Pay per Click advertising, or PPC for short, is a method of putting your business in front of your target market at the point where they are actively hunting for your product. You pay a fee each time someone clicks on your advert, hence the name ‘pay per click’.
The most common platform for PPC advertising is Google Ads, though there are others such as Bing, Amazon and even Facebook. Google’s platform allows advertisers to display their adverts on Google search results, maps, YouTube and a plethora of sites across the web.
Every time someone raises a search using Google, Google holds a mini auction; comparing all the eligible businesses who wish to appear for that particular search term, estimates a ranking and quality score based on many factors and how much a business is willing to pay per click, then chooses winners to land at the top of the search engines. All this is done within micro seconds, 8.5 billion times a day!
To succeed in PPC advertising you need to focus on a few areas:
– Relevant and exhaustive keyword research
– High quality and enticing ads with clear calls to action
– Optimised landing pages
– Continuous data analysis to support campaign optimisation
How are the ads targeted?
You can select the keywords that you want your ads to target such as ‘used cars for sale in stoke’ ‘second hand cars near me’ ‘stoke car dealership’. When someone searches for any of those terms, if your ad is of a good enough quality, it will be entered into an auction with the highest bids winning the top advertising positions for that key term. This auction happens each time a user enters a keyword that you’ve chosen to include in your campaign.
What sorts of statistics do you measure?
This will depend on the overall goal for the campaign but the main areas we tend to monitor are:
- Impressions: The number of times the ad is served
- Clicks: How many people clicked the ad
- Click Through Rate (CTR): How often people click the ad after it’s shown to them
- Cost Per Click (CPC): The average that each click on your advert has cost you
- Conversions: These are user-defined and can include things like the number of forms submitted/newsletter sign ups etc.
- Conversion Rate: How often an ad interaction led to a conversion
- Quality Score: How relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to a person who sees your ad
So, it’s really that simple?!
No, that’s just scratching the surface! There are many different ways to alter how your PPC ads are served – such as targeting by location, device, time of day, age, gender, behaviour, intent and so on. There really is so much that can be done with PPC advertising, and when done correctly it can offer cost effective results that are both immediate and consistent.
While anyone can have a go at managing Google campaigns, it does take a lot of time and attention to get it right and can take specialists years, with continuous personal development, to accumulate the knowledge and skills to maximise performance – which is where we can help! Our Digital Marketing team can take all the stress away and provide you with amazing results.