Pay per click advertising has a steep learning curve. This can be a nasty wake up call for some marketers that enter the PPC world with little-or-no planning or strategy in place. The lucky ones break even, but some lose money in the beginning.
This leads to a belief that the potential profit margins are very thin. This is not true.
PPC is a great method for growing your business, but you have to overcome this learning curve. Whether you’ve just created an account on Google Ads, or you’ve tried your hand at PPC before, but came up empty (or worse), you’re in the right place.
The objective of this content is to help you understand how pay per click advertising benefits businesses and what sort of strategies you need to be aware of and implement in your own PPC campaigns.
Table of Contents
Let’s Start With The Benefits
Before we get into how to use pay per click advertising, let’s first discuss why you want to invest the time, energy and money into mastering this digital marketing strategy. How does PPC help a business grow?
More Valuable Website Visitors
Some companies neglect PPC because they feel that their sites receive plenty of organic traffic, which means they don’t need paid traffic. However, the two traffic types are not the same.
When a Google user clicks a PPC ad result, it’s because they have the intention to act. They want whatever offer is displayed, and they want it now. These search users have already done the research, the product comparisons and all of the other activities that your organic traffic is performing. These are individuals at the end of the funnel that are ready to convert.
In short, PPC traffic is much more valuable and shouldn’t be ignored. With more qualified leads entering your site, you’ll gain more new customers and generate more revenue.
Fast And Measurable Results
As soon as you publish your first pay per click ad and the campaign goes live, you’ll start seeing results. Compared to SEO and other strategies that can take weeks and weeks to show positive results, this is Superman-level speed.
In many ways, PPC ads are the fast-track to the top of the results pages.
And, it’s also incredibly measurable. Google Ads does an excellent job of lifting the veil on what’s going on in each of your campaigns and ad groups. You always have data available to measure your ROI and see how you might be able to improve margins.
Versatile
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that PPC is just for product-focused ecommerce businesses. If you gain value from website visitors, pay per click advertising can grow your business. You can attach any desired action to your PPC campaigns, whether it is subscribing, buying, attending, booking, calling or otherwise.
Pay per click platforms offer a lot of useful campaign features that help target local audiences. This means that you can turn your paid website traffic into in-person visits. And, you can even retarget past website visitors with new, relevant offers.
There’s a lot you can do with pay per click advertising!
How To Use Pay Per Click Advertising Successfully
Now that we’ve explored the why, it is time to shift attention to answering the how. How can pay per click advertising be used effectively to grow a business?
There’s a lot of different parts to a successful PPC campaign. They all need to be working in cohesion with one another.
Keywords
Targeting the right keywords can make or break your PPC campaigns. They are easily one of the most important ad components. You should always be managing a list of keywords and exploring new possible additions to that list.
Your chosen keywords should be relevant to your business. They need to fit into your budget (some keywords are more expensive than others). And, they should provide good results. You don’t want to waste ad spend if people aren’t converting. So, be sure that you’re paying attention to performance metrics and making informed decisions about how to allocate your ad budget.
Ad Groups
Next, you need to collect keywords into ad groups. The keywords in each group share the same ad copy and landing page. So, it is important to group together only the most closely-related keywords.
Many PPC professionals prefer to utilize single keyword ad groups, which allows them to make a custom-tailored ad experience for each individual search term. This is a great way to ensure a high clickthrough rate and raise the quality of your ads.
Landing Pages
The final step in the sequence is the landing page. This is where search users end up after they’ve clicked an ad. It’s the last stage before they decide whether or not they want to complete the action. You want your landing page experience to entice visitors to convert, not deter them from it.
To do this, there are a few traits that your landing page must include:
- Simplicity: we don’t want to overwhelm visitors with lots of unnecessary offers.
- Frictionless: don’t put a lot of steps in the way of a customer taking action.
- Cohesive: your ads and landing pages need to feel, look and sound the same.
- Relevant: landing pages need to relate to the ad and target keyword.
Account
Once all of the small parts are assembled and your ads are running, your job is not over. In fact, it is only just beginning. Managing your PPC campaigns is a necessity. PPC changes fast. Search users change their behaviors; competitors switch their strategies; performance ebbs and flows.
If you aren’t paying attention to these subtle and not-so-subtle changes, you aren’t in control of your PPC efforts. Fortunately, Google Ads gives marketers all the information needed to effectively monitor the health and performance of PPC ads and make changes accordingly. It’s up to you to use it.
Conclusions
The businesses that shy away from pay per click advertising often to do because they assume that the risk is too great. They don’t want to lose money trying to learn how to be successful at PPC. While it can take some time to learn and understand the PPC space, the benefits are great for those marketers that are willing to give the strategy the attention it deserves.