PPC is a type of online marketing that involves advertisers paying a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.
Did you know? Well-written PPC ads may boost brand awareness by 80%, and 65% of customers click on them.
PPC can achieve several goals. Pay-per-click ads are typically used to raise brand awareness, generate leads, improve site traffic, and boost sales.
But even though there are many good reasons to put money into PPC marketing, the main reason is growth. PPC is easy to do, but it does take some planning and preparation to do it right.
Here, we’ll look at everything you need to know to make a successful and long-lasting PPC campaign strategy. Here’s what will be in our ultimate PPC guide:
- PPC: Important Terms
- PPC campaigns have a lot of pros.
- Different kinds of PPC campaigns
- Platforms for PPC
- PPC vs Organic
- Step-by-step Guide to Making a PPC Campaign
- Strategy and Examples for PPC Campaigns
PPC marketing: Important terms
Before we go any further with our PPC guide, let’s look at some important PPC marketing terms you should know.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) uses sponsored and unpaid methods to promote your brand, services, or products to targeted audiences.
Cost per click (CPC)
How much it costs for your PPC ad to lead to a single conversion or sale.
Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Cost per thousand is another name for this. With a CPM pricing model, marketers and advertisers pay for every 1,000 times their ads are seen.
Ad Rank
Your ad’s rank is found by multiplying your quality score by the most you’re willing to pay per click (CPC).
Quality Score
This is a way to figure out how relevant a PPC marketing ad is.
Bid
The most money or budget that a pay-per-click (PPC) marketer is willing to spend on each ad click.
Ad groups
The process of putting your PPC ad keywords into groups or segments based on certain categories or themes.
Landing page
Users click on paid ads to visit the linked page or place.
How a PPC campaign works
Now that you know the most significant PPC marketing words, we’ll look at a good pay-per-click strategy.
As you can see, a well-balanced PPC campaign is made up of four main parts. Here you have:
- The main headline includes the main keyword “wedding dresses” and tells the user exactly why they should click on the ad.
- The brand name and the main keyword are both in the display URL. It’s short, to the point, and easy to read.
- The beginning of the ad’s body copy starts with the first description. It gives a little more information about the headline and includes the main key term.
- The ad’s second description comes last. Talk about your USPs, why users should click, and include a strong call to action here (CTA).
From the backend, you can change a number of parameters, such as:
- Target keyword Maximum bid
- Who we want to reach
- Regions and places to focus on
- Headlines
- URL Description lines
Why using PPC in your marketing campaigns is a good idea
The main reasons why you should start a PPC campaign strategy are:
- You can quickly reach a larger audience and get a good return on your investment (ROI) for your work.
- You can be at the top of certain SERPs almost immediately and start getting traffic.
- Reaching “warm” leads at the correct time in their journey will help you sell your products and services.
- You can improve and fine-tune other parts of your digital marketing strategy by looking at your PPC data.
Platforms for PPC
Now that we’ve looked at the main types of PPC ad content, let’s look at the three main platforms you can use for your campaigns.
Ads/AdWords by Google
Google Ads or AdWords is an important platform for making and launching content for your PPC strategy based on search engines.
This easy-to-use platform lets you do detailed PPC keyword research, set campaign budgets, and make targeted ads in text-based search, display, video, banner, and shopping formats.
Budget: For Google Ads campaigns, the average cost per click (CPC) is between $1 and $2.
Bing
Even though it’s not as well-known as Google, Bing is still one of the most-used search engines in the world. Still, putting PPC marketing content on the platform will give you the tools to reach a larger audience that you can turn into paying customers.
The pay-per-click (PPC) platform for the search engine used to be called Microsoft Advertising, but is now called Bing Ads. The platform is easy to use and is a lot like Google Ads in a lot of ways. The best thing about Microsoft Advertising is that you can import campaign content, details, and data from Google Ads or AdWords directly into Bing. So, you can run similar campaigns on both PPC platforms at the same time to get the most people interested.
Budget: The average cost per click (CPC) of a paid ad on Bing or Microsoft is $1.54.
Facebook is still popular with a wide range of people around the world, so it’s a popular (and potentially profitable) PPC platform for social media.
Setting up campaigns with Facebook ads is easy. You can set your target demographics, target locations, ad lengths and budgets, and, of course, ad content using dropdown boxes and text boxes.
Budget: A paid Facebook ad costs an average of $1.72. But the price does change a bit depending on the niche, industry, or sector.
PPC vs organic
PPC and organic advertising are both important parts of a digital marketing strategy that is consistent, creative, and well-balanced.
Paid search is more direct in many ways and gives quick results in terms of brand awareness, engagement, and sales. But if you don’t use organic marketing or advertising, you’ll miss out on a lot of chances to build your brand and keep customers coming back. Here’s a quick “PPC vs. organic” guide to help you understand each method:
| Paid | Organic |
| When you use pay-per-click (PPC) ads, the traffic you get is sponsored, or “paid.” You have to set a budget based on keyword bids and costs per click to reach the right people and get good results. | Organic marketing and SEO are free ways to get traffic and engagement. Content optimization, campaign messaging, landing pages, free social media posts, and building links all help you get results and grow your audience. |
| When it comes to serving clickable content and links to specific audiences, PPC is faster and more direct. | To connect with the right audience and start seeing positive campaign results from organic content and messaging, it takes more time and persistence. |
| PPC ads are shorter and give you more say over what they say. Most of the time, these ads don’t last very long. | The search engine algorithm has a bigger say over the content of organic campaigns and search results. Content from organic campaigns is easier to reuse and tends to keep people interested for longer. |
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Creating a PPC marketing campaign
Here are the most important steps you need to take to build a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that will help you reach your PPC marketing goals.
