Whether you’ve heard a little about PPC marketing and are curious to learn more, or you already know that you want to use PPC to market your business, but aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place!

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. Every time our ad is clicked, sending a visitor to our website, we have to pay the search engine a small fee. When PPC is working correctly, the fee is trivial, because the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. In other words, if we pay $3 for a click, but the click results in a $300 sale, then we’ve made a hefty profit.

PPC Keyword Research

: Keyword research for PPC can be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also incredibly important. Your entire PPC campaign is built around keywords, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers continuously grow and refine their PPC keyword list. If you only do keyword research once, when you create your first campaign, you are probably missing out on hundreds of thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost and highly relevant keywords that could be driving traffic to your site.

An effective PPC keyword list should be :

1. Relevant– Of course, you don’t want to be paying for Web traffic that has nothing to do with your business. You want to find targeted keywords that will lead to a higher PPC click-through rate, effective cost per click, and increased profits. That means the keywords you bid on should be closely related to the offerings you sell.
2. Exhaustive– Your keyword research should include not only the most popular and frequently searched terms in your niche but also to the long tail of search. Long-tail keywords are more specific and less common, but they add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic. In addition, they are less competitive and therefore less expensive.
3. Expensive– PPC is iterative. You want to constantly refine and expand your campaigns, and create an environment in which your keyword list is constantly growing and adapting

: If you want to find high-volume, industry-specific keywords to use in your PPC campaigns, be sure to check out our popular keywords.

Managing Your PPC Campaigns :

Once you’ve created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the best predictors of account success. You should be continuously analyzing the performance of your account and making the following adjustments to optimize your campaigns:

1. Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business
2. Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend..
3. 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.
4. Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary
5. 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.

Advantages of pay-per-click advertising

1. Cost-effective– because you only pay when a user actually reaches your website, it can be a good value for money. You can choose to spend as much or as little as you like.
2. Targeted – you can choose your audience according to demographics like location, language and device
3. Measurable– PPC campaigns can be set up to carefully measure effectiveness. You can determine exactly how much your return on investment is.
4. Customisable– as you run your campaigns, you can make many small adjustments to improve based on what works best.
5. Training resources– there are many (often free) online courses and training materials to help you develop your skills.
6. Fast– you will see the impact of your PPC efforts almost immediately. Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics can take months to make a difference.

Disadvantages of pay-per-click advertising

1. Time investment– you can’t just set up your PPC campaigns and leave them. You need to invest time in optimising and improving to get the best results.
2. Skills required– it can take some practise to set up effective campaigns. Many businesses choose to use a specialist agency.
3. Costs can quickly add up– if you aren’t monitoring and optimising your campaigns to make sure you get a return on investment, money could be wasted. You will need to allocate budget for PPC campaigns, unlike SEO tactics where the investment is time and skills.
4. Clicks and visits don’t always lead to sales – you will need to convince the user to ‘convert’ once they reach your website.