An Overview of Paid Marketing Using Pay Per Click (PPC)

Millions of individuals can be reached by your brand, and it just takes a few minutes to do so. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has amazing potential because it may reach a wide audience and target particular demographics.

What can you do to maximise it?

PPC advertising can provide significant returns for your company ($2 is thought to be returned for every $1 invested), but it can also be a simple way to lose money if you don’t go about it the right manner.

Here is my introduction to pay-per-click marketing to ensure that you are doing it correctly.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing?

A popular advertising strategy in online marketing is pay-per-click. By paying a fee each time an ad is clicked, it enables advertisers to place ads on search engines, social media platforms, and independent websites.

Google is the biggest supplier of PPC services, bringing in approximately $134 billion in ad revenue. People starting out in PPC marketing frequently start using its platform, Google Ads.

How Much is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Every time you make an advertising investment, you want to know how much it will cost. This is a little more difficult with PPC.

Online advertising differs from purchasing a full-cover page ad in a magazine, where you pay a charge. On the other hand, PPC only charges you for outcomes (someone clicking your ad).

In contrast, you often pay a flat amount for offline advertising regardless of the outcomes. You have more control over how much each fully involved customer costs you with PPC.

An auction system is used to carry out this. You are bidding on how often and how high up your ad might be seen, unlike a traditional auction, where there is only one product and one winner. Even if you “lose” the auction, you might still receive PPC space; it just might be less.

Google scans through its list of advertisers for a certain keyword, such as “PPC Marketing,” whenever a user performs a search for it. This results in an auction between the advertisers. Use Google

The algorithm then selects ads based on the maximum bid of each advertiser and the quality score of each ad.

The main lesson to be learned from this is that it doesn’t just come down to price. Your advertisement’s quality is also very important.

However, if your maximum bid is unrealistic, your ads won’t be displayed frequently enough to be profitable. Your bidding approach should be based on the fact that various keywords have varied average costs per click.

Ubersuggest and Google Advertising Keyword Planner are two tools that should be used in your keyword research because they may help you get a fair idea of how much your ads will probably cost.

Is PPC Marketing Right for My Company?

PPC marketing offers benefits and drawbacks, just like any other marketing strategy. Your business should ideally use PPC as part of a comprehensive digital marketing plan to maximise its benefits and minimise its drawbacks.

Pros of Pay-Per-Click Marketing

• Results right away: As soon as your ads are authorised, they will be seen by the people you are trying to reach.
• Highly targeted: You have a lot of control over who sees your adverts.
• Simple to monitor: You can easily monitor the effectiveness of your campaign and calculate your ROI.
• Exposure that could be enormous: Paid advertisements are prominently displayed and have the potential to reach practically an infinite number of individuals.

Cons of Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Long-term expensive option: You are at the mercy of advertising prices because you must pay for each click. It will build up if you continue doing this for weeks or years.

Not constructing an asset Constructing an email list or investing in content marketing is building an asset that belongs to you. Your success with PPC depends on maintaining your ad budget.

For this reason, my own digital marketing company works to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your company. PPC provides some incredible advantages, but you also need effective marketing in other areas.

PPC cannot take the role of natural SEO. The two should function in tandem, with organic work requiring the majority of your attention because those clicks are free.

Six Steps to Starting a PPC Marketing Campaign

You may launch your first PPC marketing campaign in only six easy steps, which may surprise you. Remember that ad quality has a significant impact on the outcome of your campaign, so give each phase your full attention.

1. Figure Out Your PPC Budget

What budget do you have for pay-per-click advertising?

Setting an initial budget is necessary to allow you to test the waters. You can use certain industry benchmarks as a general reference to determine how much you should expect to pay for each conversion.

Set daily and lifetime cost caps for your campaigns once you’ve determined your overall budget.

This is a crucial step in developing a PPC campaign because your budget will have a big impact on how successful your ads are. You may utilise Google Ads to help with this, and since its algorithms are created to maximise your return, it is wise to heed their advice.

You can see an estimation of the number of clicks your budget will probably buy you. Based on your estimated conversion rate, you can then calculate your possible return on investment.

It can be worthwhile to consider some alternative marketing strategies if your budget prevents you from achieving any significant results.

