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!

This is the first lesson in PPC University, a set of three guided courses that will teach you everything you need to know about PPC and how to make it work for you.

First, we’ll need to define PPC and establish a basic understanding of how PPC advertising works.

• What is PPC?
• What are the Benefits of PPC Advertising?
• What is a PPC Campaign?
• How do you Manage PPC?

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.

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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.

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. 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.

What are the Benefits of PPC Advertising?

There are many compelling benefits of PPC advertising. Whether you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the value of Google Ads (or Bing Ads), there’s a powerful case to be made.

For starters, PPC:

• Offers quick entry.
• Results are easy to measurable and track.
• Works well with other marketing channels.
• Provides a wealth of useful data

PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most businesses and brands. If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing, you’re likely losing out on valuable traffic and revenue.

Need to make the case for PPC advertising? Here are just seven powerful benefits of using PPC.

1. PPC Contributes to Business Goals

This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.

Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.

In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads.

PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path that your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer. Regardless of the set of identified goals, PPC campaigns can be set up effectively.

2. PPC Is Measurable & Trackable

A major benefit of PPC advertising run through Google Ads is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the Google Ads tool in combination with Google Analytics.

You’ll see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals).

There’s no mystery to your PPC performance. Stats are readily available and show how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they are driving for your budget.

In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture isn’t as clear for attribution of the budget to direct results.

When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and track it all the way to conversion using Google Analytics, you’re able to clearly see what you spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals. No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like that.

3. Quick Entry

Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors on jumping into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same type of positioning and traffic that Google Ads offers within minutes of launch.

When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who are already aware of your brand, and you aren’t limited to your existing followers or customer lists.

PPC lets you quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and customers.

Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform — from the research to campaign build out, to writing ads. You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking and any desired landing pages.

4. You’re in Control

While there are several nuances regarding default campaign settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for how you reach potential customers. This starts with the keywords or placements you choose to target and how restrictive you want to be.

You also have a lot of budget flexibility if you want to start small. You can set your own ad budget and bids, and choose what you’re willing to spend (though you have to pay at least close to a market rate to play in most cases).

If you’re seeing positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop your ad spend right away. This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when necessary or desired.

Google Ads’ auction and the algorithm involved has the final say as to where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.

The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and to optimize while your ads are running, and to try new tests every day if you wish. There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment that you see in other mediums, and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to let it finish out a contracted media cycle.

5. PPC Works Well With Other Marketing Channels

Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now.

With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, Google Ads is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content investment.

PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience — the people using Google to find information, services, or products. The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from Google Ads can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for where to prioritize SEO efforts.

On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and business end goals are not siloed.

Google Ads remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on specific rules or audiences you select.

There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing activities. PPC can also be directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and conversion. If you can shift away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, it can be a big win.

6. Incredible Targeting Options

Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in Google Ads to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.

This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors, or focusing on specific audience demographics on the display network.

By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of Google Ads is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.

Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other.

Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience as well as those that have been exposed to your brand. You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.

7. A Wealth of Marketing Data

While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly available in Google Ads, the value of information gained goes beyond just PPC performance.

Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.

Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to find where your audience is.

You can also cross-reference where your competition is through third-party tools like SpyFu, KeywordSpy, and iSpionage to build a solid profile of what you’re up against and what market share you can gain.

What is a PPC Campaign?

A PPC campaign is a well-defined advertising strategy that sets out to achieve a specific goal, known as a conversion. The most common conversion goals include generating more leads and getting customers to make a purchase.

Advertisers must select keywords – user search queries – and create ads with these keywords to ensure their ads perform well in search engine results pages. Your ad can show on the search network when someone searches for terms that are similar to your products and services.

You can set up a PPC campaign on advertising platforms, using these dedicated systems to create, publish, and promote your ads to a specific target audience. The main platforms for PPC marketing are Google and Bing.

Google Ads

As the front door to the online world, Google is the dominant force in paid advertising, owning almost 80% of the market share. You can use the Google Display or Search Network to post your PPC ads, which will reach more people on Google compared to any other platform.

