Maybe you have come across PPC which stand for Pay Per Click or you are hearing about it for the first time, the good news is that you can make money from it.
Pay per click is a form of advertising that has gained popularity over the years and a lot of people are taking advantage of it. You too can benefit from PPC, and this article will show you how.
- What is Pay Per Click?
- How do I Create a Pay Per Click?
- How do You Make Money From Pay Per Click?
- How can you Effectively Manage Your PPC Campaign for a Better Result?
- How much does PPC Advertising Cost?
- What are the Pros and Cons of PPC Advertising?
- What is the Best Pay Per Click Site?
- What Should be the Approach for Effective Pay Per Click Campaigns?
What is Pay Per Click?
Like we mentioned above, pay per click is a form of advertising, but there is more to it. 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.
Read Also: How Does Bing Ads Make Money?
Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
For example, if we bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page.
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.
However, does it come that easy?
A lot goes into building a winning PPC campaign: from researching and selecting the right keywords, to organizing those keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimized for conversions.
Search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks.
How do I Create a Pay Per Click?
To succeed in PPC marketing, you need to keep your objective closely in mind. What are you trying to achieve, Sell a product? Drive traffic to your website of blog, or are you trying to get subscribers to your newsletter. Following the tips below to get started.
- Work out your goals. Do you want to make more sales, encourage sign-ups, increase enquiries?
- Decide where to advertise. Advertising on search engine using Google AdWords and Microsoft Advertising is a good option for most businesses. Sign up and create an account.
- Choose which keywords you want to bid on.
- Set your bids for different keywords and select your daily, or monthly, budget.
- Write your PPC advert and link to a relevant landing page on your website.
- Watch closely and continually improve.
If your ads and landing pages are useful and satisfying to users, Google charges you less per click, leading to higher profits for your business. So if you want to start using PPC, it’s important to learn how to do it right.
How do You Make Money From Pay Per Click?
If you are a brand, and you are hoping to take full advantage of PPC, one way you can achieve huge results is by integrating SEO into your PPC campaign. Here are some ways your brand will benefit.
The Best of Both Worlds
Improving one’s website leads to better SEO that garners organic driven traffic but with the help of PPC, it ensures that your brand dominates the SERPs.
In addition to this, it actually assists your SEO campaign in recovering the clicks it might’ve missed. They can assist you in drawing traffic from those in search of your products or services!
Remarketing
Another opportunity PPC campaigns offer is remarketing. Most of the organic traffic your SEO garners come from potential customers that often take their time before making a decision.
The ads can help remind them of going back to the site and making that purchase. Combining your SEO and pay-per-click strategy helps you reach back to customers and successfully convert them into a lead.
Negative Keywords List
Pay Per Click also has a feature that helps brands keep their marketing efforts well-targeted called negative keywords. It helps Google identify which search queries are not related to them but only a handful of campaigns use it.
Google Ads’ keyword planner is a great way of managing your targeted keywords and negative keywords. By developing your own list, you can avoid wasting funding on clicks that don’t really convert.
Testing Keywords
If your brand already has a running SEO campaign, pay per click can help you test some of the keywords you want to add.
For example, if you’re aiming to rank for a new set of keywords, buying PPC ads can help you test out the waters. This can help you avoid wasting resources on keywords that don’t really work.
Bigger Data, Bigger Ideas
And the major benefit of integrating SEO and Pay-per-click is a large source of data. Both methods provide similar metrics such as click-through rates, bounce and exit rates, the time users spent on your website as well as your brand’s conversion rate.
The data you collect can help you in decision-making processes. This becomes specially useful when you’re determining which keywords or phrases are generating more sales.
As the competition on Google’s SERP continued to change, earning money with pay per click becomes more difficult. Integrating both strategies in a seamless manner can lead to better fortune.
In addition to the points mentioned above, PPC advertising offers a unique opportunity to:
- Grow Your Customer Base – Connect with searchers actively looking for products and services like yours, and respond to that need by providing them with an offer relevant to their search query.
