What is PPC and How Can It Help Your Business?

So you’ve heard people talking about PPC – but what is PPC? Have you ever gone to Google and clicked on one of the top 3 search listings or clicked on a shopping/product item?

If you have, then you’ve experienced PPC. But to be honest that still doesn’t make it any clearer does it?

So let’s delve in a bit deeper.

The aim is to make your advert enticing but RELEVANT and encourage the prospect to click on your advert. Why did we capitalise the word relevant? As you’re paying per click, you don’t want to entice people with a great advert that doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant to the prospect. That’s the route to wasting money and damaging your brand.

What is PPC or Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-Per-Click – that starts us off on a better route to explanation, at least we have some words! In the voice over of a famous fence treatment company “it does what it says on the tin” 😉

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a method of online advertising that enables businesses to pay to promote a product on a platform (e.g Google). As a business you only pay if someone clicks on your advert.

How does PPC Work?

PPC works by allowing you to bid on specific keywords or interests. An advert is then displayed to the prospect either in their news feed or when they search for that keyword.

The aim is to make your advert enticing but RELEVANT and encourage the prospect to click on your advert. Why did we capitalise the word relevant? As you’re paying per click, you don’t want to entice people with a great advert that doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant to the prospect. That’s the route to wasting money and damaging your brand.

When you advertise via a PPC method you will enter a bid-range. This is the amount of money you feel a “click” is worth. How much you bid will factor where and how often your advert appears.

Advertising platforms will give you a guide of how much they recommend you should be paying-per-click. Approach this recommendation with care, remember they want your money. Sit back, take a breath and think about how much that click is worth to your business.

Good digital marketing support can use existing online sales data to forecast how many clicks should convert to sales. This is a great way of back calculating how much you want to spend on every click.

Good digital marketing support can use existing online sales data to forecast how many clicks should convert to sales. This is a great way of back calculating how much you want to spend on every click.

Why should I use PPC?

Paid Advertising is fantastic as one of the digital marketing channels. It enables you to scale reach and generate demand fast. When some other digital channels might take some time to build up to speed.

PPC enables you to:

Have full control over:
- Who can see you advert and;
- When they can see it
Specify who shouldn’t see you advert:
- Enabling you to deter clicks from people who aren’t in your target audience or;
- Showing your advert alongside detrimental content

What are the different types of PPC?

Search Ads

Search Ads are the most common and well known form of paid search adverts. Seen on Google or Bing, these sit above the organic search listings. They each have a small “Ad” wording to the left to show users that it’s an advert.

Search Ads are pure text with no images or video content. They have limited character length, so your advert copy needs to be concise, factual and to the point.

You can use ad extensions to expand your advert screen and maximise the screen space your ad takes up.

Typical extensions are:

Location Extensions: Perfect for local physical businesses. These show your business address, phone number and a map marker. Enabling the user to one-click for directions
Call Extensions: Allow you to add your phone number (desktop) or a call button (mobile). These can be call-tracked using phone-call tracking services
Sitelink Extensions: Add up to 6 webpages and help the user to deep dive into your site with one-click
Callout Extensions: Highlight (or “call-out”) key information about your company, products or services. What makes you different from your competitors? Why should people buy from you?
Structured Snippet Extensions: Highlight specific product or service features
Price Extensions: Are you prospects driven by price? Is you advert a product specific ad? Price extensions allow you to list options and prices. For example if you have three sizes of a specific products – list them all with their pricing
Review Extensions: Do you have a fantastic Google 5 star rating? Let’s showcase it! Have you won an industry award? Let’s yell about it!

Google Shopping

Shopping ads showcase products on the search page. Great for product retailers as you can showcase your products and pricing upfront. Meaning you tend to only get clicks from people who looking to buy.

Display Advertising

Display ads are visual adverts. They can encompass static, animated or video imagery. Display Advertising is a great way to drive brand awareness. Display ads display on websites or apps. They target people who have searched for, or shown interest in a similar product or service.

Social Media Advertising

Whether your customers are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter, you can advertise to them. You can use the powerful data that these providers have on their users. Data like demographics, interests or content they follow or like.

How will PPC help my business?

With so many opportunities within PPC, it can be an absolute minefield! But it can also generate fantastic revenue returns for your business.

Use Paid advertising to boost traffic and sales

Using PPC will help you reach a lot of people in a very short time. And if you get your ad copy and targeting right, you should see sales boost in-line.

Gain great data and insight from PPC

PPC can help you get great insight into your audience. You’ll be able to segment the data to see if specific audience types are more likely to convert. Or which keywords are winners – and thus great ones to target for Search Engine Optimisation.

Paid advertising is measurable

PPC advertising makes it easy to track your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). Meaning you can see how effective your adverts are down to the penny!

It does help if you structure your ad account so you can scan it. This will help you identify the things that are working, or the things that are wasting your budget fast.

PPC is instantly adjustable

If you don’t like how something is performing in your ad account you can stop it straight away. And if you do like how something is performing for you, you can expand it’s reach or budget to drive more for your bottom line.

Are there any negatives to paid advertising?

We’ve only seen negatives with accounts that are:

Mis-managed
Neglected or;
Left for Google’s automated campaign manager to “optimise” (remember our point above – they want your money!)
Like growing a good plant, if you want it to grow well and nourish, you need to spend time and care for it.

All to often we’ve heard from businesses that PPC doesn’t work for them, but in reality, when we’ve delved in, it’s been because of a poor set-up or bad management.

Want help with your Paid Advertising?

If you’ve got an existing PPC campaign or account that’s not working well for you, or is a nightmare to handle. Or you’re looking to get started with paid advertising, then please reach out for a free chat, so we can discuss your goals, needs and pain points!