What Is PPC? (Pay-Per-Click Advertising)

With the developing technology and digitalization, advertisement changed itself. Nowadays, there are many sources for advertisement. The internet is one of them. However, PPC does not cover all of the internet ads. It is the type of advertisement that takes place on the search engines. That makes PPC one of the interesting aspects of digital marketing and SEO professionals. Yet, PPC is not actually SEO. So, what is PPC? What makes it different than SEO?

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is an ad type that is shown on the search engine results pages (SERPs.) What makes it different than SEO is that it is paid advertising, as you can guess from its name. You can see these ads when you search for a keyword on a search engine. PPC ads appear on the top of the results, and they include bold ‘Ad’ writing next to them. 

What Is Important for PPC Strategy and Campaign Planning? 

The first thing you need to know about PPC is that you have to attract traffic to your website if you want to get visitors. Everybody knows that bringing new visitors to your website means potential customers, and if you manage to earn their respect with your efforts, you will definitely reach your goal. However, even if you use the traffic to your advantage, that does not mean it will work for you immediately with just one trick. There are several important things for PPC strategy that you should definitely consider if you want to plan an absolute PPC strategy for your website: 

• Prioritize Objectives: As the name suggests, deciding which objective will be more important to you is crucial for you to choose. Depending on your situation, you will determine what strategy will get you to your goals immediately.  
• Optimization: After you prioritize your objective, you have to adjust your website’s optimization in order to increase your website’s performance for your users. If you want to enhance your website’s performance, you will need to check your keyword decision for your website. 
• Negative Keywords: If you have negative keywords in your website’s keyword list, you might want to remove those negative ones. The visitors wandering on the internet will not be interested in your negative keyword decision, so that means they will not spend their time looking around your website. All you need to do is remove every negative keyword representing your website and replace them with more efficient ones. 
• Reporting: Reporting tools like Google Analytics will provide you not only information about user behavior but also it will help you enhance your website’s performance. Checking your website’s reports every day is crucial. 

What Are the Types of PPC Ads? 

When it comes to PPC ads, there are several types of ads that every website owner implements different types of ads into their websites. This is one of the best possibilities for PPC ads because there is more than one option, meaning PPC ads offer more than one option to the one who uses PPC ads. Depending on what your website offers in terms of content to your users, there are probably one or two good ads for you to use on your website, which is a good number for your website. 

Then what are we waiting for? Let’s look at other PPC ads that will be a good match for your website’s content: 

• Search Ads: Search ads are the ads that can be seen on search engine results. Since they have a URL, Google Ads are the perfect choice for you to run search ads. 
• Display Ads: As the name suggests, Display Ads uses images in their ads. Display Ads are the best choice for those who want to introduce their brands through graphics. 
• Shopping Ads: These types of ads are popular among e-commerce website owners. Shopping Ads help you showcase your e-commerce product in search results. If you want to run Shopping Ads, you might want to try Google Shopping. 
• Video Ads: Video Ads are the type of ads that can be seen on YouTube.  
• App Ads: App Ads are used in mobile applications. You can encounter these types of ads in app stores. 
• Social Media Ads: Famous platforms such as Instagram, Twitter (X), and Facebook have their characteristic ad design that represents their brand. 
• Gmail Ads: Gmail Ads can be seen in user’s Gmail inboxes as text or images. These ads are related to the user’s interests. 

How to Do Effective PPC Keyword Research

You know the importance of PPC strategy. However, you also have to know how to put that strategy and information into an actual process. This process needs time to research, so being patient is key. Let’s look at how to do effective PPC keyword research. 

• Brainstorming: Starting with creating your list of keywords that will represent your website’s content and products will be the starting point of the process. It is important to choose a keyword that will address your audience. 
• Organize Keywords: When you are done with creating your list of keywords, categorize the keywords you chose to your website user’s liking. Categorizing keywords will help you monitor your keyword list better. 
• Monitor The Process: Constantly update your keyword list, which is related to your website’s content, to enhance your website’s performance. 
• Adaptation: Now you are good to go. Update your website with new trends every day. Do not forget to change your keyword list. 

