What is PPC – Learn the Basics of Pay-Per-Click Marketing
It goes without saying that search engine marketing is an excellent method to get the word out about your business. Today within this article we will outline the uses and benefits of using PPC marketing, otherwise known as pay per click advertising. It doesn’t matter if you are a complete rookie of this advertising technique as this article will outline the basics, giving you enough information to help take your PPC marketing to the next level.
How to use PPC Advertising and maximise its strengths as an online marketing tool.
So how exactly does pay per click advertising work? Well to put it simply, every time your advert is clicked it sends the visitor to your website, you pay the search engine for each click, essentially you’re paying for visits to your website.
One of the most used forms of PPC marketing is search engine advertising, this works by putting your website at the top of the page of Google, Bing, Yahoo or whichever search engine you have decided to advertise with. The price you pay depends on several factors, keyword phrases you select, position on the page you want to be placed, Global, National or Local visibility (Geo Targeting). You will be bidding on your chosen selected keyword phrases against other companies who may also want to be placed for those keywords.
Once you have decided on the keyword phrases for which you want to be found, you will need to sign up with one of the online advertising companies in order to setup a PPC campaign, once signed up you will have access to see the prices of keyword phrases, the competition for those phrases and other important factors needed to run a successful campaign.
One of the most widely used search engine advertising platforms is Google Ads, within a google ads campaign you have the ability to set multiple parameters such as how much your daily spend limit should be, which position you would like to be placed on the page, which times of the day or night you would like your campaign to run and which geographical location you would like your adverts to be shown.
Examples of Geographical Locations
Global (Worldwide), National (Across a whole Country), Local (within a specified distance from your location) This is only a basic example, you could of course select areas by County, State or Region, depending on where you are located in the World. As you can see there are many areas that must be addressed in order to create a successful PPC marketing campaign, not forgetting of course the most important factor of any pay per click campaign, selecting the correct keyword phrases for your business. It’s a good idea to check search volumes for the phrases your looking to purchase for your pay per click campaign and to compare advertising prices in google adwords for the phrases you want to run.
Finding longer tailed keyword phrases that have reasonable search volumes in general have a better success rate in converting than singular or generic keyword phrases, you may need to get creative in finding and selecting keyword phrases that will bring not only quality traffic, but a higher conversion rate, in general the longer the keyword phrase the higher the conversion rate and the cheaper the bid price, see example below.
Example for selecting a longer keyword focused phrase over a single or double generic kw phrase
A Singular generic word could be Car, most searchers looking for a car would be looking for a specific make and model, let’s say a web searcher is looking for a Honda Civic Estate, Diesel 5 door, this would be an example of a long tail keyword phrase, if the customer is specifically looking for this type of make and model car, chances are higher of converting the customer into a buyer. If you have advertised this focused phrase and the visitor clicks the ad in google, it’s more likely that the customer will spend time viewing these details on your website.
The price for this longer tail keyword phrase may be cheaper than a single or double generic phrase which is less likely to have enough information for the customer to find exactly what they are looking for. The more obscure and focused a phrase is the cheaper it will be using pay per click, although it may have a smaller volume of search traffic as opposed to a word such as car, the chances of converting the customer into a buyer are much higher.
You may consider setting up specialised pay per click call to action landing pages that are perfectly optimised in order to convert as many visitors into paying customers. You can reduce your spend on a PPC campaign by creating focused content that is both useful and interesting for your user. Making your ad focused and relevant will certainly help increase conversion rates for your campaigns
Ultimately what you are looking for is to bring visitors to your site who actually want what you are selling, this will increase the conversions and give you a larger return on Investment (ROI), more sales, more profits.
Understanding how PPC marketing works and doing it correctly can mean the difference between failure and success.
Once you have a PPC campaign in place you can place hundreds of phrases into a campaign and monitor which ones have the best results, thus fine tuning your campaign for a better overall conversion rate