How much more dollars do you need to burn before your PPC campaign converts?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a successful Internet advertising approach that directs online traffic to certain websites. Perhaps you’re searching for strategies to get your first visitors and sales for a new business, or you’re thinking about expanding your brand’s online presence. PPC may be a terrific method to advertise your brand and attract new clients, but it can be difficult to understand and confusing to implement at first for those who are new.
Have you heard about PPC advertising or have you already wanted to utilize PPC to your business but are unsure where to begin? If so, then this is the article for you!
So, what’s Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)?
PPC is an online advertising technique used to generate traffic to websites in which an advertiser pays a publisher (usually a search engine, website owner, or network of websites) when the ad is clicked. In essence, this is a way to “buy” traffic to your website, rather than generating organic traffic.
The price you pay per click is usually based on your bid for that particular ad. Examples of where you’ll see PPC ads include search engines (Google, Amazon, Bing,…), banner ads, social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn,…).
For example: Moonpig, a company which mainly sells greeting cards, flowers and personalized gifts wants to get more traffic to their website to promote their new product – personalized card. They decided to run this PPC campaign on Google Ads. They can set a maximum bid-per-click of $2, which means they can pay less than $2 but never more than $2 per click. They will only pay less if the next competitor only bids it for $1 for that keyword. You only need to pay $1.1 to beat the competitor. However, if a competitor bids higher, $3 per click for that keyword, their ad will be shown above yours.
However, it is competitive, risky, and a business can spend a lot of money, get a lot of visits, but end up with very few actual sales.
PPC is expensive, but if you don’t do it, you lose to your competitors, here is WHY?
In fact, PPC will be a form of marketing that brings many benefits if you understand it well and know how to distribute it properly.
Cost-effective
Although you need to set aside a budget for bidding and “bet” that it is reasonable enough for your ad to appear on the platforms. However, pay-per-click advertising saves you time compared to SEO or blog posts and significantly reduces costs compared to other forms of advertising such as television or print newspapers.
With pay-per-click advertising, you also have the flexibility to adjust your budget accordingly. You can set a budget and choose the initial amount you want to spend. Later, if the results are positive, you can also scale up quickly or turn off ineffective ads to save costs.
Quick results
Pay per click will be very suitable for those of you who have no knowledge of SEO, or simply do not want to wait when running a campaign in a short period of time, such as selling seasonal products, events,... When your audience searches through keywords similar to your business, your ad will be shown up above the organic search results and shown as (Ad)URL on the SERPs. Moreover, PPC ads are not affected by Google’s algorithm.
PPC is probably the fastest way to run an advertising campaign and get immediate results. Pay-per-click allows you to quickly set up campaigns, create ads, and reach potential customers. As a result, pay-per-click advertising campaigns also show results faster, which can be: increased traffic, increased conversion rates or high ROI (return rate) from campaigns.
Easy to monitor and control
You can track how your ad campaign is performing: how many impressions, click-through rate (CTR), web traffic or conversion rate, etc. From the statistics, you can evaluate whether PPC advertising has really worked and what needs to be improved.
For better results, you can conduct split (A/B) testing with different contents, ad images, and bidding. The results from this test tell you which ads will get the most traffic to expand or pause.
Reach the right audience
When running a PPC campaign you choose where and when your ads will appear based on a number of factors including keywords, location, website, device, time and date, and more. All these optional elements allow you to segment the market into small groups and bring the product/service to the right target audience.
For example, if you own a flower shop, you can set your ads to appear around the holidays, when your audience is most likely to be pursuing a show of their love. You may even target a local audience if you have one location in the city center by choosing a mile radius restriction from your site.
And let’s dive into PPC advertising by investigating “How to set up a PPC advertising?
Determine your goal
Being successful in PPC advertising means setting the right goals. You should determine from the beginning what you want to achieve after completing this work to have the right direction and preparation. For PPC, you need to know what this tool gives you and whether the company really needs it to avoid the case of following the trend without understanding the essence. Furthermore, you need to determine where you want your ad to be in order to bid.
Create a campaign
After defining the goal, you need to create an account on Google Adwords. A campaign consists of different ad groups, each with a corresponding keyword and bid. To create an effective campaign, we need help from tools:
- Landing page: is the website you want users to visit when they view and click on your ad. When designing, you should refer to the F-shaped pattern so that visitors can see the characteristics of the website.
- Ad: is a specific ad that will be shown to the user; usually includes the title, path, description, extension information,…
- Keyword: keyword research is important to know that we’re running the “right word at the right time” in our campaign.
- Remarketing: When users show interest in a product by clicking but not taking any further action, these people will be included in the “remarketing” list.
Every time there is an ad position on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), an instant auction takes place for the keyword. Auctions start when someone searches for something on a search engine; businesses can purchase listings in search engine results, which display alongside non-paid organic search results. In fact, the position is auctioned off by Google. If a company bids the most, they receive a chance to be ranked first.
To participate in these auctions, businesses use accounts on platforms like Google Ads to set up their ads and determine where and when they want those ads to appear.
Manage PPC advertising, analyze and compare to KPI
After a period of running PPC, we need to adjust to fit the budget. What we need to pay attention to is:
Which ad groups are bringing in the most customers, or which ad groups have been underperforming in the past to increase or decrease bids accordingly?
If you’re always showing in the first position, but the results aren’t improving, it won’t help even if you increase your bids.
You also can use Google Analytics to help track, measure, analyze, and report visits, time-to-stay, website response rates, and take appropriate improvement solutions.
And most importantly, remember that: “When writing PPC advertisements, first, ask yourself – why should anyone click it?”
Conclusion
PPC is an effective form of advertising that helps bring traffic quickly and increases the ability to generate conversions for businesses.
To do a pay-per-click advertising campaign effectively, you need to have a good understanding of PPC, delivering campaigns to the “right people at the right time”. There are several forms of PPC advertising from which to pick and apply for the greatest outcomes. If you master how to do PPC correctly, it will bring a huge advantage to your business in terms of both revenue and brand.
Author: Le Hong Hoai
This article is in a series of a mentorship project that I am collaborating with students from business schools. They will be guided to write about a topic in Marketing they are interested in, and I will coach as well as proof-read and edit. If you are a student and wants to collaborate, please write to me at yennhi.tr.writing@gmail.com.