Whether you’ve just heard a bit regarding PPC marketing and got curious to learn more, or you already have knowledge about it and want to use PPC to market your business, but don’t know where to begin, you’ve come to the right place! In this article, you’ll learn everything that you need to know about PPC and how to use to market your business.

First, we need to know what is PPC and understand how PPC advertising works. Let’s begin!

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers will pay a fee when one of their ads were clicked. It is a way of buying visits to your website, instead of trying to “earn” those visits organically.

One of the most known and popular kinds of PPC is Search Engine Advertising. It permits advertisers to submit for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links once somebody query a keyword that is relevant to what their business is offering. For instance, if we query the keyword “affordable web design,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the search engine results page.

Whenever someone clicked on our ad, sending them to our website, we are required to pay the search engine a small amount. Once a PPC is working properly, the fee won’t matter anymore, because the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. For instance, if we pay $3 per click, however the click leads to a $300 sale, then we have earned a large profit. 

A lot goes into creating an effective PPC campaign: from researching and choosing the correct keywords, to arranging those keywords into an orderly campaigns and ad groups, to putting up optimized landing pages. Search engines reward advertisers who can produce relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks. If your ads and landing pages are effective and helpful to users, Google will charge you less per click, resulting in higher profits for your business. So if you’re going to start using PPC, it is important to understand how it works and how to do it right. 

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) is a very popular PPC advertising system in the whole world. The Ads platforms allows businesses to build ads that will be seen on Google’s search engine.

Google Ads operates on pay-per-click model, where users bid on keywords and will pay every time a visitor clicked on their advertisements. Every time a query is done, Google will look into a pool of Ads advertisers and will choose a set of winners that will show up in the ad space on the search result page. The “winners” will be chosen depends on a combination of factors such as the quality and relevancy of their keywords and campaigns, as well as the size of their keyword bids.

Generally, whoever gets to be chosen to appear on the page will be based on the advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated with multiplying two key factors - CPC Bid(the highest amount an advertiser is willing to pay) and Quality Score(your click-through rate, relevancy and the quality of your landing page). This kind of system permits winning advertisers to achieve potential consumers at a cost that will fit their budget.  

Organizing PPC marketing with the use of Google Ads is valuable because Google, as one of the most commonly used search engines, gets huge amounts of traffic and thus delivers the most clicks to your ads. How frequent will your PPC appear will depend on the keywords and match types you select. Although there's a lot of factors that will decide the success of your PPC advertising campaign, you can still achieve a lot by focusing on: 

• Keyword Relevance –  Thinking of relevant PPC keyword lists, tight group of keywords and correct ad text.
• Landing Page Quality – Developing optimized landing pages with effective, relevant content and clear call-to-action, made to specific search queries.
• Quality Score – Google’s rating of the keywords’ quality and relevancy is called Quality Score. Better quality scores will get you more ad clicks at a lower cost. 
• Creative – Enticing ad copy is essential; and if you are advertising on the display network, you have to create high-quality ads that will demand clicks.

PPC Keyword Research

Keyword research for PPC can consume a lot of time, however it is also very important. Your whole PPC campaign is composed of keywords, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers continue to grow and refine their PPC keyword list. If you just did your keyword research once, when you start your first campaign, you are most likely missing out on hundreds of valuable, low-cost and highly relevant keywords which may bring traffic to your website.

An effective PPC keyword list should be:

• Relevant – Ofcourse, you wouldn’t want to spend money for Web traffic that won’t do anything for your business. You would want to look for keywords that may lead to a better PPC click-through rate, effective cost per click and increased profits. It means that the keywords you bid on should be relevant to the items that you sell or service that you offer.
• Exhaustive – Your keyword research should not only be composed of popular and frequently searched terms, but it also to the long tail of search. Long tail keywords are more specific and uncommon, however they still add up to account for most of search-driven traffic. Also, they are less competitive, meaning it is less expensive. 
• Expansive - PPC is repeated. You would want to continuously refine and expand the scope of your campaigns, and build and environment where you keyword list is constantly growing and adapting. 

Managing Your PPC Campaigns

When you already have created your new campaigns, you would have to manage them often to make sure that they are continuously effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the most predictors of account success. You need to analyze the performance of your account continuously and should make the following changes to optimize your campaigns:

• Add PPC Keywords: Expand the scope of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are related to you business.
• Add Negative Keywords: You should add non-converting terms as a negative keywords to boost your campaign’s relevancy and avoid wasting money.
• Split Ad Groups: Boost your click-through-rate (CTR) and Quality Score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller and more relevant ad groups that may help you make more targeted ad text and landing pages.
• Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review costly, under-performing keywords and turn it off if you need to.
• Refine Landing Pages: Change your landing page’s content and calls-to-action (CTAs) to line up with individual search queries to improve conversion rates. Do not drive all your traffic to the same page.