PPC Marketing Guide for Business [2021]
Why Pay Per Click Marketing?
1. Fast
Pay per click advertising is about the fastest form of marketing there is.
It is possible to set up a Google or Facebook advert and have it live the same day.
Then, if the ad is not working, changes can become live within hours; just think how long this process takes for a newspaper advert.
2. Measurable
You can immediately find out a wealth of information about your ad campaigns to see if they are working or not, and how they can be improved:
- Categories of people clicking on your ads (age, gender, interests etc.)
- Locations of people clicking on your ads, and time of day.
- Devices they are using (mobiles, desktop, etc.)
- How long visitors stay on your site.
- and much more
This data can help you maximise your campaign’s effectiveness and drive down your costs.
3. Cost Effective
PPC marketing can be a very cost-effective if used correctly. You can set a defined budget, which if exceeded automatically stops the adverts.
The stories of PPC being expensive usually relate to poorly managed campaigns; any marketing can be expensive if it is not run correctly.
This means choosing the right platform for your business, whether that be Google AdWords [1], Bing Ads [2], Facebook Adverts [3], Twitter Ads [4], LinkedIn Ads [5], YouTube Ads [6] or another.
Contents
- Summary of the benefits of PPC
- Why is PPC is so powerful?
- How to pay up to half of what your competitors are and get more customers!
- What is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?
- What are the advantages?
- What are the disadvantages?
- Do I have to pay more than my competitors to get above them?
- Are there different types of PPC marketing?
- What audience targeting can be done?
- Glossary
- References
Summary of the benefits of PPC
There are many advantages to paid search over traditional offline marketing:
1. Select your audience
Specify your target audience (search query, location, gender, age etc.) so your ads are only shown to your target market.
2. Optimising your best message
Quickly find your best marketing messages. Test multiple adverts to find the ones that people most consistently respond too.
3. Set your budget and schedule
Be in full control and specify your maximum spend, and the specific times or days that your adverts should be shown.
4. Pay less than your competitors
It is very possible that you can pay less than your competition for adverts, if they are better written, set up and monitored.
5. Constantly Improve Your Ads
Test combinations of adverts to quickly find out the words and taglines that drive the very best response from your market.
6. Increase Customer Conversions
Quickly test different versions of web pages and designs that are most effective in converting visitors into customers.
Why is PPC is so powerful?
Never before has the advertiser been so in control!
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the successful US businessman coined the phrase “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half” [8].
With pay-per-click you now have much more control, and so much more data that John Wanamaker ever had, so you can control how all your money is being spent.
1. You can select your audience
Google AdWords- allows you to target search queries in a specific location.
So, using the above example, if you target “specialist equestrian outfitter” with a location of Surrey, this could deliver your advert to the very people who are searching for your services.
Facebook Ads- allow you to target the demographic to whom your ad will be delivered:
- Age, Gender, Location and
- Detailed targeting such as interests and behaviours
For your equestrian outfitter, this may be, for example:
Women aged 25 – 55, in Surrey, with an interested in horses.
The success of your marketing campaigns rests on how well you craft your message to your audience.
For offline media, adverts in highly targeted publications typically perform better than those that are more general.
For example, a specialist Equestrian Outfitter would be more likely to drive business when advertising in a horse related magazine compared to a general newspaper.
Online advertising is no different.
2. You can see which messages work the best
It used to be time consuming and expensive to find the message your market responds to most; not with PPC!
Any marketer will tell you a beautifully written engaging advert can drive disproportionally more businesses than the poorly written one.
In the past this would have meant running numerous newspaper adverts, then trying to measure which were effective using complicated tracking systems.
For a national company running hundreds of adverts this is possible. For a smaller company this is usually too expensive and slow.
Until pay-per-click marketing.
It allows you to run multiple adverts at the same time and accurately measure the responses to each one.
Meaning you can quickly test multiple messages to find the one that drives the best response.
No longer do you have to ‘guess’ which words and images work best, now you can test and test to find the best.
3. You can set your budget publishing schedule
Advertising costs and time schedules used to be defined by the publisher; not with PPC!
If you have ever run adverts in a printed publication, you know that the publisher is in control and not you.
Maybe the publication only issues on certain days and has a set rate card for pages and sizes.
Pay per click is quite different and you have significantly more control.
You can define:
- Days and times that specific adverts are shown.
- Your specific budget.
- This allows you to be much more responsive to your market and
- Only run ads at a time, or on a day that works best.
- Quickly run seasonal offers.
- React to something in the press or run a flash offer.
Then when you have reached your budget, your ads can immediately stop.
Or if your ad has exceeded expectations, you can stop the ad early.
How to pay up to half of what your competitors are and get more customers?
