Pay Per Click Advertising – The Way to Drive in Traffic

Pay Per Click Advertising – The Way to Drive in Traffic and  Sales

If you are thinking about your online business promotions, you must know about PPC marketing and its strategic ability to drive traffic to your website.

So, let’s get into the basics first, as we get to know PPC.

Explaining PPC

PPC is the abbreviation for pay-per-click and referenced to advertising. It is a popular internet marketing model used by businesses all over the world. Through this model, advertisers pay every time a user clicks an ad, which leads to the website or a landing page. Thus, it is a way of purchasing ‘visits to a website’ and not attempting to ‘earn’ such visits.

One of the common forms of PPC is search engine advertising. Through this, advertisers pay money, or they bid for placing an ad in sponsored links of the search engines. Thus, whenever anyone searches such a keyword, the advertisement comes up. If the user is interested in the offered service or goods, the user clicks the ad and the advertiser will be charged.

How Does PPC Work?

It starts with the setting of a budget for the ads you place on a platform. This platform can be Facebook, Google, or anywhere else you select to place your ad. You can set your budget based on how much you want to spend. This will usually be a daily budget for the PPC campaign. There are two general types of ads:

• Search Ads
• Display ads

PPC ads are suitable for long running PPC campaigns, time-sensitive campaigns, as well as specialized campaigns like in promotions or events.
Two Broad Categories of PPC Ads

• Google Ads
• Social Media Ads

Understanding Google PPC Ads

In any Google PPC campaign, the advertiser does not pay Google for displaying ads. The advertisements usually appear at the top or on the right side of the organic search results. Besides this, ads can also be displayed across different sites through Google’s display network. As a user clicks such ab ad, the advertiser is charged the cost per click also known as CPC. This amount is available through the daily budget.

There are a few factors that determine The CPC. Those include the competition level and search volume for a specific keyword. Another important factor is the keyword/ad quality. This means basically, how relevant your ad- and the landing page content is to the keyword or keyword phrase. This is why it is important to have keyword or keyword-phrase optimized landing pages;

Let us consider an example.

For instance, a Company ABC wants Google to display an ad, whenever any user searches for the keyword-phrase ‘sports goods shop’. The Company ABC pays a lot more money per click for this keyword because it is highly competitive with many searches every day. In comparison, the company will pay less per click for the keyword-phrase ‘sports goods shop in New Jersey’. The reason is simple. By adding a specific location, there will be far less searches then for the more general keyword-phrase ‘sports goods shop’.

Google runs the ad continuously until the daily budget which you have set is depleted. When this happens, Google will no longer display the ad until the following day, when your fresh daily budget applies again.

Now – let’s look in a bit more detail on how Google shows such ads?

These are:

• Search Ads
• Local Ads
• Display Ads
• Remarketing
• Search Ads – These are the most commonly visible ads in use all over the world. As per the queries of the users, they appear beside or above the organic results. For setting up search ads, it is necessary to fill in information about when, where & how you wish to have your ad on display. The process involves writing the ad and selection of the keywords which the user may use to search for a specific product or service.
• Local Ads – Those are generally used by “brick & mortar” shops which are shops that have a physical location. These are a subset of the usual search ads. These ads target a specific region that is usually close to the business. These local ads also help in driving users to Google My Business page.
• Display Ads – are more like traditional advertising. Your PPC specialists or their designers will create image ads. Those will be displayed trough the Google display network, as well as 3rd party networks, associated with Google. The CPC is usually considerably lower than for search ads, which is the reason, why those ads are often used for branding. Creative advertisements and text ads are on display on various apps and third-party websites.
• Remarketing – Think about a situation when you visited a website, glanced through, and left without purchasing anything or without subscribing to a service. Later, you see the ads of that specific company or the product all over many sites on the internet. This is all about a remarketing campaign, branding and building trust.

PPC campaigns are set up and run by expert digital marketers. The digital marketer sets up the ad after consulting with the client. The client explains the objective and business objectives, after which the campaign begins. However, things are not as simple as it seems. Strategies have to be correct, or the advertiser loses a lot of money with a substantial boost in traffic. Hence, continuous monitoring and analysis is a must in any PPC campaign.

Primary Objectives of the PPC Campaign to Maximize ROI

Digital marketers run different PPC campaigns for their clients. Each campaign has its own strategy, but the majority of the campaigns have three primary objectives which assure maximum return on investment.

