involved in these auctions, advertisers use accounts on platforms like Google Ads to set up their ads and determine where and when they would like those ads to appear.”
Source: SearchEngine Journal
Keywords
Another aspect of PPC advertising is keywords. Keywords are used to match up with search queries in order to align them with accurate ads. Keywords are essential in PPC because they act as the connecting pieces between business advertising and potential conversions. Some ways advertisers use keywords are:
“For example, advertisers can choose to match keywords with search queries exactly or to allow for variations such as different orderings of the words, different spellings, or the inclusion of other words.
It is also possible to have negative keywords, which will prevent ads from being triggered by search queries containing those keywords, to avoid irrelevant traffic.”
Source: SearchEngine Journal
Categories
Along with keywords there are PPC themes that each campaign has. A theme is the overarching subject. For example, the theme could be “White T-Shirts” and then the branching categories, known as ad groups, could be “100% Cotton White T-Shirts , Athletic White T-Shirts, Custom Fitted White T-Shirts”. Lastly, there needs to be a monthly and daily budget for what a business is willing and able to spend on PPC advertising. This is done by using budgets at a campaign level and bids at the ad group or keyword level. Some basics of PPC budgets are:
“Budgets are set at the campaign level and can be exceeded daily but will not be overspent monthly.
Budgets should be set according to the overall account strategy, but bids are a more precise way of controlling spend.
All ad groups must have bids, but keyword-level bids override ad group level bids.”
Source: SearchEngine Journal
There are a lot of moving parts with PPC advertising. There are budgets, keywords, queries, targeting, conversion tracking, and much more. But if a business secures a solid, strategic plan to go after their target market in an effective way they should expect to see a lot of conversions.
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