Pay Per Click or PPC is a strategy that can help enhance your digital marketing strategy if you’re willing to put a little extra time and money into it.
But what exactly is PPC marketing and how does it work?
Join us for a crash course in PPC marketing and why it can be a useful tool at any stage of the sales funnel.
We’ll give you the lowdown on the difference between PPC vs SEO and how to create a PPC strategy that works for you.
Paid traffic is the traffic you generate with a little help from your PPC marketing campaign.
Regardless of which you choose, the use of relevant keywords is going to be incredibly important to your success.
Using great keywords as part of your SEO strategy will sometimes be enough to get you a nice ranking on the SERPS.
This is particularly true on occasions when the search matches up with very specific keywords you use, such as the name of your business.
With broader searches, however, even a great SEO effort might still land you on the third or fourth page of the SERPS, simply because there’s a lot of competition out there.
In these cases, PPC is a way to shoot your paid ad to the top of the search results anyway.
Is PPC better than SEO?
Not necessarily – but it’s not always worse either.
Both PPC and SEO both have their pros and cons, which is why many marketers use them both simultaneously.
But PPC does have its upsides, especially if your site is new and hasn’t had time to build much authority yet.
Some of the perks of PPC include:
- It can increase brand awareness by getting your ads in front of more people, much faster.
- Unlike traditional marketing, it allows you to target specific audiences.
- A PPC campaign also generates a lot of data, which you can analyze for information to strengthen your campaign.
- You can decide which landing page your ad links to, whether it be your home page, a product page, etc.
- PPC allows for remarketing, which is targeting viewers who have already interacted with your site.
How do you create a PPC strategy?
First and foremost, you’ll want to decide exactly what you want your PPC campaign to achieve.
Do you want to increase brand awareness, make more sales, or enhance your website traffic?
This may vary based on the campaign and which stage of the sales funnel you’re focusing on.
It will also likely influence your ad type, which is what your ads will look like and where they’ll be shown.
Next, you’ll need to set your budget and decide how much you’re willing to spend to achieve your goals.
The perk of using tools like Google Ads is that you can set an average daily budget and Google will optimize when your ads are shown based on when you’re the most likely to get clicks.
Now it’s time to choose your bidding strategy, of which there are many.
Google Ads, for instance, offers either automated smart bidding strategies or a number of other choices geared around achieving specific goals.
You’ll also need to specify the keywords you want to associate your ad with and what types of matches you want to associate them with.
For instance, you can choose broad matches, exact matches, phrase matches, etc. In this case, it’s good to stay on top of PPC trends.
If all this keyword talk starts to sound a little overwhelming, well, you’re not alone. It’s not unusual to start out overconfident, only to realize you’re tangled up in spreadsheets and obsessing over whether your “exact match” is too narrow or your “broad match” is just inviting in a crowd that couldn’t care less. Some marketers swear by weekly adjustments; others ride it out for a month just to see what sticks. Nobody really gets it perfectly right out of the gate, and if they say they do, they’re probably just bragging.
Plus, as soon as you feel like you’ve mastered the setup, Google or Facebook will tweak something behind the scenes, and you’ll be back at square one—or at least somewhere pretty close to it. There’s a bit of humility built into the whole process, like a gentle reminder that digital advertising isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal. But the silver lining here? PPC actually gives you a shot at learning quickly from mistakes. You can see what works and make changes on the fly instead of waiting months for organic search rankings to budge.
Last but not least, you’ll need to specify your audience, which is the buyer persona that your ad is designed to target.
There are several different platforms you can use for PPC marketing. Some of the most popular include:
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Facebook Ads
- RevContent
- AdRoll