Lower the Average CPC

It’s a fact that any PPC campaign is costly. Thus, it is vital to keep a good watch on the budget to ensure no money wastage. Here are a few things worth considering –

• Long Tail Keywords – Focusing on long-tail phrases helps a lot as these are less competitive. They attract less traffic than single keywords, but can also be more targeted. Single terms are more competitive and therefor more expensive.
• Negative Keywords – There will be a few keywords that will bring in unqualified traffic. These are negative keywords, and you have to avoid as many of such expensive, but unqualified clicks. It will save you money.

ROAS (Increase your Return on Ad Spend)

People invest in PPC because they want to turn their investment into a profit. Here are some ways which can help to achieve this:

• Location Targeting – When targeting by location, remove a few areas. Conversion chances are higher in the city where you have a store.
• Device Targeting – Do a bit of research and analyse data to find which devices are offering a good return. Hence, you can adjust the bids easily and target such devices.
• Time Targeting – Keep adjusting your bids and target all those times when your potential customers are most active.
• Audience targeting – If for example you are selling B2B, select relevant audiences from the selector which you’ll find on Google’s campaign setup.
• Age Group targeting – If you are selling a product most popular with teenagers, select the appropriate age group in the selector.
• Income targeting – For example, if your product or service is very expensive, you can select that your ad is only shown to higher-income groups.

Boost the ROI

Whenever there is a positive ROI, it signifies the success of your PPC campaign. Thus, when you find Quality Score improving or good performance of an ad, it means good ROI for all your efforts. If the quality score is more than 7, you will get discounts on clicks. Thus, the focus should be on improving the Quality Score with better ads and landing pages. It will bring in more conversions, helping you to save money on the campaign.

Whenever any online business gets in contact with digital marketing companies for driving in more traffic to a website, marketers recommend a setting of PPC campaigns. But one has to realize a very important fact, which is often overlooked.

The campaigns job is to bring qualified traffic to your site. However, it is your landing page that has to convert a possible customer to a real customer. That is why the PPC team at turnitorange works closely with a landing page design team.

Benefits of Investing in PPC Advertising

If it is about convincing any business about investing in PPC, it is an easy job. PPC campaigns offer a gamut of benefits that none can ignore.

• Paying for Clicks Only – In the case of several other kinds of advertising, users have to pay a fixed amount for booking an ad spot.
  However, in the case of PPC, the advertiser only has to pay whenever a user clicks an ad. Thus, the advertiser only pays when someone interacts and increases the chances of conversion. Especially, if the campaign is well targeted.
• Way to Fulfilling the Goals of Business – PPC campaigns help in establishing brand exposure that helps in bringing leads and sales.
• Easy to Track and Measure – It is possible to track and measure the performance of the campaign. It is possible to quickly track impressions, a number of clicks, and subsequent conversions. Thus, marketers understand if their selected keywords are helping their campaign or if they need to change the keywords.

• It is Fast

  PPC doesn’t take a long time to show results. It shows results in a short time, depending on the campaign size. Setting up a PPC campaign can take as a few hours to many days, depending on size. Budget and complexity.

• Targeting Options are Many – There is an advantage of utilizing several marketing tools. It is not just about targeting search keywords. It is possible to set perimeters on various user demographics, geographic locations, dates, and times during which the ads remain active. With PPC, there is a scope for dynamic retargeting as well. Thus, it is possible to track visitors to a website and let them see ads related to the pages which they have an interest in, based on previous search results.
• Provides Total Control – There is total control on several options as one reaches out to different customers. There is plenty of flexibility in terms of budget as well.
• Ideal for Other Marketing Channels – Any PPC campaign can help the existing marketing strategy that you have. A PPC campaign drives as many visitors as your budget allows quickly to your landing page that helps in boosting ROI if the landing page is well done.
• Increase in Traffic – PPC advertising helps in generating a great stream of non-organic traffic. It helps in bringing in more sales. PPC marketing is the way to get exposure in a short time. It brings an instant traffic drive to a website.

PPC campaigns are unaffected by Googles algorithm updates

PPC advertising does experience updates. However, these are not so frequent and not disruptive as Google Algorithm updates have on organic search results. Thus, do not worry if you hear about changes in Google Algorithms, as your PPC ads will operate just as you have set them. You do not have to worry about any changes or any tweaking.

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