- Generate Leads at Low Costs – Because pay-per-click marketing allows you to reach leads and prospects when they’re researching and looking to buy, it’s a highly effective way to bring interested visitors to your site. Plus, you can enjoy an algorithmically generated discount from the search engines in exchange for making their users happy.
The truth is, pay-per-click marketing can work for almost any kind of business, whether you’re looking to sell products through an e-commerce website, generate leads for a service-based or software business, build brand awareness, or even drive foot traffic and phone calls to your local store.
So, if your pay per click marketing is properly done, it will have tremendous impact on your products and the brand in general. But, how can you do it properly? Lets see.
How can you Effectively Manage Your PPC Campaign for a Better Result?
If you have successfully created your PPC campaign, congratulations but that is not all. You still have a lot of work to do if you want your desired result.
You’ll need to manage your campaign 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:
- Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
- Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
- 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.
- Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
- 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.
How much does PPC Advertising Cost?
Your PPC costs are likely to be driven by the competitiveness of your market, the value of your product and your regular marketing spend.
The more competitive your market and the more expensive your product, the more you will have to pay to feature prominently in the listings.
The amount you want to pay per click, however, should be determined by your marketing budget and your online conversion rates.
For example, if you normally set aside 10% of the retail value of the £100 shoes you sell for sales and marketing, you should stick to this.
If you know that one in ten visitors to your site will buy your shoes, that suggests you can afford to pay up to £1 per click – which amounts to £10 for every sale, or 10% of the retail value of the shoes.
There are free tools that can help you get ideas for keywords and see how much you need to bid. You should try out different keywords to see which ones give you the best return on your advertising spend.
What are the Pros and Cons of PPC Advertising?
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a cost effective way to drive traffic to your website. There are a number of benefits and challenges to consider.
Pros
The benefits of running PPC advertising include:
- Cost effective – because you only pay when a user actually reaches your website, it can be good value for money. You can choose to spend as much or as little as you like.
- Targeted – you can choose your audience according to demographics like location, language and device
- Measurable – PPC campaigns can be set up to carefully measure effectiveness. You can determine exactly how much your return on investment is.
- Customisable – as you run your campaigns, you can make many small adjustments to improve based on what works best.
- Training resources – there are many (often free) online courses and training materials to help you develop your skills.
- 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.
Cons
Some of the challenges of PPC advertising include:
- Time investment – you can’t just set up your PPC campaigns and leave them. You need to invest time into optimising and improving to get the best results.
- Skills required – it can take some practise to set up effective campaigns. Many businesses choose to use a specialist agency.
- 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.
- Clicks and visits don’t always lead to sales – you will need to convince the user to ‘convert’ once they reach your website.
What is the Best Pay Per Click Site?
The answer to this question is not really difficult to arrive at, when it comes to online advertising of this sort, Google immediately comes to mind.
Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords – by far the most popular PPC platform – operates on a pay-per-click model, in which users bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements.
Every time a search is initiated, Google digs into the pool of bidding advertisers and chooses a set of winners to appear in the ad space on its search results page.
The “winners” are chosen based on a combination of factors, including the quality and relevance of their keywords and ad text, as well as the size of their keyword bids.
For example, if Megaincomestream bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page.
More specifically, who gets to appear on the page and where is based on an advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying two key factors – CPC Bid (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and Quality Score (a value that takes into account your click-through rate, relevance, and landing page quality, among other factors). In turn, your Quality Score affects your actual cost per click, or CPC.
This system allows winning advertisers to reach potential customers at a cost that fits their budget.
What Should be the Approach for Effective Pay Per Click Campaigns?
Choose Your Keywords Wisely
PPC ads work by having you bid on matching specific keywords to your ad. How effective your bid is depends on, among other factors, how much you spend, so you want to make sure that you’re bidding on the right keywords.
For Google AdWords, for instance, the Keyword Planner is a great tool that gives you keyword suggestions, letting you research and pick amongst the most effective.
While this is a good place to start, bear in mind that many of your competitors might get the same keywords from Google.
If you find any words or phrases that the Keyword Planner doesn’t suggest, then you might have stumbled onto a keyword that your competitors aren’t already bidding on.
