When we create digital marketing strategies for our clients, PPC often plays a crucial role. Used correctly, PPC can be a powerful aid in meeting business goals. Read on to find out what PPC is, when it’s most useful – and whether it could be right for your business.
What is PPC advertising?
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s a dynamic form of digital advertising, where advertisers pay a fee whenever someone clicks or interacts with their ad (hence the term “pay-per-click”).
Google Ads are a particularly common example of PPC ads. These are the ads that display whenever someone searches for something in Google. Bing is also a big player in search, and Microsoft Advertising (formerly called Bing Ads) is another important consideration when marketing a business.
What is PPC marketing useful for?
The brilliance of PPC advertising lies in its adaptability. PPC can be used to achieve different marketing goals for businesses, including:
- Generating web traffic for specific products or pages.
- Increasing brand exposure in key sectors.
- Remarketing to people who have already visited your website.
- Promoting sales, new products, offers, and more.
Different types of PPC marketing
1. Paid search advertising
This the most common type of PPC advertising. Whenever a user types a search query into Google, ads often show as the top results (alongside AI overviews). These businesses have paid for their ads to display for the keywords the user searched for.
These ads show up alongside organic search results; a good SEO strategy will help ensure your website ranks highly for keywords and search terms related to your business. PPC and SEO are strongest when they work together. If both your PPC ads and the SEO content of your website targets keywords specific to your audience, your business will feature heavily in relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Remarketing
Often, users may visit your website, explore the products or services they’re interested in – and leave without further action. This could be to explore other options, or to mull over the decision of whether to purchase from your business or not.
Remarketing using PPC targets users who have already visited your website. When this happens, a file called a ‘cookie’ is created to capture information about the visit (with the consent of the user). You can then create a remarketing list of all the users who came to your website and performed a specific action (e.g. visiting a certain page).
Using a remarketing campaign, you can then display ads relevant to these users – reminding them of the product or service they were interested in, rather than just generic information about your business. This is far more likely to recapture their interest.
What is the difference between paid media advertising and pay-per-click?
Paid media advertising is any form of marketing that involves paying to put promotional content about your business on a third-party platform (TV ads, print media ads, sponsorships, etc). Social media has firmly established itself as an essential part of the digital marketing landscape, and it has also become an important part of paid media advertising. This is when businesses pay to promote their ads across certain social media platforms. These ads might be images, videos, sponsored posts, and more.
The click-through-rate (CTR) of social media ads is one of the metrics different ad campaigns can be measured by. Others include:
- Impressions: The number of times your ad has been seen.
- Post Engagement: The number of reactions, comments, and shares that a post received.
- Leads: The number of leads acquired on your website from an ad.
- Custom Conversions: Track any event that happens on your website as a custom conversion (newsletter sign ups, specific page visits, etc.)
Businesses can create paid social media ad campaigns precisely targeted towards specific users, basing which ads are displayed on the user’s profession, interests, age, location, and more. Paid social media advertising can be used to market your business to people likely to be interested in your services – saving on ad spend and maximising the return on investment you’ll see from a successful ad campaign.