Bing

While overshadowed by Google, Bing is far from dead, powering almost 60 million searches each month in the U.S. alone. Bing is a great choice for small and medium-sized businesses, or if your company is based in the Google-free territories of East Asia, China and Japan.

Marketers can also advertise on Amazon, LinkedIn, and interestingly, Snapchat. However, if you really want to make a splash with paid advertising on social media, consider these platforms:

Facebook

The Facebook Ads platform allows for a high level of targeting, enabling advertisers to target people by demographics, age, interests, and location. The immense global popularity of the social media giant makes it ripe with opportunity for marketers.

YouTube

Have you heard that video marketing is kind of a big deal now? With over 1.8 billion active users, YouTube is attracting a LOT of businesses to experiment with video ads. As mobile mania continues to grow, this channel will surely become more potent for paid advertising.

Instagram

Since Facebook acquired Instagram, the latter has surged north of 500 million active users. The world’s love of video content makes this a hot prospect for PPC advertising, especially if your target audience consists of young women.

How do you Manage PPC?

1. Never trust Google blindly

In fact, never trust any PPC platform blindly – Your interests, and theirs are not the same. Here’s what it mean by this:

Think about the signup process for a Google AdWords account. You login/create a Google account. Set up your AdWords account, and Google scrapes your site to show you some obvious search terms you’ll want to bid for in AdWords.

Immediately after that, Google wants your credit card information. They want your money right away, to the point where they walk you right through to pushing your first ads live. Without any care in the world!

There’s not even an opportunity to hit the pause button until Google has your credit card information – it’s the gun-to-the-head get it done now approach.

In 5 minutes you can be running live ads!

This might sound great if you’re busy entrepreneur. But after many years of hard-earned lessons in this business, I can definitively say that if you let Google run your ad campaigns, you will have a hard time turning a profit!

So why does Google’s signup process work this way?

Because Google wants your money. If you lose the budget that you authorized Google to withdraw from your credit card, and walk away from AdWords saying “that didn’t work at all,” Google still keeps your money.

Adjusting your advertising settings to work for your business is something that sounds obvious, but it’s not intuitive in the AdWords interface. Google doesn’t make profitable advertising strategies obvious to their users (because that would affect their own profits).

Taking a skeptical approach to Google’s motives will force you look at your PPC account settings before launching, to make sure they align with your goals.

2. Be realistic with your expectations

What do you expect to gain from PPC advertising? It’s common for new AdWords users to have unrealistic expectations about what they can accomplish with PPC advertising.

Many new advertisers want to set up an AdWords account and immediately see 10X returns on their ad spend.

While that type of ROI isn’t completely extinct in PPC, it’s certainly not a normal outcome these days. It takes a lot of dedication, hustle, and persistence to realize consistently high returns. PPC can be a great way to generate leads if you’re willing to invest the time in learning how to make it work.

Like any new business process, start out with realistic expectations, and plan to grow your success over time, diligently. What do you expect to receive in return for your advertising spend? Be honest, be thorough, be realistic.

3. Know your numbers

There are several numbers that indicate the health of your business: Customer Life Time Value (LTV), Average Deal Size, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Product Margins.

Do you know these numbers for your business? Do you have an idea where to find them?

PPC can be a harsh dose of truth serum if you don’t understand your business revenue and expense structure before you start advertising. You need to know which metrics are critical to your business, and how you expect PPC to affect these numbers before you jump full throttle into PPC advertising.

4. Burn a little budget

The first month of PPC advertising is all about testing the market to find the best long-term strategy. It will be inefficient and under-optimized. And that’s OK.

Your first month advertising is when you harvest data on your target advertising market. This is when it’s acceptable to target more broadly defined search terms, so you can develop tighter keyword lists using real-world search data.

While we don’t advocate bidding on broad keyword terms for the long-haul – because they are inefficient – broad and +broad +modified terms do provide you with valuable keyword variations and negative keyword ideas, which help you build a well-rounded advertising campaign.

