What is PPC (Pay Per Click)?

How does PPC work?

What’s in it for your business?

These are all valid questions, so let’s start with the basics.

What is PPC?

The most common definition of PPC is an online advertising model where businesses run adverts on a platform such as Google Ads. The company that is advertising then pays a fee to the platform whenever a user clicks on the advert.

PPC (Pay Per Click) is also sometimes called Paid Search.

What is the goal of PPC?

A PPC ad campaign aims to lead potential customers to your website, where they will complete an action that is valuable to you – such as purchasing a product or enquiring about a service you offer.

Search engines such as Google and Bing are popular advert platforms as they allow you to display an advert to users that is relevant to what they are searching for – making them more likely to convert.

Paid advertising gives businesses the perfect opportunity to reach their target audience when they are looking for a product or service like yours. It also offers business owners and us data insights that can help you to achieve the ROI of this marketing channel over time.

How does PPC work?

Paid search covers various ad platforms, but the most common are Google Ads and Bing Ads.

Within these platforms, there are various ad formats available, including:

• Display ads – a type of advert that combines text, images and a URL that links to a website where a customer can learn about or buy a product or service
• Gmail ads – a type of advert that runs through Google and appears in Gmail users’ inboxes
• Search ads – a type of advert that only appears to those who are already searching for your product or service
• Shopping ads – ads that include rich product information such as a product image, price and merchant name
• Video ads – video ads that play before, during or after streaming content

We tend to focus on the Google Ads platform. It allows us to get your product or service in front of the most potential clients and many ways to set up your paid advertising campaign dependent on your goals.

Paid search works through a bidding system where companies bid on keywords relevant to their business.

How do PPC ad auctions work?

PPC ad auctions are the driving force behind paid search, and they decide which company appears in the top position.

PPC ad auctions begin when someone searches for something through a search engine. The auction is aimed at:

identifying the ad accounts’ eligibility to enter the auction

the order in which the ads will appear on the results pages

how much a click on the advert will cost the company whose adverts are showing

How are PPC ad campaigns grouped?

PPC ad accounts are split into campaigns for ease of management so that reporting on product types and locations is easier.

These campaigns can then be further split into ad groups containing keywords and relevant adverts.

Keywords are crucial to PPC as they connect the adverts to what the users are typing into the search engine. Keywords can be matched to search queries with more and less precision depending on keyword match types. For example, we can choose to match keywords to search queries precisely or allow for more variation through different spellings of words or the inclusion of other words. We can also use negative keywords to exclude specific keywords so that irrelevant traffic is not sent to the site.

If you win the auction for a particular keyword, the user will see your ads, so these must be right. They typically contain a headline, a text description and a URL and can appear at the top or bottom of the search engine results page (SERP).

How do budgets and bids work?

If you are taking part in a PPC auction, you need to know what you are willing to spend on any given keyword. This is set using budgets at a campaign level and bids at the ad group or keyword level.

Budgets should be set according to the account strategy and can be exceeded daily but will not be exceeded monthly. Bids are a more precise way for us to control ad spend.

What is Ad Rank?

A PPC auction is not won just by someone who has the highest bid. Search engines also look at other factors when deciding who should have the top spot on the SERP.

Google, for example, looks at:

• Ad relevance and quality
• Bid amount
• Context of the search
• Format impact

Why should you invest in PPC?

Here are some of the most common reasons why PPC could be a good marketing channel for you to invest in:

• You will see returns very quickly compared to SEO which is more of a long-term strategy
• You can easily measure and track conversions so you can refine the performance of the campaign over time and improve the ROI
• You have complete control over how much you spend and when the ads run so that you can manage your budget more efficiently
• You can target your customers more effectively based on data and so reduce your wasted advertising spend

Hopefully, you are a bit clearer about what PPC is now and how it can be helpful to your business.

Contact Zool today to learn more about how PPC and SEO can work together to drive success online.