Paid advertising isn’t a new concept within marketing, there are plenty of forms of advertising that are paid for. This can include sponsored posts, boosted posts on social media, paid ads within videos and audio ads on streaming sites such as Spotify or within podcasts. Often the term PPC (or pay per click) is thrown into the mix whenever paid ads are mentioned, but what can make pay per click different is that you only pay when someone clicks.
PPC stands for pay per click and can be run via Google search ads or even on Bing through Microsoft Ads.
The clue is in the name for PPC, you only pay is someone clicks on your ad. Unlike search engine optimisation, Google Ads PPC can help you get to the top of Google for the specific search terms that you want.
If you’re unfamiliar with pay per click ads you might not be able to recognise them as easily in the search results. Typically, PPC ads are used and most often referred to within search engines such as Google and Bing.
If you’ve used Google before, you’ve probably seen a PPC ad and may have even clicked on one without knowing it. They appear as sponsored links on mobile or ‘Ad’ links on desktop within a search result and are typically shown within the first four results of the page.
For a business to appear within those top positions with its adverts, it will have to bid for specific keywords or phrases.
Below you can see we have searched for ‘estate agents Norwich’. It might be that those businesses appearing have bid on phrases such as ‘estate agent’ or ‘best estate agents Norwich’ for them to appear in the search results.
With PPC, these businesses aren’t paying to appear at the top of Google, they’re paying every time someone clicks on their ad. But it’s not that straightforward, because there is a lot of competition for PPC ads to appear for the same or similar search terms. To secure these top positions, you need to bid enough for your ad to appear. If your PPC advert is more relevant to the user's search term or you offer to pay more money for each click, your advert is more likely to appear above your competitors.
When setting up your PPC ads you want to be able to appear in the top 4 paid positions, whilst convincing potential customers to click on your ads. The best way to do this is by encouraging those people to take immediate action when they see your link, rather than browsing the internet for multiple options.
Pay per click works best when you are bidding on high-intent keywords that suggest the user is ready to take action now.
Here are some strategies you can use to make your PPC marketing more effective:
Identify the keywords or phrases that your target market is searching for. You can identify them through third party SEO tools such as SEMRush. Once you understand which keywords are popular and match the right intent you can start to gain an advantage by bidding for these words.
Make sure the page people land on after they click your ad relates to the keyword they put into the search engine. Remember you’re paying for their click, you don’t want to get them to your website to then not take action, bounce and leave. For example, if your advert is about a specific product or service then you don’t want to send people to your home page once they’ve clicked on your ad. Instead, lead them straight to the product or service page as that will result in a better quality score and higher conversion rates.
You need to decide how much each person clicking your ads and visiting your website is worth to determine your bid strategy. If the average value spent on your website is £50, you might not want to be setting your bid to £25 per click because it’s costing you half of your average sale value to convert that customer. Evaluate how much you can afford to spend on each click and allocate this towards your PPC marketing. Use tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner to get data on the average cost per click for those keywords.
Setting a maximum cost per click can help you to control what you spend and make your daily budget work harder. This can reduce the risk of overspending on your ads and not seeing a return on ad spend (ROAS).
Once you’ve tried and tested a variety of options you can start to establish a pattern within your ads and work out which keywords and phrases are the most effective for your business.
Knowing how much your PPC ad campaign is going to cost is dependent on the competition within your business market. For example, if you trade in a very competitive market where your products are of high value, it’s more likely that you will have to spend more per click to secure the top spaces of the search results.
Factors such as the price of your services or products should also determine the amount you spend on PPC ads as you don’t want to be bidding for clicks that won’t have a positive ROAS. This is especially important if the main goal of your PPC ads is to sell products. Thankfully along with a maximum cost per click you can also set a daily budget to help control how much you spend.
The third point to take into consideration when deciding how much you should spend on PPC is your usual marketing budget. You need to factor in how much you can afford to allocate to this strategy. Most importantly because there really isn’t a limit on the available inventory as there are billions of searches in Google every day. You really could spend millions without buying up all the available keywords. That’s why it's useful to introduce spending caps that we previously mentioned if you have a strict budget.
As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, there are a few places where PPC ads can appear such as Google and Bing. As with all digital marketing, experience will help you to start on the right foot but testing and learning will help you to discover what works best and where to maximise your efforts.
If you need help with your Google Ads campaigns, contact us today!
