How to Make the Most of Your PPC Marketing Campaign

The potential of your brand to be seen by millions of individuals worldwide is enormous, and it requires only a small amount of time to get the job done. The immense power of pay-per-click advertising is phenomenal, allowing for a vast and widespread audience to be reached and certain demographics to be targeted.

How can you make the most of it?

It has been said that paying for advertisements can increase your business revenue by $2 for every $1 invested, but if not executed correctly you can quickly lose money.

Here is an introduction to pay-per-click marketing to ensure you’re doing it correctly.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing?

Pay-per-click is a common advertising model in internet marketing. It affords companies the opportunity to advertise on search engines, social media, and external sites, and they are required to pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad.

Google is by far the greatest supplier of PPC services, having made an estimated $134 billion from advertising. Those starting out with PPC marketing usually begin by using Google Ads as their go-to platform.

How Much is PPC Advertising?

You need to be aware of the expense associated with any advertising investment you make. With PPC, this is a little complicated.

Promoting on the web isn’t similar to placing a promotion in a magazine, where you pay a fee and you get a full-page spread. Rather than doing it for free, when you use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you are only charged when you get the desired outcome (like someone clicking through on your ad).

No matter the outcome, when you opt for offline promotion, you usually end up paying a flat rate. With PPC, you have more capability to determine the true cost of each person who has become engaged.

This plays out through an auction system. Rather than a typical auction, there is not a single item with one victor- you are offering on how often and how high up your advertisement could be seen. Not being selected as the winner of the auction does not mean that you will not receive PPC space, just that you will get less.

When someone searches for a particular term, for example “PPC Marketing”, Google scans all its advertisers for the word and launches a bidding process among them. Google’s programming will decide which advertisements to show based on the price that the advertiser is willing to pay and the excellence of the ad.

The primary lesson from this is that your willingness to pay is not the only factor at play. The excellence of your advertisement greatly influences the outcome.

In other words, if your top bid is not realistic, then your ads will not be seen enough to make it worth the investment. The average expense per click for different key phrases should dictate your bidding method.

Utilizing resources such as Ubersuggest and Google Ads Keyword Planner can give you a better understanding of the projected price of your advertisements, and should be included in your keyword investigation.

Is PPC Marketing Right for My Company?

Pay-per-click advertising has its advantages and drawbacks, just as any other type of promotion does. It is preferable for your business to employ PPC as a component of an overall digital promotion plan to exploit its strengths and discount its flaws.

Pros of PPC Marketing

Immediate results: As soon as your ads are approved, they will reach your target audience.
Highly targeted: You can be extremely specific about who sees your ads.
Easy to track: You can quickly track the success of your campaign and measure your ROI.
Potentially huge exposure: Paid ads are prominently displayed, with the potential to reach a virtually unlimited number of people.

Cons of PPC Marketing

Costly long-term option: You have to pay for every click, leaving you in the hands of advertising pricing. If you do this for months or years, it’ll add up.
Not building an asset: When you invest in content marketing or building an email list, you’re creating an asset you own. With PPC, your success is reliant on continued ad spend.

My digital marketing firm puts together an all-inclusive digital marketing strategy intended to bring success to your business. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has some great perks, however, you still need other strategic marketing measures in place in order to be successful.

PPC isn’t a replacement for organic SEO. Both should work hand-in-hand, putting a significant amount of effort into organic activities because those results do not involve any costs.

Six Steps to Starting a PPC Marketing Campaign

Beginning your initial PPC advertising endeavor may unexpectedly appear to be quite easy – you can be done in only six steps. It is important to emphasize that the quality of your advertisements is highly influential in the outcome of your campaign, so make certain to put sufficient effort and attention into each step.

1. Figure Out Your PPC Budget

What is your budget for your pay-per-click advertising?

At first, it is essential to establish a financial plan in order to try out the market. Using industry benchmarks as an approximation, you can estimate how much it will cost per conversion.

Once you have established the overall amount you wish to spend, set maximum limits for how much can be spent in one day and over the lifetime of the campaigns.

Having a budget for your PPC campaign is critically essential since it will have a major effect on how effective your advertisements are. Google Ads provides some excellent resources that will help you achieve the best possible results, and heeding Google’s advice is worthwhile since its algorithms are designed to produce the most advantageous outcome for you.

You can get a guess of how many clicks you can possibly receive with your budget. Using your expected conversion rate, you can evaluate the likely return on your investment.

If your financial plan won’t permit you to get outpourings of a more significant amount, you may want to consider some other ways of promotion.

2. Define your goals

Figuring out what you hope to accomplish with PPC is likely the key component of constructing an efficient campaign plan. Today, there are many various PPC targeting selections within Adwords, as well as outside of it. Figuring out what you want to achieve will help you select the platforms and kinds of ads that suit your marketing objectives.

Consider these common PPC goals:

Increase site traffic
Generate leads
Drive sales
Raise brand awareness

If your focus is on making your brand well-known, then utilizing social media and displaying ads are the ideal tactics to achieve that. If your main focus is increasing sales, the majority of your PPC funds should be invested in either search engine or Product Listing Ads. If creating leads is your main goal, you can consider utilizing Facebook lead capture ads.

