Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101

Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019?

But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip!

The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns

Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimization) takes some time before you will be able to see your site on the first search engine results page. It certainly pays off to be at the top of the page so you are able to get in front of your target audience.

What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

PPC advertising is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ad campaigns. 

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an effective option if you want to reach people who are actively searching for terms related to your business. If you decide to create a PPC campaign your ad spend will be determined by your audience, competition, and the types of products/services you wish to drive awareness of.

These ads appear when people search for things online using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's Bing ads– especially when they are performing commercial searches, meaning that they're looking for something to buy. 

This could be anything from a mobile search, such as someone looking for "restaurant near me" on their phone, or a local service search like someone looking for a dentist or a plumber in their area. All of these searches trigger pay-per-click advertising.

How often your PPC ads appear depends on which keywords and which match types you select. The PPC platform may also have an impact. 

PPC Basics

Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click marketing (or PPC marketing). It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. 

Cost-per-click (CPC) is calculated by dividing the advertising cost by the number of clicks generated by an advertisement. The basic formula is:

Cost-per-click ($) = Advertising cost ($) / Ads clicked (#) 

Bid-Based PPC

With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. In contrast, content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. 

The bid and Quality Score are used to give each advertiser's advert an ad rank. The ad with the highest ad rank shows up first. 

The Google Display Network allows you to place your ad in front of the right person at the right time and on the right sections of relevant websites.

Google Ads take up the very top positions on a search results page. Those results are the first ones people see and as you can imagine, get the majority of clicks. It sounds simple, but Google AdWords can be quite complicated especially with all of the settings and insights it offers. But if you do it right, all of those clicks will lead to conversions.

Here’s a simple search in Google for basketball shoes. As you can see, two ads come up with the store Dick's Sporting Goods being number one. These first two positions are all targeting the keyword “basketball shoes” and paying each time their ad is clicked by a potential customer.

The position of your ad is determined by several factors that give your ad a score based on the quality of your ads and how much you are willing to pay per click. Even if other brands are competing for the same keyword as you are, it is possible to rank above them and pay less per click, but Google must see your ads as highly relevant in order for this to happen.

While a number of factors determine how successful your PPC advertising campaign will be, you can achieve a lot by focusing on: 

Keyword Relevance: Crafting relevant and specific keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text. 

Landing Page Quality: Creating optimized landing pages with persuasive, relevant content and a 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 lower costs. 

Advertising Formats: Search ads, Display ads (typically banner ads), text ads, responsive text ads, video ads, and image ads. A creative ad copy is vital. 

Managing Your PPC Campaigns

Campaigns need to be regularly managed to make sure they continue to be effective. It's important to be continuously analyzing the performance of your account and making the following adjustments to optimize your campaigns:  

• Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
• Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting 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, more relevant ad groups, which help you create more targeted ad text and landing pages.
• Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
• Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and calls-to-action (CTAs) of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Don’t send all your traffic to the same page.

We’d like to thank Cory from the Law Offices of Craig Altman for asking about this.