PPC ads are based on auction systems, so how can you pay less than your competitors?
Google, Facebook, and the major platforms fundamentally want to run adverts that their users like and engage with.
If they consistently run poor adverts, this will eventually damage their own brands.
So, if you run a good advertising campaign that attracts many clicks, and the visitor spends time on your website, you can get rewarded by paying less for your adverts.
AdWords metrics are AdRank and Quality Score and Facebooks is Relevance Score. The higher your scores, the more clicks you will get, and the lower you will drive your costs.
From years of experience as a PPC management company we have found that most advertisers do not optimise their adverts well. Human nature takes over, the ads are set up and just left.
We will specifically manage and optimise your PPC campaign, so your ads are better than your competitors, so you pay less for them.
1. Constantly Improve Your Ads
Test and improving your adverts, so you drive more clicks and visitors.
People respond very differently depending on the adverts they see. Some words and image combinations work, and some do not.
To maximise your campaigns success, we will be consistently measuring the success of the adverts being run and fine tune.
The goal is to get more people clicking on your advert than your competitors. This will not only drive you more customers, but this will help to improve your Quality and Relevance Scores which will help to lower your costs.
The other ‘hidden benefit’ to optimising PPC adverts, is that you now have ad copy that you know works with your customers.
So, you can use this ad copy in all other forms of marketing and offline advertising too.
2. Optimise for Conversions
Your landing pages are an extension of your PPC adverts, so need to be optimised to increase customers conversations.
If you are surfing the web and click on an advert in Google or Facebook, you want to visit a webpage that is relevant.
Let us say the advert says, “Buy Men’s Orange Woollen Jumpers”, but you are taken to a page that sells women’s jumpers, you will be frustrated and leave.
This wastes the good job done with the PPC advert and the advertiser’s money.
In this example the landing page would be much more effective if it specifically sold “orange men’s woollen jumpers”.
The page also needs to be easy to understand, fast and provide clear calls to action. For our Men’s Orange Woollen Jumpers page, this may include:
- Great photos
- Clear sizing information
- Clear pricing options
- Great customer reviews
- Clear delivery information
- Clear purchase and checkout process
This is also known as conversion rate optimisation.
Converting web pages will help your Quality and Relevance Scores and reduce cost per clicks?
What is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?
Pay per click is a form of online advertising that only charges the advertiser once their advert has been clicked on, so if people do not like the advert and do not click on it there will be no charge.
In Google for example these Ads are the search results you see at the top and bottom of the page with the ‘Ad’ note, or in Facebook these are the ‘Sponsored Posts’.
The different platforms run auction systems where you set bids for your adverts.
If you are aggressively targeting a market, you can place higher bids than your competitors to ‘get to the top’.
This is not always necessary, as Google AdWords for example also have metrics called Ad Rank and Quality Score.
If you have done a good job in setting up the advert you may be able to ‘get to the top’ with cost per clicks lower than your competitors.
What are the advantages?
The primary advantage of pay per click over traditional marketing, is you only pay when someone takes action 👍
Compare that to a newspaper advert, where you pay up front for an adverts inclusion irrespective of whether there is a response or not 👎
This can mean your advertising budget is much more efficiently spent.
There are numerous other advantages:
- Speed- ads can be written and live within minutes (depending on the platform)
- Control– you have full control:
- When the ads are run – time and days, plus turn off at any time
- The budget – set your daily / monthly budget
- Changes – change the adverts being displayed at any time
- Targeting– you can very tightly control the market you are targeting with an advert, so the advert is not shown to people who are unlikely to want your products or services.
- Feedback– extraordinarily rich statistics are provided on the types of people who clicked on your ad, times of day, location, keywords they used and much more. This enables you to improve the adverts you are running to get better results.
What are the disadvantages?
Pay per click is a technical discipline which requires planning, time and expertise to set up and manage.
Typically, the campaigns that do not work have not been set up or managed correctly.
Many business owners tell stories of PPC campaigns that cost a great deal of money with poor returns.
Though Jacob Baadsgaard in his blog post 4 Things I’ve Learned from 2,000+ AdWords Audits [7], cites the main reason for poor performance as inadequate tracking and lack of attention.
Effective PPC campaign management will ensure this does not happen.
Do I have to pay more than my competitors to get above them?
There is a misconception that to get your advert shown you need to pay more.
Whilst the various platforms do have auction systems where you can ‘get to the top’ if you pay more, this is not a cost-effective way of advertising; instead, you should focus on creating high-quality adverts that people click on.
In Google AdWords [1] you get rewarded for adverts and landing pages that are effective, the reward is lower cost per clicks.
Google wants to promote good quality adverts, so if you do this, you can feasibly pay lowers costs than your direct competitors.