Spending time mining these search query reports in your first month means each future month will be run more efficiently. You burn (sacrifice) a little budget up front to have better results long term.

In your first month of PPC advertising, focus less on your return on ad spend (ROAS), and more on finding the right advertising opportunities. The first month is about putting enough lines in the water to find the best fishing spots.

During this time you want to monitor your search query reports closely. As you look at your ad reports, you’ll start to see which keyword categories have the most promise, and which search term categories are money wasters.

Once you move into your second month of advertising, you can create a more refined and efficient strategy that eliminates broad match search terms.

But in the first month of PPC advertising, you want to burn a little budget in order to find the best long-term advertising opportunities.

5. Don’t throw good money at bad

If your business has not yet achieved product-market fit, PPC advertising won’t get you there any faster. Even The best PPC advertising campaigns can’t save a flawed product with no market for customers.

To put it more practically, you can do everything right with your PPC campaign; reduce cost-per-click, write good ad copy, use the best ad formats. But, if your target customers don’t want what you’re offering, PPC won’t deliver the results you expect.

The best PPC advertising campaigns help proven products expand their reach. They help you expand on proven marketing efforts. They bring a ready-to-buy audience right to your fingertips.

If you haven’t found product-market fit yet, PPC advertising is likely to be an exercise in futility. You will get frustrated by the lack of results, and likely come to the conclusion that Google AdWords doesn’t work.

Don’t throw money at promoting a product that hasn’t found an audience yet. Focus on building your audience organically. 

6. Fix Your Funnel

In PPC, each leak in your sales funnel will hurt your chance of success. You can make your budget ten times more effective by fixing any leaks in your funnel.

There are many optimizations that you can make in your account, and my favorites can help your budget work 3-5x harder than trusting Google defaults.

Here are some examples of optimizations you can make in your account, and how it can impact your results.

Refine your keyword list, mine search query reports, and incorporate negative keywords

This can decrease your costs by 50%.

Use ad testing to find your best performing ads

Better ads can increase quality scores, which can decrease your spend by another 20% while achieving the same number of conversions.

Improve the relevancy of your landing page to your top performing ads

Quality score improvements can represent another 20 to 25% in cost savings. And that’s not to mention the benefits of increasing your conversion rate. 

Mine your search queries for negative keywords and new long-tail keyword opportunities

Provide individual bids for each keyword and reduce overall costs by up to 50%. And by focusing on relevant keywords, your conversion rates will also rise (because you are not advertising on irrelevant keywords)!

Remember, every click that doesn’t convert costs you money. When a customer sees an engaging ad, only to click through to a poorly designed landing page, you’re burning through budget chasing the wrong people.

Yes, this takes a rigorous and strategic approach to managing PPC campaigns. But this is the type of effort necessary to make PPC advertising profitable. Trusting Google to deliver results automatically is not going to get you anywhere. Someone needs to look out for your best interests: either you, your team, or a PPC specialty agency.

The difference between paying $10 to acquire a customer and $100 is the difference between a growing business and one that stagnates.

Keep your funnel tight. Leaks cost you money.

7. Broad is (generally) Bad

Too many broad keywords will kill your budget. Broad search keywords are a necessary evil in the first month or two of your ad campaigns. After that, they are budget-draining, click wasting, vanity mechanisms.

Once you’ve identified the right target areas for your campaign, you need to build out as many long-tail keywords, exact and phrase match keywords, and negative keywords as you possibly can. The more granular your account, the more you can reduce your advertising costs.

Moving away from broad match is a key step on the path to advertising profitably with Google AdWords.

Keep in mind Google’s tools (like keyword planner), and their account reps, will usually lead you in the direction of generic search terms that have lots of search volume and traffic potential. In other words, high volume, low conversion. Does that sound like a recipe for success? No way!

As we’ve already discussed, Google’s goals are not the same as yours. Google’s job is to monetize clicks. When you pay for a click, Google has succeeded, regardless of whether you achieve a conversion or not.

