Whether you are curious about PPC marketing or want to know about it to promote your business, but don’t know where to start you have come to the right place.
First, we’ll learn about PPC and establish a basic understanding of how PPC advertising works. Let’s go!
What is PPC?
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a method of digital marketing within which advertisers pay a fee to publishers every time their ads are clicked. Primarily, it’s some way of shopping for visits to your website, instead of trying to “earn” those visits organically.
Search engines and social media are the two main platforms that are using pay-per-click models. Google ads, Facebook ads, and Twitter ads are actively using PPC advertising.
Every time our ad is clicked, and we have got a visitor to our website, we’ve got to pay these platforms a little fee. Once PPC is functioning properly, the fee is trivial, because the visit is more important than the pay.
How does PPC work?
PPC model works mainly on keywords. When a user searches in the search engine, it gives them the results based on their search. What the user search for is called a keyword. So the companies working on pay-per-click advertising research and analyzing the most suitable keyword which are most relatable to their products. When the keyword is relevant, clicks will be higher, and thus their profit.
The PPC model is beneficial for advertisers because they have to target only a specific audience who are interested in buying their products. A well-designed PPC advertising model saves money as the value of each click by potential customers exceeds the money paid to the publisher.
Publishers also benefit from it as they are generating a revenue stream.
Pay per click models
There are mainly two common models of PPC
Flat rate model
In this model, the advertiser pays the publisher a fixed amount for each click. Publishers keep different PPC rates that apply to different areas of their websites. Note that these rates are negotiable. If the advertiser is signing for a long term or has a high-value contract, then publishers will reduce PPC rates.
Bid based model
In the bid-based model, each advertiser makes a bid with a maximum amount of money they are willing to pay for an advertising spot. Then, a publisher undertakes an auction using automated tools. An auction is run whenever a visitor triggers the ad spot.
Note that the winner of an auction is generally determined by rank, not the total amount, of money offered. The rank considers both the amount of money offered and the quality of the content offered by an advertiser. Thus, the relevance of the content is as important as the bid.
Steps involved in PPC campaign strategy
Now you know what is PPC and how it works. Now let’s discuss how to implement our campaigning strategy. First of all, you should have a clear strategy about what you are going to do. Especially nowadays developing a competitive PPC campaigning strategy is not as easy as it used to be. Advertisers are now using a number of different ways to target their audience, which makes distributing ad spending a challenge.
Here we have listed 5 simple steps which will make developing a PPC strategy an easy one. So let’s get started.
Step 1: Define your goals
This is the most important step in the PPC campaign strategy. You have to decide what you want to achieve. Now there are different targeting options available within Adwords and beyond it. You can choose the type of platforms and ad types that are best suited for your marketing needs by defining your goals. These are the five common PPC goals:
- Increase site traffic
- Generate leads
- Drive sales
- Raise brand awareness
If you want to generate leads, then you can explore using Facebook’s lead capture ads. If you want to drive sales, then your PPC strategy should focus on search or PLA. If your main goal is brand awareness, then you can choose social media and display ads for your strategy. Most of the PPC campaigning strategies now use ad types and platforms to target their audience.
Step 2: Audience targeting
Targeting your audience helps you in determining which advertising options you should invest in.
Adwords audience targeting
A successful Adwords audience targeting not only depends on keyword relevance but also on targeting based on the intent. The keywords you bid for, the ads you display and the landing page you send people to should all match the position the individuals are in your sales funnel.
There are three main categories of search intent keywords in PPC:
- Transactional: searchers wanted to buy something
- Informational: searchers wanted to know about something
- Navigational: searchers wanted to go somewhere or want to get to a certain page and are looking for directions.
So you have to decide on the appropriate keywords depending on the type of audience. For example, e-commerce businesses should largely concentrate on transactional keywords to encourage conversions, whereas a service-providing business should largely concentrate on informational keywords providing information thereby boosting their content marketing strategy.
Apart from these, there are several other audiences you can target on the Display Network, Youtube, and Gmail. Some of them are affinity audiences, in-market audiences, remarketing, life events, and custom intent audiences. It is important to consider all the targeting options when doing a PPC campaign strategy with Adwords.
Social media audience
Audience targeting can be done largely by advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. here you have the freedom to target the existing specific leads or targets based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other parameters you have saved.
Step 3: optimize your landing pages
When a large number of keywords are in use, optimizing unique landing pages is a difficult task. However, if the landing pages are not properly designed, directing visitors to these pages is a total waste. There will not be any conversions and their on-site behavior can lead to lower quality scores.
PPC managers will definitely establish a strong connection between audience targeting and landing page optimization. If the landing page is relevant to the initial search intent or audience demographic interest, there are more chances for conversions.
If you are using social media ads to promote content, you will have to optimize by using the content types and language that perform well on the platform.
Step 4: Create your ads
After audience targeting and creating relevant landing pages, you can now head to optimizing your ads. There is a direct connection between audience interest and the landing pages you have already optimized. The main goal should be to showcase your unique selling proposition and offer value. There are different methods to optimize your ad like a different copy, visual media, extensions, etc.
Adwords play an important role in ad creation and optimization. You should provide Adwords with a sufficient variety of ad variations to rotate and test.
With the help of Adword features, you can fulfill huge orders with simple measures. In Adwords, you can test different headlines, extensions, calls-to-action, and more by setting up ad variations. You can create your own experiments by duplicating ads and then using find and replace to swap out text and elements. By enabling the ad rotation in Advanced settings, Adwords will identify the most effective ad variants for you over time. Set your ad rotation optimization to automatically prefer the best performing ads.
Social media ad creation can also be optimized. Facebook Dynamic Creative will actually take your ad components and create ad variants for you. Everyone can benefit from these intelligent technologies to create and optimize their PPC ads. But you should test a variety of ad elements to understand what is best for their audience.
Step 5: Analyze and optimize your PPC campaign strategy
Here the main target should be on identifying the right keywords and target features that help to drive your campaign goal. On a basic level, there are some important metrics to consider for search, display, and/or social ads:
- CTR( click-through rate): it can help you determine how important your content is to your keyword or audience targeting for social or display.
- Conversion rate: a low conversion rate indicates that you should focus more on high-performing keywords.
- CPC( cost per click): your ideal CPC would be the amount you are willing to pay to get the attention of a member of your audience.
- CPA(cost per acquisition): here we can understand how competitive your keyword is and whether it is worthy to invest in which will ultimately lead to conversions.
- Quality score(For Adwords): this metric can be considered as a combination of a variety of factors such as the relevance of the ad, landing page, CTR, etc.
- ROAS(Return on ad spend): here the evaluation process is carried out, where the effectiveness of ad spend is measured in driving the financial goals.
These 5 steps are actually all you need to build a strong PPC campaign strategy. The main things to remember are to identify the right audience, choose the right platforms and ads to do this, and finally optimize your PPC advertising material.
