Pay-Per-Click, or, as it is better known in the digital language, PPC, is an internet advertising model which is used to direct traffic to a certain landing page, where the advertiser pays the website which displays your banner a certain amount of money when the banner is clicked.
At the beginning, the PPC model was used only to refer to Google Adwords (the actual Google Ads) advertising model, but later the term has been broaden and now it refers to all type of advertising where you pay the search engine (might it be Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc) in order to display your ads and direct traffic to your online business.
What You Should Know About PPC
PPC is not a number game, but it is a targeting game. Many people think the more you pay the search engine, the more clicks you get to your website. WRONG!
Of course, if you run a 1000 USD per day promotion in Google Ads, chances are you get more clicks than when running a 500 USD per day promotion, but you shouldn’t take it for granted.
The fact is, the difference between a good PPC specialist and an average one is huge, in terms of money invested in ads in order to generate leads.
PPC is a targeting game, and that is so because at the end of the day the one who pays for PPC advertising expects results, which translate with leads. A lead is a prospect, a potential buyer of your products or services who landed on your website and takes a certain action – he/she asks for more details or takes the first steps in order to make the purchase; these kind of actions differentiate the average user from a potential buyer. Of course, a lead can differ from a case to another, and if in most of the cases a lead is a potential buyer, in others a lead is simply one who subscribed to your newsletter or confirms his details in a form.
So, to get back on our thoughts track: PPC is not a number game. If it was a number game, than the biggest payers would take all the advertising space and would collect all the leads they can get. Instead, PPC is a targeting game, which allow you, with as little as a few dollars a day, to be able to display your campaigns on the search engines and to get as many leads as possible.
The Steps To Running A Good PPC Campaign
There are some important steps when running a good PPC campaign
1. Determine your goal
It seems so unimportant that people most often disregard this step. It is the most important one, though.
By establishing the goal of your campaign, you establish the strategy to follow, the visuals to use, the copy to insert and the way to measure the results. If you consider these things unimportant, than we don’t know what else is important.
2. Define a budget
By defining the budget, you simply define how much you want to spend on the campaign itself. You can define the whole sum, but also you can define how much money you want to spend per day, per click or per lead. The last one is the most important, but you’ll get to a satisfactory CPC or CPL after optimizing the campaign over a few days or even weeks.
3. Keyword research
This is the most time consuming part of them all. You have to really do your homework here and, as the name says, you have to do a thorough research. You have to define the targeted keywords by selecting the most used by potential leads and the most profitable in terms of revenue. Of course, you will also have to pay attention to their competitiveness, as many keywords, while costing little and bringing you lots of traffic, are not qualified to bring you leads.
You have to differentiate between navigational search queries, informational search queries and transactional search queries – there is a difference between “New York”, “Stores in New York” and “Best sneaker shoes store in New York”, right?
4. Creating the landing page
Any PPC campaign is meant to drive qualified traffic to your webpage. If this can be accomplished by efficient targeting and creative ads and copies, what users do when reaching your website is crucial to your business.
Do your landing page persuade them to buy your products or services or not?
Most of the campaigns land on the website itself, but this is not the best tactic of all. You need to have a simple, yet creatively built page, which compels users to take the desired action. The CTAs are important, of course, but the whole design and the way you conduct people on it are equally important.
5. Creating the PPC campaign
Now, that you have all the ingredients, you can create the PPC campaign itself. You did your keyword research, you have defined the goal and the budget to be allotted, the only thing left to do is creating a compelling ad, whether it is for search or for display network.
The difference is that while display network allows you to attract customers through banners or videos, the search network allows you only to display text announcements, posted above or bellow the organic searches.
Also, display network allows you to run re-targeting campaigns, but this is another topic.
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