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If you want to be successful, then you must need to know:
what is PPC (Pay-Per-click)? Why PPC Marketing is important for business?
Suppose you want to own the most precious place with lots of traffic or valuable real estate in any search engine’s result. Then the fastest way is with PPC (Pay-per-click) marketing.
The second name of pay-per-click marketing is search engine marketing. It is a form of online advertisement that will allow your brand or business to appear above all organic results.
Mainly the procedure is; you have to bid on specific keywords for appearing on the top of the search engine. And whenever your business site appears on the top, and anyone clicks on it, you have to pay the amount for each click.
Simple, right?
SEM or PPC marketing is not easy nowadays and is considered a complex task. And there is a lot to know and understand before you start or create campaigns and ads.
Why?
For starters, if you do not know what you are doing or what keyword and strategy you should use, you can easily blow off your budget. That is only good for ad platforms but very bad practice for your budget.
If you want to be successful, then you must need to know:
· Ad networks: Google Ads, Adroll, Microsoft Ads, Gemini, etc.
· Advertising formats: Text ads, Image ads, Responsive text ads, Call-only ads, Video ads, and many more!
· Terms and acronyms: Quality Score? CTR? Ad Rank? ROAS? CPC?
What Is PPC?
PPC or pay-per-click is an advertising method used for advertising and placing ads by different advertising platforms. In it, advertisers have to pay the host every time whenever anyone clicks on the ad’s link.
The ad’s main goal is to lead users, visitors, or vendors to the advertiser’s platform or web page. Where users can do a practical action like buying the product. Search engines like google are the best hosting platforms. They allow people to run the ads relevant to viewer’s interests.
Advertising with services like Microsoft ads and google ads operate RTB (Real-Time Bidding). And the inventory of advertisements is sold via (PAA) private automate auction using real-time data.
How Paid Search Works?
Whenever an ad spot on the search engine’s page and anyone clicks on it, whether the visitor buys something or not, an auction takes place or the keyword instantaneously. Many factors are used to determine the top position winner on the page, like the ad and bid amount’s quality. A higher bid amount means a higher position. Sometimes it gets too expensive, but if your quality of the product is good, all will pay off.
Advertisers use platforms or accounts to set up the ads and define all the things like; when or where they want to appear in this ad. They have all the filters to include and exclude people, areas, industries, amounts, etc.
Moreover, those campaigns are further divided into a category “ad groups” that may contain relevant ads and keywords.
What are PPC Keywords?
Keyword lies at the center of pay-per-click PPC, connecting users to advertisers on their search queries.
Queries for PPC:
Are the words or keywords that users type on the search bar of any search engine to get results according to their needs.
Keywords for PPC:
Are the words and main words related to markets or use marketers’ short-term use to target the audience’s search quires? It works as generalized concepts of wide-ranging search quires/questions disposed to irregularities such as misspellings.
Depends on the keywords type people use, advertisers also make search quires with less or more precision to get results and user clicks.
For example, advertisers may choose search quires to match keywords exactly sometimes or allow for different variations like; different spelling, different orders of the words, inclusion or exclusion of other words.
It is also a good practice to have negative keywords to prevent your ad from irrelevant traffic. Negative keywords would help your ad from being triggered by queries that contain these keywords.
PPC Ad Campaign Optimization Workflow:
Advertisers have to prepare good ads in their campaigns, and it should be according to your product or brand. It is nestled within-group ads that will target different sets of keywords and organized via common themes.
We can define ads as what users will see if anyone wins the auction, so it is important to set them right. Typically it contains a heading, description (few lines), and URL.
On a SERP (search engine result pages), they can show on the bottom of the page or maybe on the top of results.
It is good practice to do tests with different ad copy versions and see what format is best and which ad is performing best. The testing process should be done before finalizing the campaign.
Some services like Microsoft Ads and Google Ads; provide features like “ad extensions” it enhances the format or looks of ads.
Examples: include site link extensions, which occupy an ad with additional links to different webpages on a website, or call extensions as well, which will help to add a phone number to ads throughout the working days or business hours.
Ad extensions are very good because they have helped increase the visibility of ads and make them more appealing and engaging to users while connecting more information.
