Grab yourself a cuppa and allow us to enlighten you on the world of PPC!
Whether you currently use PPC to market your business, have heard little about PPC marketing, or you’d like to further develop your knowledge but are struggling on how and where to start – Freelancetosuccess can help! This blog will teach you the basics of PPC and where to start!
First thing’s first- let’s look at how PPC is defined and establish a basic knowledge of how it all works…
What is PPC?
PPC (pay-per-click) is a form of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee for each click their ad receives. In simple terms, it’s a way to generate website visits through buying them as opposed to ‘earning’ them organically.
One of the most popular forms of PPC is search engine advertising. This allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in sponsored links when someone searches a keyword relating to their business. As an example, if we bid on the keyword “Paid search support”, our ad may well appear in the very top spot on Google’s results page. Each time that ad is clicked, resulting in a visitor to our website, we have to pay the search engine a fee. They key here is this – when PPC is set up correctly, the fee to the search engine is trivial because the visit will be worth more than what you’ve paid for it. Simply put, you may pay £2 for a click, but that click results in a £200 sale – now that’s good business!
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is the most popular PPC advertising platform in the world. The platform enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties.
Managing your PPC marketing through Google Ads is extremely valuable because being the most popular search engine, Google receives an enormous amount of traffic and as a result, delivers the most impressions and clicks on your ads. How frequently your PPC ads appear depends on the keywords and match types you select, and while there are a number of factors which will determine how successful your PPC campaign will be, we have three key areas for you to focus on:
- Keyword Selection – Create relevant PPC keyword lists, and creative keyword text.
- Landing Page Quality – Review and where necessary, create optimised landing pages on your website with clear call-to-action, tailored to specific search queries.
- Quality Score – Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores get more ad clicks at a lower cost.
PPC Keyword Research
Researching keywords for your PPC campaign can be incredibly time-consuming, but we can’t stress enough just how important it is. Your entire PPC campaign will be built around your keywords, and to continually grow and refine your PPC keyword list, you should revisit and re-evaluate your keywords on a regular basis to ensure you’re not missing out on valuable, low-cost and highly relevant keywords which could be driving traffic to your site.
An effective PPC keyword list should be:
- Relevant – You don’t want to be paying for web traffic that isn’t relevant to your business, so you want to be finding targeted keywords which will lead to a higher click-through rate, effective cost and ultimately- increased profits! Only bid on keywords which are closely related to your business offerings.
- Exhaustive – When researching your keywords, you should include, not only the most popular and frequently searched terms within your market, but also the ‘long-tail’ keywords. These are more specific and a lot less common, but they can add up and result in highly relevant traffic. By selecting more specific keywords, they’re often also less competitive and less expensive!
- Refined – PPC can seem monotonous, however constantly refining and expanding your campaigns is crucial for creating an environment in which your keyword list is constantly growing and adapting.
Managing Your PPC Campaigns
Once you’ve created your new campaign (hurrah!), you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account optimisation goes hand in hand with account success. You should always be analysing the performance of your account and making adjustments to optimise your campaigns:
- Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding new keywords that are relevant to your business.
- Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting and irrelevant terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
- Split Ad Groups: Improve click-through rate (CTR) and quality score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller, tightly themed keyword groups.
- Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and carry out tests to improve performance or where necessary- exclude them!
- Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and call-to-actions on your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Remember – don’t send all your traffic to the same page!
Phew- that’s PPC basics in a nutshell!
We hope this blog post has been useful, and remember, Freelancetosuccess offer a complete end-to-end PPC service and we’re always here to help.