Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC, is a digital marketing strategy in which advertisers create ads and bid on specific phrases. It basically consists of buying viewers to a certain website, instead of letting it happen organically. In this model, the advertisers only pay when the ad is clicked. Each time a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays a small fee.
Advertising on a search engine provider is one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click marketing. The advertisers primarily bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links work when their related keyword is searched and the ad with the highest bid is displayed. If a user clicks on one of those links, the advertiser has to pay; this is known as pay per click marketing.
While PPC marketing on search engine pages is more prominent, social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram also run PPC advertising; it works the same way as PPC marketing on search engines, but the ads are displayed on these social media outlets. The five most prominent PPC platforms are Google (through Google Adwords), Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
It’s important to note, though, that PPC marketing is not just about knowing what it is or paying the most money for successful results. There are a lot of factors that go into creating a beneficial PPC campaign: starting from the research of choosing the right keywords, to arranging those keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimized for conversions. This is not just about converting viewers into clickers and then customers but also to have a more profitable ad campaign.
How to Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising for your Small Business
Advertisers who create relevant, well-targeted pay per click campaigns are charged less for ad clicks by search engines. Specifically, Google charges advertisers less per click if the ad campaign is intelligently put together, which results in more profit for the business.
There are three important factors which contribute to a successful, profitable ad campaign:
- Keywords: It is essential to use the most relevant keywords and phrases which specifically cater to the target audience and the product of that campaign. The number of times the ad is displayed depends hugely on the chosen keywords as the algorithms pick up those keywords.
- Landing page: Once a user clicks on an ad, it will direct them to a landing page so it is very important for the landing page to turn those clicks into customers. There are three important aspects when it comes to optimizing your landing page: it needs to have a distinct call to action, convincing enough reasons to choose over competition and the loading time should not be more than three seconds. You can be a cut above your competition through this.
- Quality score: Monitoring the quality score in Google Adwords helps ensure a profitable ad campaign as it indicates how a certain ad is performing in terms of the relevance of its keywords and the click-through rates.
As PPC campaigns are complex to work through for everyone, there are advertising agencies which handle PPC campaigns for companies. One of them is called Local Dudes Marketing: https://www.localdudesmarketing.com/san-diego-ppc/