Advertising on high-volume, broadly-matched search terms will have you competing with bigger, badder, more ruthless companies than you. Companies running branding campaigns on unlimited budgets.

Companies spending millions of dollars a month with Google, and a different measure of success than your business. When you try to compete, you’ll either exhaust your budget quickly or go into debt trying to keep up.

Get specific, be exacting. Don’t be Broad. Broad is bad in PPC! 

8. Exacting Efficiency

Two of the best ways to become more efficient with your advertising are using exact match keyword types and Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

You want to invest your paid search dollars in the areas that are most likely to yield returns. You do this by advertising with precision, to prospective customers who closely match your ads and your offer. Or website visitors who have already shown interest in your site.

Going after the most motivated searchers is going to yield the best results. Let the big advertisers chase market share. You are chasing profitable searches!

PPC efficiency starts with keyword match types. Moving away from broad match to more granular match types and ad groups will yield great results.

Not only that, but having re-marketing pixels in place allows you to present ultra-targeted ads to a warm audience. Think of the world of potential searchers as the ocean and each dollar you spend is one calorie of energy. Think about how much energy (money) it would take to boil the entire ocean.

Targeting the bottom-of-the-funnel (ready to purchase customers), and minimizing your exposure to top-of-the-funnel queries (those just looking around) will produce the most efficient advertising results.

Sure, it won’t win you 100% market share, but that’s not the goal for most advertisers anyway. The goal for most advertisers is profit! There are only three paid search strategies, and only two of them actually result in profits.

Be efficient with your advertising to maximize your return on ad spend.

9. Get Granular

You convert searchers into customers by being the best answer for their search query. The best way to achieve this is by creating an ultra-granular search marketing strategy.

What does granular mean? It means that instead of focusing on the broad-strokes, you want to narrow your focus to see the granular details. This is a fundamental tenet of search advertising. The more granular you set up your account, the better your results.

Granular accounts allow you to test multiple ads against your best keywords. They allow you to test landing page variations against your best-performing ads.

Being extremely granular and targeted with how your keywords, ads and landing pages fit together is key to decreasing your cost-per-click. This structure allows you to drill down until you are providing searchers the best answer and the best experience each time they search.

The most consistently successful PPC advertisers test every component of their advertisements. They analyze their granular data until they’ve fine-tuned their campaigns. They have distilled their ads down to the most precise product to search fit they can create…. and then they test some more.

Get granular, be the best match for the search, then provide the best answer.

10. Daily Diligence

Running PPC campaigns is like tending to your garden. To create a healthy garden, you need to water your plants and prune back unhealthy limbs. For best results, you should maintain your garden on a daily basis until your plants mature. If you don’t, you’ll have a garden bed full of weeds and dead plants.

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That’s been my experience with Google AdWords accounts as well. Your Adwords and other PPC accounts require daily maintenance to make sure you are getting the best results.

What should you do on a daily basis?

• Eliminate underperforming keywords and pause poor performing ad groups
• Pause poor performing ads on costly keywords
• Increase bids on the best converting keyword opportunities
• Manage bids to hone in your target cost per acquisition
• Mine search queries and add them back into your account
• Report on results and monitor things closely
• Check quality scores and adjust bids to match first page estimates
• Lower positions by lowering bids, increase positions by increasing bids
• Work hard to build an AdWords garden that makes you proud

It’s this daily diligence that results in healthy, profitable AdWords campaigns.

While you’re building out your ad campaigns, try not to take days off. And Absolutely don’t enter into PPC advertising with the expectation that you can “set it, forget it.”

Daily diligence doesn’t mean you have to be logged-into AdWords 24/7. But it does mean you need to be checking your data, analyzing your reports, and making prompt adjustments when you see problems.

Not into gardening? Then think of daily PPC management like personal fitness. Exercise equipment doesn’t work if you leave on the shelf! But 10-minutes a day might make a big difference. Don’t set it and forget it – manage your PPC accounts diligently.