Lead with Value First
It’s a solid tactic across all marketing niches and it works for PPC, too.
While your keywords should focus in part on the details and descriptions of what you offer, let the actual ad copy take a value-based approach.
For instance, rather than writing copy that describes your services as a “social media marketing company,” describe the values and benefits of the service, such as “increase your traffic,” “grow your conversions,” and “improve your impressions.”
Don’t think about what the customer literally gets, but rather what value your products and services offer them. How are you going to solve their problem and make their life better?
Include a Call to Action
It’s always best to end an ad with a call to action. The main body of the copy should offer the value and make it about the customer. In other words, show why people should use your service. What are they going to get?
Your CTA should clearly give the potential convert an actionable next step that the rest of the copy has been gearing them up for.
A good call to action also adds a sense of urgency to the ad, like there’s something there for them to capitalize on there right now.
An effective CTA should:
- Be compelling
- Have a clear benefit for the user
- Continue the conversion momentum
- Actually cause action
Simple calls to action like “sign up” or “download now” or “start my free trial” have proven to be a lot more effective than ads that don’t have CTAs.
Netflix has an especially compelling call to action: “Join free for a month.” The text just above the button also ads to it: “Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.”
Target both Newcomers and Old-Hands
If you’re familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel, then you’re aware that you can convert people who are at different stages in the funnel.
The first stage is building awareness and interest, and this is where most PPC campaigns aim for. They use keywords to target those who might not know exactly what your business provides.
However, people in the latter stages of the marketing funnel know exactly what companies like yours provide and already have a purchasing intent.
Use keywords specifically for people in the commitment stage of the marketing funnel, such as “hire social media management team.”
The closer your ad viewer is to having that purchasing intent, the more likely they are to convert.
Should You Bid on Brands?
Some people will say that you should never bid on branded keywords. There is some wisdom in this. For instance, you shouldn’t bid on your own brand.
If someone knows your brand name, they can visit your site directly; they don’t need you to pay for an ad to lead them there. However, if you provide products that belong to other brands, then you should bid on those keywords.
So if you’re a Peugeot car dealer, don’t bid on your own business brand; instead, bid on “Peugeot cars for sale.” It helps match you up with people who are looking for specific products but who have a variety of suppliers to buy from.
Find Your Long-tail Keywords
Many businesses and individuals stick to short-tail keywords; that is, keywords that are only 1-3 words long, such as “buy Peugeot cars.” This is the easiest way to make sure that you’re bidding to as broad an audience as possible, and likely getting more clicks.
However, a long-tail keyword like “buy used Peugeot cars London” is more specific, but it’s also going to appear more prevalently to those specific people who are more likely to convert. So you’ll want to find the long-tail keywords that apply best to your business.
A good way to do that is to look at the organic search results that have led to your web pages in the past.
Choose Quality over Quantity
Many PPC platforms have their own standards for what can help you win a bid. It’s not just about how much you’re willing to spend, but the quality of your ads, as well. In AdWords, for instance, this is measured by a “Quality Score”.
This takes into account not just your click-through rate, but the relevance of the ads to the chosen keywords and the relevance of the site to the ads.
Improve your Quality Score, first and foremost, by making sure that you’re eliminating any keywords for ad groups where they’re not relevant.
Focus Your Ad Groups
Relevance is a big part of what makes an ad group likely to have a better Quality Score. For that reason, you should make each of your ad groups fit a specific purpose.
For instance, if your business provides both social media marketing and search engine optimization services, you could brand them both together in ads for general digital marketing.
However, you’re likely to get more clicks and conversions if you create a separate ad group for the social media marketing keywords and for the search engine optimization keywords.
Ad groups work best when they have a narrow target. The broader the range of keywords, the more diverse the copy, and thus the harder it is for an ad group to work effectively.
Cut Clicks that Don’t Convert
You might find that a lot of people are getting exposed to your PPC advertisement, despite not being the kind of web user that you want to market to.
For instance, back to the car dealer example: if you sell only Peugeot cars, you don’t want your ads to appear to people who are searching for Mazda car dealers.