How to Optimize Your Pay-Per-Click Ads

Optimizing your website’s PPC ads is a must. As we mentioned previously, enhancing the performance of your website requires time and patience because if you do not optimize your website’s ads, you will encounter errors in your website. Let’s look at some important things to provide you with information about optimizing your PPC ads: 

• Keyword Optimization: Even if we told you about keyword listing, updating the keyword list is essential when it comes to enhancing your website’s performance.  
• Landing Page Optimization: Landing pages need to be related to your website’s keywords. That way, you can satisfy your website users. 
• Extensions: In order to increase visibility, you need to benefit from ad extensions.  
• Targeting Audience: If you want to attract users from a specific region, you should check your geographic settings and adjust the settings according to your performance data. 
• Budget Management: Do not forget to check your daily budgets every day. If you forget to check your budget, you may accidentally spend your entire budget on one specific feature. In short, you need to manage your budget efficiently. 
• Competitive: The day you decide to create your website and sell products will also be the day you enter the competitive world. Observe your competitor’s strategies and decide which countermeasure you should use against your competitor. 

How to Do PPC Advertising

When you create ads on a search engine, you pay an amount for one click. Of course, to make a profit, your visitors have to be more valuable than your paid advertisement. Paying is called bidding on PPC advertisements. To create ads on Google, you have to use Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords). It enables its users to create advertisements on Google’s platforms. One of the ad types is PPC. To create these types of ads, you bid on keywords. If you are lucky enough to select the most relevant keywords about your website, Google will reward you for being accurate and give you a discount. 

After you create the ad, Google brings the related ads from its database when someone conducts a search on the search engine. 

Even though paid ads always take place at the top of the results page, they have a ranking among themselves as well. So how does that happen? Google takes two things into consideration when ranking PPC ads. One of them is the CPC (cost per click) bid. It is the amount that the advertiser spends on the ad. The ad with the highest CPC bid gets to rank higher. The other ranking factor is the Quality Score, which is a combination of the value of click-through rate, relevance, and landing page quality. 

Since there are biddings and other ranking factors in PPC ads, we can say that Google’s system works like an auction. 

Key Points of PPC

Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to promote your business on the Internet. Especially promoting on Google matters a lot. The reason because Google is the most preferred search engine worldwide. So, to attract traffic on Google, you have to consider the ranking factors of PPC marketing. The appearance of your ads is determined by the keywords and the match type you select. Yet, there are still other factors you should consider. 

Keyword Relevance

Google takes care of keywords so much that it can even penalize your site for using irrelevant keywords. To avoid penalization, come up with the best and most relevant keyword lists. 

When doing keyword research for your ads, you should not only include the popular keywords; long-tail keywords about your niche are very important as well. It is better to do it this way to catch the relevancy in search queries. 

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It would be better to choose keywords that are suitable for expansion. The reason because you would want to refine and continue your campaigns. If you come up with new campaign ideas, it would be better to have keywords that are already suitable for your business.  

Quality Score

Quality Score is the score that Google gives to websites for their keyword relevance and quality of other aspects such as landing pages and PPC campaigns. 

Landing pages are important in PPC advertisements because they are the places where you lead the traffic from ads. If your landing page is not successful, the ads will be useless since you cannot make any sales. You can create user-friendly and quality landing pages with SEO. Optimized landing pages with call-to-action buttons are always one step ahead of their rivals. 

Creativity

If you are running ads, it is better to have some creativity in them. No one intends to click on an advertisement that just says ‘Buy Something.’ Just like in-text ads, creativity matters in PPC ads. To create the best advertisements, you can use Ads Creator tools or hire an agency to come up with a creative idea for your ads. 

Other Important Factors

• Adding Negative Keywords: To make your PPC campaign look more professional, it is recommended to add negative keywords to improve the relevancy of your keywords. 
• Splitting Ad Groups: If you want to create more targeted campaigns, splitting your ad groups will help you improve the click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score.
• Keep your Landing Pages Up to Date: Follow the trend of digital marketing and compare your landing page to others. If you create an easy-to-use and simple landing page, it will be easier for you to place your call to action (CTA) on the page. One other thing to consider is not driving all of the traffic into one page. Relevancy of your landing pages with your keywords is crucial. 

If you want to learn more about SEO, please check out our latest articles about it. You may also check how do search engines work.

Conclusion

We have covered what PPC is and how to do PPC advertising. If you are searching for a quick way to attract traffic to your landing pages, this type of advertising might be the best option for you. However, there are some key factors for fully benefiting from paid advertisements. That is why you should come up with the best strategy to turn these into a favor.