What is PPC in Digital Marketing, and How to Use It?

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is one of the conventional digital marketing methods that involves advertisers paying a small amount every time an advertisement is clicked. In layman’s terms, the advertisement owner only pays a fee if a viewer clicks on the ad.

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This is a simple method that is essentially a way of paying for visits of viewers to your web application and driving organic visits to it. PPCs are most commonly used in search engine advertising enabling advertisers to pay for ad placement in sponsored links of any search engine. 

If a viewer looks for a certain keyword specific to a business’s offerings, the advertisement might appear at the top of the search engine’s result page. Although approximately 45% of most small and medium businesses do some form of digital marketing, PPC is still a concept that most elude.

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Any marketer must acquire the skill of PPC in digital marketing or at least have a basic understanding of the concept. 

Main elements of pay-per-click advertising:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): The main goal of all these advertising forms is to rank for a specific target word, a keyword. This target word is searched for in multiple ways, and it refers to any form of digital marketing done on common search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. SEM is an umbrella term composed of search engine advertising (SEO) and paid advertising that solely depends on the target word, aka keyword. It is important to know that PPCs are also on social media platforms.

2. Cost-per-click (CPC): It refers to the fee paid by the advertiser for each click. It poses as a bid in an auction determining where the advertisement will be placed, where a  higher bid is equal to better advertisement placement. The fee paid is determined by the formula: 

       CPC= (Competitor’s Ad Rank/ Current Quality Score)+0.01

       Where: Ad rank= Highest Bid x Quality Score

       Quality Score: Determined by your clickthrough rate on the search engine or               social media platform.

3. Cost per Mile (CPM): Commonly known as cost per thousand, it is mainly used for paid display and social ads for a thousand impressions. 

4. Keywords: These are target words that each advertisement within your group of ads contains. These words play a vital role as the search engines are guided by these words or queries containing these words that, in turn, determine where your ad is placed alongside in the SERPs. Based on the performance of these target keywords, a micro CPC can be set specifically within those ads. 

5. Landing page: It forms an integral part of the paid advertising strategy as a spot for users to end up once they click on your advertisement. Irrespective of being a dedicated web page or homepage, it is vital to follow the best practices for maximizing conversions using the landing page as the foundation.

6. Campaign: This is the initial step of setting up your PPC ad. Campaigns work on a key message or theme that should be communicated to the target when the ad is placed and viewed on the search engine or social media platform.

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Advantageous behavior of PPC ads

1. Quick positive results: If you are looking at marketing strategies that produce immediate results to amp up your business, PPCs are the way to go. They provide quick, efficient, and immediate results.
2. Flexibility and stability: This form of advertising is extremely stable and is not affected by changes in algorithms or processes, making it reliable.
3. Cost-effective: This is a cheap and effective marketing strategy as you do not pay unless clicked on. 
4. Other elements: PPC ads provide data that helps improve SEO strategy due to the target keyword technique while simultaneously improving the domain ranks.
5. Brand awareness and ideal targets: PPCs help you build credibility while improving your rank, thus placing your advertisement more often. They also skip irrelevant audiences and target your probable customers.

How to build your PPC campaign?

There are no specific steps to build your ad campaign. However, there are a few elements that you might have to pay extra attention to while creating an effective paid search marketing strategy:

Setting parameters

Without initial parameters, the ad might risk being untargeted or ineffective. The idea of these ads is to put your business strategy into context. This is why it is important to understand and pay attention to the details while setting up a campaign. The ads must generally encompass: 

• Your target audience
• Theme or design of the campaign
• Method of measuring your success
• Type of campaign that must be run to serve your purpose

Establishing goals and goal metrics

Generally defined by organizations, PPC goals often include: 

• Lead generation: An outcome of having an engaging and relevant landing page. 
• Brand awareness: Determined by your brand’s familiarity with your target audience. The engagement can easily be determined by social engagement surveys, traffic rate, etc.
• Site traffic: This is essentially the most important goal of PPC. It strives to drive traffic to your website, which helps in maximizing conversions.
• Sales: This is the intended outcome of PPCs. The number of products sold determines the sale rate, influenced by the engaging content of the PPCs.

Choosing a campaign type

Apart from knowing where to advertise, it is crucial to know how to advertise. The type of campaign used is based on the needs of the organization. Here are some of the most common types:

• Display ads: Posting advertisements on external websites and social media platforms that are generally image-based ads.
• Search ads: These are text-based advertisements that show up on search engines. These are the most common types of ad campaigns.
• Remarketing: The ad type utilizes a list of contacts or cookies to target people who have engaged with the organization previously.
• Social: This mainly refers to advertisements on different social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Perform keyword research

The selection of keywords is a tedious yet essential task as it determines ad placement on the search engine. Ensure that the selected keywords are streamlined with the theme chosen.

Setting up Google Analytics 

This is a free bonus and could immensely help you. This is a special tool that provides insights into the website’s performance and its interactions. This data can also be used beyond the use of PPCs.

Best practices for managing your PPCs

Google Analytics tool and tracking can assist your PPC campaign in managing its effectiveness and influence. Regular activity of the organization’s account is one of the best ways to predict success. Continuous analysis of your performance and adjustments helps keep your campaigns effective. Here are a few things that can help manage your pay-per-click advertising strategies:

• Addition of negative keywords: Enables you to stay relevant while reducing wasted spending.
• Review of target keywords: It is vital to continuously review them and shut off expensive ones if necessary using the review option, which does charge a few.
• Refining and adjusting landing pages: Modification can only help improve the landing page. It keeps the audience hooked, possible only through several amendments.
• Split ad groups: Quality scores and CTR can be improved by distributing your ad group into smaller fragments as they help create more targeted landing pages.

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Getting started with PPCs

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