Strategy for PPC Bids and Budgets:
Budgets and bids are very important and considered the main factor because PPC is all about paying on clicks. To contribute to the auction, advertisers have to decide the amount willingly they have to spend on a particular keyword. This process is done on a keyword level or campaign level at ad groups.
Also, costs are set while starting any campaign, and the budget cannot be overspent. Maybe sometimes it could exceed daily. We know that bids control the spent amount precisely, so the budget would always be set to the overall strategy or plan.
All groups (ad groups) must have bids, but keyword bids mostly outweigh the ads group’s bids.
Many sellers also use automatic bid strategies; Google sets all the strategies and industries. You have to set an amount, and Google will do the rest of the work to promote your products.
These allow sellers to aim for their product’s campaigns on any advertising platform they choose to regulate the most suitable bid for every sale.
Also, the bid strategy could be used for a portfolio of more than one campaign or individual campaigns.
According to “RTB” schemes, the amounts which the seller pays are reliant on ad ranks and participant activity, not only the highest bid.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ad Rank:
Having the highest bit is important but winning the auction is always be your priority. The search engine looks upon many factors to determine the best for all advertisers to be the best spot on ERP.
To determine the ad-rank, search engines have many precise ways of factoring the other elements. For example, Google considers:
· Advertiser’s bid amount.
· Quality of ad
· Ad’s format impact (like whether it contains extensions that improve the ad’s layout or not).
· Ad relevance
· The purpose of the search (like; time of the day and user’s device).
Quality score I the key metric that controls ad relevance.
While talking about PPC; Here are the basic components of Quality Score:
· Historic (CTR) click-through rate.
· Relevance of the focusing keyword to the ads is very important.
· The ad’s significance and focusing keyword to the query (search query; the words or sentence you may search on any search engine).
· Landing page (front page) quality (where user land after clicking on an ad).
We can say that; if the quality score is high, then the CPC would below. Search engines like Google penalize those sellers or advertisers whose keywords have low-quality scores even if they have large bid amounts to spend.
So that is why it is necessary to have a relevant and engaging copy that including keywords with high volume. Not focus on keywords only because your landing page’s quality is also very important and could not be overlooked. If your webpage or website experience is poor or not good, then ads are shown less often.
Landing webpage must be related and appropriate to ad and user’s demand and quickly loadable and provide a good user experience.
What is a Targeted PPC Campaign?
Choose the right keywords is necessary because it allows sellers to get the right audience relevant to ads.
And there are other options as well for optimizing campaigns, such as:
· Device targeting.
· Demographic targeting.
· Location targeting.
· Day targeting
· Time targeting.
With this, sellers or advertisers can target users on laptops, mobile in the evening. Or users above 30 or within any specific location radius for optimization of their ads and their performances.
It is so valuable with all of these variations of ad copies; by using this, we can consider better results and perform much better from one group than the other.
By using tools (remarketing tools) that allow us to get more precise to adjusted budgets and ad copy messages, it would be possible to exclude or target previous vendors, customers, visitors, or buyers to a web page that follows up searches targeting keywords.
Sometimes bids could be adjustable automatically for some targeted keywords. It gives sellers or advertisers more control over their expense and traffic when big and customers are valuable.
PPC Conversion Tracking:
The key point of all these hard works is not just to get simple clicks or traffic, but the real deal is to make conversions by PPC.
Here are some of the actions that sellers want their visitors to take after they click on the ad’s link. It varies from business to business, but here are some common actions:
· Purchase a service.
· Purchase product.
· Signing up their newsletter.
· Contact them (agency, brand, etc.)
· Make a phone call.
Any many more.
It is necessary to track conversions while your PPC ad is running and check the results whether your PPC campaign is working according to strategy and giving desire results or not.
· Platforms like “Google Ads” could track all of your conversions by using a snippet code merged into the original or source code of the landing page. (Conversion page: the page reached by users after conversions, such as thank you page or complete action page). They were used to collect conversion data or info of conversion through an ad.
· CT (conversion tracking) is considered a tricky task to track any conversion because conversion paths are complicated sometimes than simple clicks or direct purchases.
· It often includes numerous searches and webpage visits, and they may lead to an email or in-store visit and phone call.
· While using analytics services such a “Google Analytics,” it could help us decide how credit for exchanges is assigned to the conversion path.