What is Pay Per Click Marketing? Everything You should Know in 2021
Pay Per Click marketing may sound like a fancy and complicated concept to fresh unfamiliar minds. But we all have seen Pay Per Click models. We have all generated income to Google and other search engines through PPC.
In simple words, Pay Per Click is a form of Internet marketing in which the advertiser will pay a certain fee every time their ads get clicked. In this article, we’ll dig deep into the PPC model, how it works, and how you can deploy it for your marketing campaigns.
Pay Per Click Marketing – What Is It?
Ideally, when you have a product/service, you’d put your content out there, and you’ll get organic traffic from the search results. Notice the word ideally. In reality, your content will be buried by the established brands/pages.
You can research what the people want, start building your content around it, understand and apply SEO techniques to get organic traffic. But it is a long process. To boost instant reach, you can do paid marketing, and the Pay Per Click model is one of them.
Before we jump into how PPC works, there is one other term we should familiarise with.
Search Engine Marketing
Pay Per Click marketing (PPC) is often used interchangeably with Search Engine Marketing(SEM). A few say PPC is a part of SEM, and a few believe in vice versa. SEM denotes a broader array of marketing techniques we can use, and PPC is one of them.
Even Though we use the umbrella term ‘Search Engine,’ more than 90% of the global searches happen through Google.
How does Pay Per Click Marketing work?
When you search for something on Google, you might have noticed a few ads that appear above the organic results. If you search for book recommendations, a bookstore’s ad might pop up. You may not have even heard about the bookstore before, but because of the ad, now you get to know about the store.
Now think about this from the perspective of a seller.
For example, if you’re a high-end handbag seller, you can bid for placing your product on the search results page as an advertisement. Hence, whenever someone searches for high-end handbags, your website will come above the organic results.
Why does it matter?
Because the top 5 results on the first page of the search results get more than 95% of the web traffic. The first search result gets more than 60-70% of the web traffic. The reality is, if you’re not in those 5 results, you’ll not even get any traffic.
By running a PPC campaign for your product, you can place your ads above the organic results for a price. Yes, it’d cost us. Let’s say if it costs $10 for one click, but the visitor buys $1000 worth of your product, you get a massive profit. This is the attraction and the selling point behind Pay Per Click Marketing.
Creating Pay Per Click Campaigns
The above-mentioned PPC campaign sounds very simple and straightforward, right? If so, everyone could create their PPC campaign, place their product on the top, and get traffic. In reality, it is a complex process.
There is a lot of research that goes behind creating a PPC campaign- in which selecting the keyword is an important process. The keywords connect our product/services to our customers. The keywords should be thoroughly researched before assembling it into the campaign.
Google Ads
As we mentioned above, Google dominates the search engine traffic. Google Ads is a platform to do our PPC campaigns on Google’s search engine and other Google properties.
Let’s take the example of the High-end handbags. If you’re creating a PPC campaign for the handbags, you’ve to find the relevant keywords people use to search for the handbags. You’ll compile a list of keywords with decent search volume, create a campaign, and bid for placing your product on the top.
But so do multiple handbag sellers out there. They’d all want their product to come first. To determine who gets to be on the ad results, Google follows a rank system called Ad Rank. Ad Rank is calculated by multiplying CPC bid and Quality Score.
CPC Bid – The highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend.
Quality Score – Calculated from 3 components: Relevance of your ad, Landing page’s quality and experience, and Expected Clickthrough rate (CTR).
CTR – The ratio between the clicks you get to your ad and the number of times your ad has been shown. A high CTR indicates that your ad is relevant and helpful.
Keywords – To improve your Pay Per Click marketing campaign
Keywords play a paramount role in the success of PPC campaigns. They are directly linked to the quality score. The better your keywords are, it’ll influence your relevance.
Compiling Keywords
Also, keywords are the only bridge that connects your product with a potential lead. Hence, you’ve to compile valuable, long-tail, low cost, expansive, and highly relevant keywords.
- Many make the mistake of selecting only the popular and frequently searched keywords. To keep the competition out and win the bid, your list should also include more specific and less common keywords. By selecting the less competitive keywords, you can reduce the expense of your campaign.
- Make sure you don’t stuff keywords in your ad groups. Splitting ad groups into a smaller, relevant group increases the CTR and thereby increases your quality score.
- When creating a PPC campaign, add negative keywords too. It’ll help the search engine to narrow your target audience and reduce your operating cost.
Compiling a keywords list doesn’t end here. It is not a one-time process. It should be monitored regularly.
Tracking Keywords
The significant benefit of running a PPC campaign is that you can track its effectiveness. You can know the impact of every individual keyword. After that, you can remove the non-performing/under-performing expensive keywords to decrease your operating cost. You can expand your list by adding new keywords and check its effectiveness.
Also, you should constantly be refining the quality of your landing pages, improving the user interface and customer experience.
To Conclude
Creating a PPC campaign is not one-time work you do and move on. If you’re not cautious, it’ll drain your marketing budget without any results to show for. Especially when you’re someone starting out, you should do detailed keywords research and constantly update the list as per its performance. The learning doesn’t stop here. You should constantly update yourself about the recent changes and trends to keep you on top of the results page.
