What you need to know about pay-per-click advertising and how to get started with PPC will be covered in this session.
What is Pay Per Click advertising?
How does it all go over, exactly?
What’s more, how can you make it work for you personally?
This chapter gives an introduction to paid search marketing. It talks about ads, keywords, budgets, bids, ad rank, targeting, and conversions.
Let’s start with the essentials to get things started.
Pay per click
In the pay-per-click (PPC) model, marketers may publish advertisements on a platform for advertising and pay the platform’s host when their ad is clicked.
The purpose of the ad is to direct the person who clicks to the advertiser’s website or app, where the user may take a beneficial action, such as buying a product.
Because search engines let marketers to show relevant advertising based on what consumers are seeking for, they have become a popular host platform
Using real-time bidding (RTB), advertising platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads sell advertising inventory in a private automated auction based on real-time data.
How it works?
Every time an ad space shows up on a SERP (search engine results page), an auction for the term takes place right away.
The top spot is awarded based on a variety of variables, including the amount paid and the quality of the ad.
PPC relies on these auctions to keep the wheels turning. When someone looks for anything on a search engine, they begin.
There is an auction set up based on keywords that are bid on by advertisers that want to display advertising linked to a user’s search query if advertisers are interested.
Once an ad has won the auction, it appears on the search engine results page.
If you want to be able to participate in these auctions, you’ll need a Google Ads account.
Accounts are broken up into campaigns to make it easier to manage and report on different regions, product types, or other useful groups. There are separate ad groups for each campaign, with keywords and related advertising in them.
Keywords
PPC relies heavily on keywords to link marketers with search queries.
The search terms that people enter into a search engine’s search box are known as queries.
These users’ search queries are matched up with keywords, which are then used to target these people via marketing.
When used in this way, keywords serve as broad abstractions for a wide variety of search queries that are prone to errors such as spelling errors.
Advertisers may employ keyword match types with varying degrees of accuracy to match search queries.
However, marketers have the option of allowing for changes such as alternative word orders, various spellings, or even the introduction of additional words.
Negative keywords can also be used to stop ads from showing up when a search query includes certain words. This cuts down on traffic that isn’t relevant to the site.
Ad Campaigns
With the help of keywords, marketers must also plan out their campaigns’ ad strategy.
Each ad group has its own unique collection of keywords and is structured around a similar subject.
If the auction is won, users will see the ads, so they must be perfect.
They often include headlines, descriptive lines, and a link to the website.
They might appear at the top or the bottom of a search engine results page (SERP).
As a rule of thumb, it’s excellent practice to try various ad words to discover which one works the best.
Services like Google Adwords and Microsoft Ads offer ad extensions that make ads look better.
For example, there are sitelink extensions, which provide extra URLs for a site, and call extensions, which offer a phone number while the company is open.
In addition to increasing ad exposure, the usage of ad extensions increases the amount of information that may be sent to consumers.
Bids and Budgets
A campaign-level budget and ad group or keyword-level bids are used for this.
Daily budgets can be blown, but there are no monthly limits because they are set at the campaign level.
According to the general account plan, budgets should be defined, but bids are a more specific technique to manage spending.
Ad groups must have bids, but keyword bids take precedence over ad group bids.
Automated bidding tactics are popular among many marketers.
The advertising platform figures out which offer is the best for each auction based on the campaign goal set by the advertiser.
It is possible to apply bid strategies to a single campaign or to a group of campaigns.
Because of the RTB mechanism, not just the maximum bid affects the actual amount paid by the advertiser. Having the highest offer isn’t enough to win the auction.
Other variables are taken into account by search engines when deciding which adverts should appear at the top of the SERP.
Other factors are taken into account by search engines in their own unique methods when determining ad rank.
Ad rank
In the case of Google, for example:
-Ad relevancy and quality are two of the most important factors to consider.
-Search context (e.g., device and time of day used by the user).
-Impact on format (e.g., whether it includes extensions that enhance the format of the ad).
Ad relevance is determined by “quality score,” which is a criterion used by advertisers.
What mades up Quality Score?
-Click trought rate
-The keyword’s usefulness in the context of the ad.
-Keyword and ad relevancy to search query.
-The quality of the landing page.
The better the quality score is, the lower the CPC will be. Ad relevancy is vitally crucial.
Advertisers that bid on terms with poor quality scores are penalized by search engines, which seldom display their ads, even if their bids are high.
Ads may be shown to the correct people by using the proper keywords.
Targeting
However, there are additional ways to focus campaigns for better results, such as:
-Targeting of devices.
-Aiming at a certain area.
It’s all about the time and day.
-Selective demographics.
Advertisers may better target their advertising to mobile users in the evening or to those under the age of 25 who are within a given radius of a certain area.
It’s important because different ad wording could work better for one set of consumers than another.
There are ways to target or exclude previous visitors who do follow-up searches by using remarketing solutions that enable more precise ad copy messages and altered budgets.
Marketers may have more control over traffic and spending if bids for keywords can be changed automatically based on how valuable customers are.
Conversion
It’s not only about getting them to click on your link. The ultimate goal is to get them to convert.
So pay per click is basically now make-to-convert.
For each sort of company, there are certain activities that marketers want consumers to do after clicking on an advertisement.
Examples of common conversions include:
-Buying a product or service.
-Subscribing to an email list.
-Calls
-And there’s a lot more.
Tracking conversions is critical if you want to know how effective a PPC campaign is and how many conversions can be traced back to paid search.
Platforms like Google Ads can collect conversion data by adding a piece of code to the source code of the page that is viewed after the conversion, like a thank you page. There is a lot more to tracking conversions than simply tracking a single click on an ad and a subsequent purchase. Visits to several websites, emails, phone calls, or in-store appearances are not uncommon. Using Google Analytics or another analytics tool, you can figure out which paths led to a conversion.