2. Set Your Campaign Goals

For their pay-per-click campaigns, various firms will have various objectives.

If you’re conducting a pre-launch for a start-up, for instance, your objective might be to increase website traffic and raise awareness. Conversions may be your primary objective if you’re selling a product.

Because each target has a varied value, the goals you establish will have a significant impact on your marketing strategy. Your cost-per-click should reflect the fact that a click isn’t as valuable as a lead or a conversion.

You can more effectively target the right demographic and monitor your return on investment by setting up your campaign with the appropriate goals. When using PPC, you only pay for the click and not for what the customer does next—the click is the same whether they make a purchase or not.

Think about who you want to click on your advertisement and the actions you want them to perform. When you realise this, you can optimise every aspect of your campaign to motivate consumers to follow those steps, which should reduce your spending.

3. Figure Out What Type of Campaign to Run

What kind of campaign you’re intending to conduct is a further factor to consider with PPC. There are many choices available here, all of which provide you flexibility in how you choose to reach your target market:

• Search ads: Commercials that appear at the top of search results
• Social ads: social media platforms’ advertisements
• Remarketing advertisements: Advertisements that target previous website visitors
• E-commerce advertisements: Product-focused Google Shopping ads
• Stream Ads: that play in-stream before a video loads are frequently encountered on YouTube.
• Display ads: Dynamic advertisements appearing on third-party websites, as in the illustration below

You can target particular audiences with the help of all of these possibilities. You must ascertain the locations and interests of your target audience. Depending on the buyer personas you’re attempting to target, this will alter.

You don’t have to stick with a single sort of advertisement, and many companies discover that a combination of various ad forms suits them the best. To adjust your plan appropriately, it’s crucial to keep an eye on your ROI for each sort of advertisement.

4. Research Your Keywords

Your keyword research can make or break your campaign because keywords are one of the primary tools you’ll use to target your audience.

You undoubtedly have a good notion of the types of searches your consumers make for your goods or services, but you need to focus on the ones that lead to people taking action.

Understanding user intent is a key component of this. Who is more likely to make a purchase, for instance, when looking up “what is SEO” or “best keyword research tool”?

Because of how that search fits within the buyer’s journey, it’s probably the second. The buyer journey stage a person is in determines how likely they are to make a purchase, thus the keywords you select should represent that stage.

Although they often cost more, keywords that draw customers who are further along in the purchasing process are also more likely to result in conversions.

5. Bid On Your Chosen Keywords

Depending on your aims, the majority of platforms provide you various bidding possibilities. This enables you to optimise for Google Ads’:

• intended CPA (cost per action)
• intended ROAS (return on ad spend)
• increase clicks
• to increase conversions
• maximise the value of conversion
• goal share of impressions

You still have some control over your bid even though Google will automatically place one on your behalf so it can optimise for your desired outcome. You can specify a maximum bid, for instance, if you aim to maximise clicks. You can choose a target cost per action if you optimise for conversions.

It’s critical to keep in mind that Google exists to assist you maximise your ad budget. To accomplish this, the algorithms are carefully honed. Utilising Google’s suggestions is frequently a sensible move, especially when getting started.

6. Create Keyword-focused Copy With Unique Landing Pages

Only a minor portion of what you’re attempting to do is having people click on your advertisements. The important part is what happens when visitors arrive on your page.

Whatever your objectives, you need distinct, compelling landing pages to meet them.

Your landing pages must provide a positive user experience and correspond to the advertisement that the user clicked. People expect easy access to the information they need, and if your landing page doesn’t contain any of the terms they used, they won’t hesitate to click back to Google.

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your PPC landing pages, they must be optimised and A/B tested.

Conclusion

Pay-per-click marketing is a fantastic approach to reach a highly targeted audience quickly. You can quickly put up paid advertisements on websites like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and many others. Depending on your budget, they may be viewed by tens of thousands of people once they have been accepted.

In marketing, finding your target audience is crucial, but once you have their attention, what you do next is what matters most. Because of this, you must either give your paid campaigns the care and consideration they require or hire a professional to handle them.

PPC may provide you with a fantastic return on investment and become an essential tool in your arsenal of digital marketing tools when you strike the appropriate balance with it and have your ads perfectly tuned.