How to Use PPC Marketing to Boost Your Business

Let’s start with an introduction to (pay-per-click) PPC marketing. This method involves advertising on search engines to generate website clicks, rather than organically earning them. For example, PPC ads are the yellow sponsored adverts you see atop the search results pages of Google.

How PPC Marketing Works

Each time someone clicks your ad and visits your site, you need to pay a fee to the search engine. Hence the name, “pay per click”. A well designed and implemented PPC campaign can make the fee payment trivial as the click and visit can generate sales for you. For instance, a single click worth $5 can give you a sale of $250, making it a smart investment.

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Benefits for All

Advantages for advertisers – Advertising experts get a unique method to convey their message to audiences that are specifically and actively searching for their product. Since searchers indicate their intent via their query, advertising professionals can measure the traffic quality obtained from clicks on search engines.

Advantages for searchers – Studies show that searchers prefer paid search adverts compared to other digital advertising types. They don’t care about advertising as long as it is relevant to them. We utilize search engines to look for services and products and we generally get relevant results and ads. In addition, Google uses an effective formula to ensure PPC adverts meet users’ requirements.

Advantages for search engine platforms – PPC allows search engine platforms to simultaneously cater to both advertisers and searchers. The searchers make up the user group, while advertising provides them revenue. The engines’ goal is to deliver pertinent results while presenting a revenue-generating, highly targeted advertising medium.

PPC marketing’s unique advantage is ad networks like Google go beyond rewarding the highest payers for ad space. They also reward high-quality adverts that are popular with searchers. In short, Google rewards and recognizes quality performance. If your ads are relevant, you can reduce your costs and boost your CTR (click-through-rates).

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PPC Marketing via Google Ads

Google Ads (previously Google AdWords) is the most used PPC medium. It uses a PPC model where advertisers make bids on keywords and shell out for clicks on their ads.

Each time somebody searches on Google, the engine looks at all the bidding advertisers and selects winners to be placed in the advertising space on the search results web page. These winners are selected based on factors such as the relevance and quality of their ad text and keywords, and the amount of the keyword bids.

To be specific, an ad’s appearance on the results page depends on the Ad Rank of the advertiser. This is a metric computed by multiplying 2 main elements – CPC Bid which is an advertiser’s highest offered amount and the Quality Score which a value calculated by considering the advertiser’s landing page excellence, relevance, and CTR, among other aspects. This Quality Score has an impact on the advertiser’s actual CPC (cost-per-click).

The above formula enables advertisers to engage potential consumers at a budget-friendly cost.

Benefits of Ad Rank

The Ad Rank metric helps advertisers to use pertinent PPC ads on search engines to deliver targeted ads to users who are searching for their products. This makes everybody a winner.

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Effectiveness of PPC Marketing

With impactful PPC marketing you can:

• Boost your consumer base – Engage searchers looking for services and products like those you provide and meet their needs by presenting them relevant offers.

• Generate low-cost leads – With PPC marketing, you can reach prospects and leads when they’re searching to purchase and direct them to your website. In addition, search engines give you algorithmically-produced discounts for meeting the needs of their users.

To be sure, PPC marketing is an effective method for almost all types of businesses. It can help drive phone calls and foot traffic to local stores, create brand awareness, produce leads for software or service-based companies, and assist e-commerce platforms to sell their products, among others. However, executing an effective PPC marketing campaign is another matter for which you need to implement best practices and processes.

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Importance of Keyword Research

For impactful PPC marketing, keyword research is vital though it is a time-intensive task. Your whole PPC program is designed around keywords. Successful advertisers on Google continuously refine and grow their list of PPC keywords using a range of tools. If you perform keyword research just once when you craft your initial campaign, you’d be losing numerous relevant, low-cost, long-tail, and valuable keywords that could boost your website’s traffic.

To make your PPC keywords list effective, you should make it:

• Relevant – You want to generate hot leads for your business. Therefore, you should use targeted keywords which can improve your PPC CTR and profits, while reducing CPC. This means your bidded keywords should be related closely to the products you market.

• Exhaustive – You should include frequently searched and popular words in your industry in your keyword researches. In addition, your research should extend to searches’ long tail. These long-tail searches are less common and more specific, but they make up a high percentage of traffic driven by searches. Plus, these keywords are less costly as they are not as competitive as short-tail keywords.

• Expansive – PPC marketing is repetitive. You should aim to constantly expand and refine your programs, and ensure your list of keywords is continuously adapting and growing.

Your PPC keyword plan should include the discovery of regular negative keywords that ensure your ads don’t show up for irrelevant searches to your products and therefore not likely to convert.

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How to Manage Your PPC Campaigns

After creating your campaigns, you should regularly manage them to ensure they are continuously effective. In short, regular account activities are required for account success. Further, you should constantly analyze the performance and results of your Google Ads account. Allot some time each week and tweak your campaigns in the following ways:

• Include PPC keywords: Improve your PPC campaign’s reach by including relevant keywords for your business.

• Include negative keywords: Include negative keywords which are non-converting words and phrases to minimize wasted spend and enhance campaign relevancy.

• Break down ad groups: Improve your Quality Score and CTR by breaking down your advert groups into more relevant, smaller segments that can assist you to produce more targeted landing pages and ad text.

• Review expensive PPC keywords: Evaluate under-performing, expensive keywords and remove them if needed.

• Optimize landing pages: Improve your landing pages’ content and CTAs (calls-to-action) so they are aligned with personal search queries to enhance conversion rates. Ensure not to direct all your site traffic to one page.

To sum up, you should aim to continuously optimize and improve your PPC campaigns to boost your ROI and grow your consumer base.