You can use negative keyword modifiers to make sure that your ad doesn’t appear for irrelevant searches. In this case, you would assign “Mazda” as one of your negative keywords.
There are broader categories of keywords you might want to disallow, too. For example, unless you’re offering a free trial, make “free” a negative keyword.
Many people might be searching for a company like yours as a place of employment, so if you’re not hiring, make “employment,” “job,” “hiring,” and “career” negative keywords.
You should continue to build your negative keyword list over time. This will prevent you from spending money on clicks that don’t lead to conversions.
Be Selective about Who Sees Your Ads
Keep in mind that there are people who will click on your ad with no intent to use your services.
There have been a lot of cases of “click fraud” where, for instance, businesses have clicked on their competitor’s PPC ads several times just to make them spend money without getting anything in return.
This could make your PPC campaign much more expensive, so use IP Exclusion to identify those IPs that are clicking your ads without converting. It makes sure that the ad doesn’t appear to those people in future.
Create Different Ad Groups for Mobile
Just as you create responsive content and a responsive website for mobile device users, you should also create responsive PPC ads for mobile users. For instance, if you’re using social media PPC, then you have the option to include videos and images.
Some of those multimedia adverts aren’t going to work as well on mobile and so mobile users won’t click on them. You can weigh ad bids for mobile differently from desktop ads.
You can make certain ads less likely to appear on mobile or stop them from appearing entirely. On the other hand, you can make ads that appear specifically on mobile devices.
Get Local
Particularly with search engine PPC like Google AdWords, the physical location of the business can play a huge factor in appealing to nearby web users.
We’ve already gone into how using locations as part of a long-tail keyword ad group can be effective.
But if you set location parameters for an ad, people who are nearby are more likely to see it first even if they haven’t searched using the specific location as a keyword.
Google has released studies showing how effective location-based advertising can be, but there are still a lot of businesses that simply don’t think to include it.
Time It Right
Just as the place matters, so does the time. In online business, we quickly learn that customers behave differently at different times of the day and different days of the week.
They might be interested in taking a look at your website on a Monday morning, but they won’t have the time to actually convert then and there.
On the other hand, they might be willing and able to spend more time on the site and actually spend some money on a Saturday afternoon.
Many PPC platforms allow you to set time and day restrictions on when your ad is going to appear.
Let them run all day for a couple of weeks, see when you get the most traffic and conversions, and then narrow your restrictions down to those time periods.
Doing so stops inefficient bids and makes sure that people are only clicking when they’re more likely to have the time and inclination to become a customer.
Landing Pages Matter just as Much as the Ads
Do not waste any money on ads for specific products, services or results that just lead to the home page of your website.
When you’re talking about converting visitors, which is essential to seeing a return on investment, you’re talking about making it as easy for them as possible to go straight from clicking your ad to becoming a customer.
Use individual landing pages for your ad groups that provide content and calls to action that are specific to the wants of the potential customer.
For instance, if you’re selling cars, then you might want one landing page for Peugeot cars and one for Mitsubishi cars. Each one should have its own ad group, its own keywords, and its own landing pages.
Otherwise, you add barriers to your potential customer’s path which makes them more likely to give up.
A/B testing is important for making sure that landing pages are as effective as possible. Finding the right place to put your CTA, using the right image, and creating the right heading can all change how effective a landing page is at converting visitors.
A/B testing allows you try out different versions of the same page to see which one works best.
Match the Copy to the Page
How a landing page relates to an advert should be immediately recognizable to a visitor. The best way to make it appear relevant is to match the content and the web page title with the language used in the copy.
Read Also: How do Online Ads Make Money?
You should even consider naturally fitting in the keywords that led the user to the ad in the first place.
Not only does it make it more likely that you’ll convince visitors they’re in the right place, but it’s an important part of establishing the relevancy that can directly contribute to your ad group Quality Score, thus making it more likely to succeed at bids
Finally
Pay per click presents great opportunities for brands to promote their products, drive traffic to their and even increase newsletter subscriber base. However, as you have seen already, a lot of efforts goes into achieving your PPC marketing goals.