A refined Pay-per-Click plan incorporates different ad types and outlets in order to aim its viewers. Ben Wood, a digital marketer, has some practical tips for apportioning money between search and social advertisements: 4 Sophisticated AdWords Audience Targeting Tactics.

Figure out your main objectives and rank them in order of importance, then use this data to decide which social media services and ad varieties you ought to be putting money into.

3. Audience targeting

In this article, we will look at how to use AdWords PPC and social media to effectively reach your intended audience. Choosing which advertising options to invest in will depend on the kind of audience you are aiming to reach and where they are in the process of making a purchase.

AdWords audience targeting

The way to make the most of AdWords audience targeting is not simply by choosing the most fitting keywords associated with your venture, but rather by targeting on the basis of intention. You should ensure that the target words you bid on, the advertisements shown, and the landing pages people are sent to are in line with the stage of the sales funnel that individuals are in.

PPC traditional knowledge tells us there are three main categories of search intent keywords:

Transactional — searchers want to make a purchase
Informational — searchers want to learn more about something
Navigational — searchers want to get to a certain page or resource

At this time, it is not practical or feasible for many companies to aim for all kinds of keyword combinations in their pay-per-click marketing campaigns. Which ones you prioritize should be dependent on the kind of business you are running and other promotional tactics you are employing. For example:

An eCommerce business should invest largely in transactional keywords to encourage conversions.
A service-based business may invest more in informational keywords to boost its content marketing strategy.
A SaaS or app developer could invest more in navigational keywords to improve user experience.

Certainly, optimizing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is not the only focus area. There are several other types of audiences you can target on the Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail:

Affinity audiences: Audience targeting to expand the reach of TV ad campaigns. Create custom affinity audiences using URLs, types of places, and keyword phrases to define interest categories.
In-market audiences: Reach audiences who are actively researching products or services like yours. Usually, these people are at the bottom of the sales funnel and are ready to convert.
Life events: Reach audiences on YouTube and Gmail based on important life events like graduating from college, getting married, and moving to a new home.
Custom intent audiences: Create custom audience categories based on keywords and URLs related to what your ideal audience is researching across the web. Adwords can use machine learning technology to analyze and create these for you.
Remarketing: Reach people who’ve already engaged with your company’s products and services.

4. Optimize your landing pages

If you are aiming to use multiple keywords, it can be difficult to generate a bespoke, optimized page for each advertisement. However, spending money on ads to direct people to unchanging product pages or landing pages isn’t a good use of funds. Visitors to a site have a lessened capacity to become customers, and also their activity on the website can cause Quality Scores to drop, making it hard to reach out to them through PPC.

Successful PPC managers understand the importance of both correctly targeting their audience as well as optimizing the landing page for maximum conversion. The higher the connection that a landing page has to the user’s original search goal or the interests of an individual demographic, the more probable it is that someone will carry out an action such as clicking through, registering, or even buying something.

5. Create your ads

Once you’ve got the target demographic determined and the appropriate landing pages set up, you can begin to make and refine your advertising.

The ads you create serve as the connection between the people who are looking for something and the pages you have already improved. The intention is to provide a concise representation of your distinctive advantage and be of benefit. You should try using different words, pictures, components, and additional features to make your ads as effective as possible.

You can create ad variations in AdWords in order to examine various headlines, requests to act, extensions, and other components. Make your own tests by copying ads then using locate and substitute to switch around words and elements. Make sure you have switched on ad rotation in the Advanced options, and Adwords will detect the best performing advertising versions for you progressively. Change the settings so that the ad with the best performance is automatically favored.

6. Analyze and optimize your PPC campaign strategy

It is beneficial to include optimization in your ad production process if the proper tools are employed. The emphasis of your investigation should be to determine which keywords and advertising features will be most likely to bring about the desired results of your promotional campaign.

On a basic level, here are important metrics to consider for search, display, and/or social ads (depending on your campaign goals):

Click-through rate (CTR): Can help you determine how relevant the content of your ads is to your keyword or audience targeting for social or display.
Conversion rate: A low conversion rate could be an indication that your ad spend is better suited for higher-performing keywords.
Cost per click (CPC): How much are you willing to pay to get the attention of a member of your audience? That would be your ideal CPC.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): This can indicate how competitive your keyword is, and whether it’s worthwhile to invest in it given the profit margin from conversions.
Quality Score (For Adwords): This metric is an aggregate of the effectiveness of a variety of factors, including ad relevance, landing page relevance, and click-through rate.
Return on ad spend (ROAS): This is a bottom-line metric that evaluates the effectiveness of ad spend overall at driving financial goals.

If you are aiming to nurture leads, you may find it important to measure engagement on your website such as the amount of page views, if the visitors are newcomers or returning.

Conclusion

An amazing way to quickly reach a particularly chosen group of people is through pay-per-click advertising. It is quite simple to use services such as Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to create paid advertisements quickly. After being given authorization, depending on the amount of money you are willing to spend, these items may be observed by huge numbers of individuals.

It is imperative to establish contact with your intended audience in marketing, however, it is more crucial to know what to do once you have their attention. It is important that you put effort into your paid campaigns or hire an agency to do it for you.

When you locate the proper equilibrium with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and adjust your advertisements to the highest possible standards, it can deliver an awesome comeback on your expenses and be a critical portion of your digital marketing strategy.