PPC Advertising stands for pay-per-click advertising — a form of digital marketing that allows you to target users who are actively searching for your product or service with Google Ads. As its name suggests, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it to visit your site or call your business.
To get started with PPC, all you need is a Google account and a business or service to promote. Keep in mind that you can do Google Ads yourself, but it can be quite complicated. If in doubt, we’d always recommend that you hire a PPC expert.
What Does a Google Ad Look Like?
Google Ads are often the first listings for a particular search term, indicated with a small “Ad” marker in the top left corner. The listings that follow are organic search terms: results that have appeared because their relevance to the search term and, in some cases, search engine optimization efforts. These results are not paid for at all.
If you’ve ever made a Google search, you’ll be familiar with Google Ads — whether or not you’ve noticed that what you’re seeing is an ad.
How to Set Up a PPC Campaign
To set up a PPC campaign, navigate to create a campaign on Google Ads, select a campaign type and your goals, set up your ad groups (target audience), and create your ads. You can tweak these ads at any point in order to reach a specific group of people (e.g. based on geographical area, age or interests), or to promote a specific deal or product.
When you create an ad, you’ll be bidding on the keyword that it includes. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive it is when someone does click on your ad. You do have the option to to set a daily budget or a shared budget for a campaign. Part of this includes your maximum cost-per-click bid, which is the most that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. With higher bids, your campaign is likely to receive more traffic, although you’ll likely spend more. With lower bids, your campaign is likely to receive fewer clicks and conversions, but you will spend less. For this reason, it is sometimes compared to the lesser-known programmatic display advertising, where you use intelligent software to bid on and purchase digital advertisements. As you’d expect then, there is no simple answer to how much PPC costs; it could cost you as little as £1 or as much as £100,000 per day.
Benefits of a PPC Campaign
The obvious benefit of PPC is being able to target the right people at the exact moment they are searching for your product. Alongside that, PPC lets you drive warm leads, is easily measurable and trackable, is a stable marketing solution, and is cost effective — find out more in our overview of the top benefits of PPC.
For more information on how pay-per-click advertising can benefit your business, contact us online or speak to one of our specialists on 029 2169 0146.
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