What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising. Pay-Per-Click advertising is a form of online advertising where you are charged each time someone clicks on the online ad that you have created, hence the name. These ads are designed to drive internet traffic to your website and can be used to build brand awareness or drive leads and purchases. It is a great digital marketing strategy for reaching new customers and even bring website users back to your site, by allowing you access to a large audience. The most popular platforms for PPC are Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Facebook Ads, however within this blog post, we will be focusing on just Google Ads due to the search volume and the potential for growth and great return on investment.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads is Google’s online advertising program that allows you to create ads to target prospective customers during their purchase journey through various formats. Your ads can show in various formats such as search, shopping, display and video, with all these formats being an effective way of driving traffic to your site and increasing conversions.
Types of Campaigns
Search Ads
Search Ads are test ads that will appear on top or below search results. During the process of creating ads, you should compile a list of keywords that are relevant to your business and that you wish to appear in search ads for. One you have your keyword list; you can then manually choose a bid so that your keyword can be entered into the action. This bid plus your quality score is then taken into consideration to determine your Cost Per Click and where your ad shows in the search results.
Display Ads
The Google Display Network is the world’s largest network for visual ads and places these forms of ads on over 2 million websites, as well as on Google’s own websites including YouTube and Gmail. This huge network reaches an estimated 90% of internet users and this percentage is only set to grow even further in the future. Using display advertising gives you the potential to reach relevant online customers and gives you the chance to reconnect with potential customers who may have left your website without converting.
Shopping Ads
Shopping Ads also appear within Google Search Results and are based on keywords. You can run a shopping campaign through Google Merchant Centre, where you can create a catalogue of products that you wish to display for. These ads appear at the top of Google Search Results and show an image of the product with your product name, brand, price, and customer ratings. These types of ads tend to have the best ROIs with a shorter purchase journey.
Video Ads
YouTube advertising, done via Google Ads, is video advertising that are placed on various ad blocks on the website. Using YouTube to advertise allows you to reach potential customers and have them interact with your brand while they are engaged and watching videos on YouTube. Plus, you only must pay when they interact with your video or show an interest in your brand by watching at least 30 seconds of your video.
Why You Should Be Using It
Measurable & Trackable
You can easily track the results of your PPC campaigns through the Google Ads Manager and Google Analytics in a way that you would be unable to do with traditional marketing. You can analyse the results that contribute to your KPIs such as clicks, Click-Through-Rate, Conversions and Return on investment. You can also see how your campaigns are spending and how this aligns with the marketing budget you have set out. You will have the ability to understand competitive metrics and see how you compare to your main competitors and see how users are interacting with your landing pages.
Achieves Your Business Goals Quickly
PPC is great because it allows for quick entry into the market once you understand how to optimise your campaigns and how to bid competitively. It has a low entry barrier, and many businesses find it easy to adapt. It is also great to set up PPC campaigns while working on your SEO and improve on your whole digital marketing strategy.
Flexibility & Control
You have multiple ways of reaching your target audience based on the format of ad you choose, you have flexibility of what keywords you choose to bid on, how much you choose to bid and what budget you use. You also have the option to quickly change bids, budgets as well as the ability to add more keywords to expand targeting or pause keywords. You can also choose negative keywords to ensure your ads are appearing exactly where you want them. You can even completely pause campaigns if you feel like you need to rethink your strategy.
A Complete Digital Marketing Strategy
As mentioned above, PPC and SEO work well together, and being able to do them both allow you to have a complete digital marketing strategy so you can reach people exactly where they are on the internet. A complete digital marketing strategy allows you to guide your customers through their purchase journey.
Gain Marketing Data & Optimise
Adopting PPC into your digital marketing strategy allows you to gain a valuable insight into how your customers act on the internet. You can see exactly what they are searching, what ads they are more likely to click on and how they react to your landing pages. Based on this data, you can easily optimise your campaigns to enable your paid marketing to get the best possible results.