Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a broad term that covers a couple of different types of online ad campaigns. If done correctly, PPC campaigns can lead a lot of new traffic to your site and deliver enormous success online. Below we’ll cover the basics of PPC, how to set up your campaign, and continue managing its performance to achieve the best results.
What Is PPC?
One of the greatest benefits to PPC is your ability to choose your budget. As a small business you could start out spending on a couple hundred a month and as your business and your budget grow, you can put more in and achieve greater results. PPC and SEO go hand-in-hand. Your PPC campaign done through Google or Bing can actually help improve your SEO more so than if it was done alone. While changes in search engine algorithms may affect SEO, these changes have little to no impact on a PPC campaign.
CPC, CPM, and CPA are a few of the main PPC campaign types. Choosing the right one, depends on your business’s goal for an online advertising campaign.
- Cost-per-click (CPC) is the most common form of online advertising. The idea is simple, the ad may be shown to many people but the advertiser only pays anytime an ad is clicked on. The goal is to lead these users to a landing page that will hopefully lead to a conversion.
- Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) is common for businesses trying to increase their online awareness. The advertiser pays for every time the ad is viewed 1000 times.
- Cost-per-action (CPA) is when an advertiser only pays when a person performs a specific action like filling a form, submitting their email, etc. Purely used to gather desired conversions.
Which Platform Do I Choose?
Each platform offers different benefits for PPC. While one may not be right for your company, another may fit your business’s needs and prove effective.
- Google- with close to 94,000 searches performed every second, Google is the most widely used search engine and offers great tools for PPC targeting and analytics. While a great platform to reach your audience, you’ll find that keywords are often more competitive and the cost per click will be higher than other search engines.
- Bing- second to Google, PPC on Bing can be effective if it fits your business’s needs. Keywords are less competitive and the cost per click is lower. However, this comes at a cost of a much smaller audience than Google.
- Facebook/Instagram- social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have billions of monthly users and are fantastic ways of reaching your specific audiences. With the ability to use parameters like demographics, location, and even user behavior, you can be sure that the people you’re targeting with your ads are the ones you want clicking on them.
- LinkedIn- While very similar to PPC on Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for B2B targeting.
Planning Your Campaign
Your PPC campaign will be way more successful if you take the time to make a solid plan. You need to know who you’re going to target, where to find them, and how you’re going to measure your campaign’s success. After knowing these, it’ll then be easier to know which kind of PPC campaign to run and which platform(s) to use. After planning these, tools like Semrush can help you find the right keywords for your campaign. Using the right keywords can make all the difference with your PPC campaign. Matching your keywords to your target audience and the campaign’s goals is what helps search engines narrow down the people that see your ads so they reach purely your target audience. However, you’re not done after your PPC campaign is set up.
Widely considered the most important part of a PPC ad campaign are not the ads themselves, but rather where the users are sent after they click on an ad. The landing page for your campaign needs to continue the messaging and style of your ads, but also convince site visitors to perform the action you want them to. Whatever your goal for your campaign, the landing page needs to really hit it home with strong calls-to-action, convincing copy, and an appealing design. This mixed with your well-targeted PPC campaign is the trick to increased awareness and more sales.
Maintaining Your Campaign
Your campaign can always do better. Tracking specific analytics can tell you what needs to be improved for better campaign performance. For example, following the success of your keywords can give you the answers as to which ones to allocate more of your budget into and which ones to drop. You can also test different times and days of the week to find which are most effective so your ads are running during the most opportunistic times. Analyzing the success of the ads themselves and your landing pages are just as important. Testing different variations of ad copy, images, and calls-to-action can help you find what might not be working and replace it with elements that drive conversions.
Putting It All Together
Your PPC campaign is not going to be perfect right from the start. But by adjusting to its weaknesses you can achieve the results you’re looking for. If you would like to learn more details about how Pay-per-click is done and what specific opportunities there are for your business, contact us here at Grow Team and we’d love to answer your questions!