If you are brand new to the field of digital marketing, one of the first concepts you are likely to encounter is pay per click advertising, also known as PPC advertising. But what exactly is pay per click advertising?
The concept is pretty simple: as the name suggests, a business sets up an arrangement with a website whereby the business pays every time a user clicks on the advertisement. Pay per click advertising generally takes the form of sponsored links that are placed on the pages of a search engine. In order to be competitive, companies need to first determine the keywords and search terms that are most relevant to their business. At that point, in order to appear near the top of the search engine results, a company has to place a bid on their desired keywords and search terms. Companies with the highest bids will get a better placement for their sponsored links, in other words the higher the bid, the better the rank will be.
Notably, one of the key components of pay per click advertising is the fact that a business only gets charged money when an individual actually clicks on one of the business’s sponsored links.
At this point you might be feeling skeptical. You might be thinking, “Wouldn’t it hurt a business to have to cough up money every time someone clicks on a link? Does appearing higher in search engine results even make a difference?” The short answer to the first question is that pay per click advertising is a marketing strategy that weighs the cost of placing ads against the potential benefits of improved business. As for the second question, search engine results really do matter and probably a lot more than you might guess.
Read on for some concrete tips and tricks to help you master PPC advertising and incorporate this approach into your company’s digital marketing strategies.
As I mentioned earlier, if this is your first time encountering the concept of pay per click advertising, you might be feeling a bit suspicious. You might be wondering if it is really worth it to pay for sponsored links just to improve your rankings on Google.
One of the first essentials of a solid PPC advertising and marketing strategy is to establish clear purpose. If you want to employ PPC advertising as your newest marketing strategy, you need to know why you are doing it and how it can help you attain your business goals.
Two of the most common purposes for establishing a pay per click advertising campaign are to sell a product or to boost your website’s traffic. However, these are not the only reasons to undertake a PPC campaign. Some other possible purposes include:
- Creating “geo-targeted ads”: Geo-targeted ads enable you to choose wherein the world you want your ads to appear and where you don’t want them to appear. For instance, if your company is a small local business in New Zealand, you probably want to prioritise attracting consumers from within your own country. If, on the other hand, your company is a large international brand, you will want to appeal to a much more extensive advertising “audience.”
- Scheduling your advertisements: Believe it or not, pay per click advertising allows you to determine both where your ads appear as well as PPC allows you to set ads that will appear during your company’s working hours and disappear during non work hours.
- Tracking your results: Another key benefit of using PPC advertising in your marketing strategy is the fact that you can keep a record of the outcome of each keyword advertisement campaign that you initiate. In part, this means that you can determine which keywords are the most and least effective so that you can adjust your campaign accordingly.
These are only a few of the reasons that companies choose to use PPC marketing strategies; as you can probably tell, pay per click ads offer a number of different possibilities. For this reason, pay per click advertising has only grown in popularity in recent years. More and more companies are beginning to recognise its versatility and the many other benefits that it has to offer.
However, in addition to the many opportunities that PPC offers, there are also a few points of caution for those who are beginners to pay per click advertising. Firstly, although PPC is a straightforward idea, be aware that implementing a pay per click advertising campaign is not nearly as simple as it sounds. Generally, you would be better served by finding an experienced professional to help you than by trying to take on PPC campaigns all by yourself.
On the same note, secondly, you need to make sure you understand that PPC is not a singleperson effort. If you truly want to build a successful digital marketing strategy, you need to be willing to work with others. With the help of an experienced PPC campaign manager, designing your new marketing strategy will be a much more manageable experience, and a collaborative approach gives you a far better chance of success than trying to do everything yourself.
Finally if you think PPC is a quick, easy solution to your company’s advertising problems, you should think again. If you want your pay per click advertising strategy to be genuinely effective, you need to be willing to take a longer term view. As long as you are willing to put in the time and effort necessary to set up and maintain an ongoing PPC campaign, incorporating pay per click advertising into your digital marketing strategy is a choice that can have a lot of advantages for your company!
Think a pay per click advertising company would be right for you but not sure about the next step? Read our next post, “The First Steps to a Successful PPC Advertising Campaign,” to figure out how to get started on the road to a new and improved marketing strategy!
We at Vivere Marketing are Google Premier Partners, which indicates we’re up to date with the latest digital marketing strategies, especially PPC. Contact us today for free quote!