Are there different types of PPC marketing?
There are many types of pay-per-click advertising
1. Paid search advertising
In the search results of Google and Bing, there are adverts at the top, bottom, and sometimes on the right-hand side of the page, above, below, and to the side of the natural search results. This is paid search advertising and is the primary reason Google is today one of the largest companies in the world.
2. Product listing Ads (shopping)
When you search for products in the search engines, the results displayed are now adverts where the advertiser only pays when the searcher clicks on the ad.
3. Display Advertising
Many of the banner, image and text adverts you see on other websites are served up by services such as Google AdWords Display Network. Typically, the ads are targeted using audience demographics. So, for example if you are visiting a website about ‘football’, it may show relevant adverts on ‘football boots’, or ‘sports betting’. Whilst the visitor may not have specifically visited that page to purchase a product, relevant adverts are places to catch their eye.
4. Re-marketing
Have you ever been browsing products or services on the web; then every site you visit displays adverts for the products you have just been searching for? Well this is re-targeting or re-marketing, where your advert can ‘follow’ the web browser around the web.
5. Social Media Advertising
Social media adverts have really taken off in the past few years, and are the ‘sponsored posts’ you see in Facebook or Twitter feeds. Facebook has become particularly good at allowing you to closely target specific groups of people.
Let’s say you are a children’s nursery based in Surrey, Facebook Ads allow you target young Surrey based mums. In their Facebook feeds, young mums only in your area will see the adverts and no-one else.
The type of advertising most suitable for your business will very much depend on your products and services and target market.
What audience targeting can be done?
The different PPC platforms allow you to target specific audiences.
- Paid search advertising (Google AdWords and Bing Ads)
You can target:- Search queries (plumber in London, men’s orange jumper etc.)
- Locations (UK, England, Surrey, Croydon, etc.)
- Devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles etc.)
If you are a plumber in Croydon, you can target search queries such as: ‘Plumber’, ‘emergency plumber’, ‘plumber in Croydon’ etc. - and only appear to people searching in the Croydon area only.
This can be extremely effective if you chose the right buying keywords. For example, if you target ‘jumper’, this may not be nearly as effective as ‘buy men’s orange jumper’.
- Display and social media advertising
You are targeting audience demographics rather than specific search keywords, such as:- Age, from say 25 to 55.
- Gender
- Location
- Detailed targeting - demographics, interests, and behaviours, for example: Tenants, who like sports, and are single.
Within certain markets if you target your advert well this can be highly effective.
Glossary
Ad Rank
A value that's used to determine your ad position (where ads are shown on a page) [9]
Average Cost Per Click
The average amount that you've been charged for a click on your ad. Average cost per click (avg. CPC) is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. [11]
Bing Ads
Bing’s advertising platform where advertisers pay to display brief advertising copy, product listings, and video content within the Bing search results and ad network to web users. [17]
Facebook Ads
Facebook’s advertising platform that provides adverts via their network to web users. [16]
Google AdWords
Google’s advertising platform where advertisers pay to display brief advertising copy, product listings and video content within Google’s search results and ad network, to web users. [12]
Google Display Network
Google AdWords is split into two networks, the Search Network and the Display Network. When advertising on the Search Network, businesses place text ads in the search engine results. On the Display Network, businesses instead place display ads on a huge network of sites across the internet. [13] [14]
Quality Score
Estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions. [10]
Relevance Score
Relevance score aggregates various ad quality and relevance factors to give an idea of how relevant ads are to the people in your target audience compared to other ads targeting that same audience.
Retargeting
Retargeting (also known as remarketing, or behavioural retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous Internet actions. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user's browser. Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show display ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange. [15]
References
- Google AdWords– Get your ad on Google today.
- Bing Ads- Millions are searching. Make sure they find you.
- Facebook Adverts- Advertising on Facebook makes it easy to find the right people, capture their attention and get results.
- Twitter Ads- Create ads focused on the objectives most important to your business
- LinkedIn Ads- Reach your ideal customers on the world's largest professional network
- YouTube Ads- Start advertising on YouTube
- “4 Things I’ve Learned from 2,000+ AdWords Audits“ kissmetrics.com
- John Wanamaker. wikipedia.org
- Ad Rank Definition. Google.com
- Quality Score Definition. Google.com
- Average Cost Per Click Definition. Google.com
- AdWords. wikipedia.org
- About the Google Display Network. Google.com. wikipedia.org
- “7 Tips to Master the Google Display Network”. wordstream.com. 2017.03.07
- Behavioural retargeting. wikipedia.org
- What are Facebook Ads?. facebook.com
- Bing Ads. wikipedia.org
- About relevance score. facebook.com