Step 1: Start by Optimizing Your Website.
Before you start a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you need to take a step back and look at the landing pages that will work with your ads.
Here’s why it’s so important: when a potential customer clicks on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad, it’s because the ad’s content interested them and they want to learn more. But if the link they click takes them to a page on your website that has nothing to do with what they were looking for, like your homepage, that prospect is likely to leave.
When someone clicks on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad, they want to know more about what the ad was about. This is why it’s so important to make landing pages that match the content of the ad. For example, if your PPC ad said that people could get two pizzas for the price of one at your restaurant, the landing page for the ad should have more information about the deal, a coupon for the free pizza, or something else that is related to the ad.
You also need to make sure your landing pages work well. If prospects click on your ad and land on a page that doesn’t load quickly, is hard to navigate, or has other technical issues, they will also leave.
Take the time now to make your site as effective as possible so that prospects who visit later are more likely to buy from you. Here are a few ways to make your site more likely to lead to sales:
- Use calls to action that are clear and convincing.
- Use a simple layout with a lot of blank space
- Write headlines that are interesting and get people’s attention.
- Write copy that is easy to understand.
- Use video and pictures in smart ways to keep people’s attention.
- Use bullet points, quotes that stand out, and pictures to make information easy to understand.
Step 2: Select a Bidding Strategy
There are many different bidding strategies to choose from, and the right one for you will depend on your budget, how familiar you are with PPC, and what your goals are.
One of the first things you’ll have to decide is whether you want to bid manually or automatically. If you’ve never done PPC before, you might want to start with manual bidding, especially if you have a small budget, because you can set a maximum cost per click with manual bidding. The downside of manual is that you can’t change your bids to make them better.
On the other end of the spectrum is automated bidding, which will save you time but might cost you a little more.
When it comes to automated bidding, there are different ways to bid, and you can get more information from Google about different AdWords strategies. Basically, you can choose from different strategies based on whether you want to increase conversions, visibility, or traffic.
Step 3: Set a Budget
A PPC campaign’s budget is important, but the best thing about this type of advertising is that you can still do it on a small budget and keep a close eye on how much you spend.
If you’re new to PPC, don’t have a lot of money to spend, and just want to test the waters, you can still get started with as little as $25. Here’s a simple way to figure out what your budget should be:
The profit part of the equation looks at how much money you make off of each conversion. To figure out the commission that pays for the ads, you have to decide how much of your profit you can give up without hurting the campaign.
You’ll need to look at past data to figure out your conversion rate, or you can use the industry standard, which Search Engine Watch says is 2.7%. Then, multiply the maximum CPC by the number of clicks you’d like to get by the number of days (at least one month). This will give you your budget.
Step 4: Research Your Keywords and Choose Them Wisely
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign because it’s the foundation of the whole thing. Without keywords, the search engine would have no way to know when to show your ads. If you need help in this area, check out our SEO Keyword Research Toolkit.
Just as important, picking the right keywords can almost guarantee the success of your campaign and get you the most views, clicks, traffic, and sales. Here are some tips on how to choose keywords:
- Check out what your competitors are doing.
- Think about how you would look for your products or services if you were a customer.
- Use Google’s keyword search or another tool to find chances (both Moz and Semrush offer great keyword tools)
- Don’t use keywords that are too general or too vague.
- Whenever you can, use local keywords.
The more hits you get, the better you are at choosing keywords. You’ll also get a higher quality score and a lower cost per click as a result.
Negative keywords are also an important part of choosing keywords because they filter out the keywords you don’t want to use. For example, if you want to advertise ice cream but don’t sell soft serve, you could use the word “soft serve” as a “negative keyword” to keep it from showing up in searches for that kind of product.
Step 5: Create a Great Ad
After you’ve set up your landing page, decided on a budget and bidding system, and carefully picked your keywords, it’s time to start working on your ad. One important thing to remember is to keep it short and to the point, because you don’t have much space or time to catch the attention of prospects.
Another important thing is to know what you want to accomplish and write the copy with that in mind. For example, if you want to sell more on Father’s Day, your ad copy should say that you’re having a sale. You don’t have to be very creative, but you do need to get their attention, keep their interest, and make them curious.
To help get that attention, you could come up with a unique value proposition that makes your offer different from everyone else’s and describes in one sentence how that will help customers. Going back to the Father’s Day example, you could say in the ad that you sell a unique tool that dads love but no one else does.
Step 6: Don’t Forget the Call to Action (CTA)
The call to action is one more part of making the ad that is important enough to get its own section. Without a call-to-action (CTA), the ad is useless because interested prospects won’t know what to do next. The call to action (CTA) can be short and sweet, but it needs to be clear, concise, and convincing, like “buy now.”
Step 7: Test Your Ads for Performance
Even after your ads are up and running, you still have work to do. In fact, this is when the real work starts. You’ll need to keep an eye on your ads, measure how well they do, and make changes as needed to improve results.
A/B testing is a great way to do this because it lets you run two versions of the same ad at the same time, but with one important difference. You can change almost everything, from the copy to the CTA to the keyword to the landing page itself. But once you know which version works better, you can make the changes you need to and stop spending money on the one that doesn’t work as well.
PPC Marketing: Conclusion
PPC isn’t too hard, but you do need to understand how the process works. It also requires a lot of planning and research if you want the best return on your investment (ROI).
The most important things to remember are to optimize your landing page first, then set a budget and decide how you want to bid.
The next hard but doable step is to research and choose the right keywords.
The next step is to make your ad.
And once the ad goes live, you have to track, measure, test, and change it to make sure that your PPC efforts are getting you the traffic, conversions, or leads you need.
