What is PPC Marketing? Is it worth investing money in PPC marketing? Does it really help in growing the business? When it comes to PPC marketing, there are a lot of questions that arise in people’s minds.
For any business, Marketing is necessary to make money. There is a classical business saying, “You can’t make money without spending money first.” There are various marketing techniques but which would work best for your business. Might be you have heard about PPC marketing. Here in this article, we will be discussing about it how it can help your business?
What is PPC Marketing?
PPC (aka Pay-Per-Click) marketing is a form of online marketing where advertisers only pay when their ads get clicked by the user. The ads are shown in accordance with relation to the keywords, platforms, and audience types. It’s all about the relevance of keywords with the ads.
PPC marketing is an automated system that uses AI technology for showing ads to people. So, it’s certain that the ads will be displayed to the relevant and interested people. The ad ranking depends upon the quality score and relevancy of the ads with the landing page. The better the quality score, the less the budget investment in PPC advertising.
The primary goal of PPC marketing is:
- Brand Awareness
- Generating leads and conversion
- Increasing Sales
Benefits of PPC Marketing
PPC marketing has numerous benefits. Some are listed below
- Pay only when people actually visit your content
- Targeting the right people at the correct time and the proper geolocation
- Measurable and Trackable Data
- Grow Brand awareness
- Full Control over budget by scheduling the campaign
- Remarketing to those people who have an interest in your business
- Increasing sales through the usage of conversion and sales funnel
What Platform does PPC Marketing involve?
There are several PPC marketing platforms. Every platform has its benefits and best uses according to the location. The usage of the PPC marketing platform determines the efficiency of marketing for growing the business. Some of the significant PPC Platforms are discussed below
Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) launched in 2000 is the largest pay-per-click platform. There are millions of publishers for showing ads that are controlled through Google Adsense. It also provides various extensions such as price extensions, site links extension, callout extension, location extension, etc. for providing more details through the ads. Google Ads support the following ad types and formats
- Search Advertising
- Display Advertising
- Video Advertising
- Shopping Advertising
- Email Ads
Microsoft Ads
Microsoft Ads owned by Microsoft are similar to Google Ads that show its ads on Microsoft and Yahoo networks. It also utilizes its search partners to display the ads. The Ads are controlled through Bing Ads. Microsft advertising supports the following ad types (format)
- Text-based ads
- Image ads
- Feed ads
- Search Ads
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are managed through the Facebook ad manager. These ads are best for remarketing purposes. Furthermore, advertising on Facebook helps in increasing engagement on social media posts. There are six areas for placing the ads. They are
- Facebook desktop newsfeed
- Facebook right column
- Instant Articles
- Audience Network
- Facebook Mobile news feed
Facebook supports the following ad formats
- Photo ads
- Video ads
- Slideshow ads
- Dynamic Product Ads
- Carousel ads
- Canvas ad
Besides these major PPC platforms, some relevant PPC platforms include Twitter ads, Linkedin ads, revcontent, etc.
Important factors that impact Successful PPC Marketing
Without proper optimization of the ads, no business can get profit. The successful PPC marketing depends on the planning and executing of PPC marketing campaign. Most of the marketers get frustrated when PPC doesn’t bring sales to their business. Poor campaign performance and mistakes consume more marketing budget and provide lower ROI. Some of the major factors that impact PPC marketing are discussed below
1. Ad Quality Score
Ad Quality Score is the most important factor that affects the PPC campaign. The ad quality score determines the ad ranking and its placements. The quality score depends upon the relevancy of keywords, landing page, ad groups, Ad text, etc. The primary benefit of having a higher quality score is lower Cost Per Click (CPC) and better ad ranking with suitable ad placements. Through optimizing the quality score, the marketer can minimize the advertising budget and maximize ROI quickly.
What factors affect Ad quality score?
The above picture shows the qualities that a PPC ad must-have. When an ad meets all the quality, then there is a high probability that ad visibility increases. Therefore, while creating an ad, one should try to meet the maximum quality requirement.
When the ad meets all the qualities, it determines that ad meet all the requirement of the customers, which indicates better performance of the PPC ad.
2. Keyword Management
The live ads appear concerning interested people through keyword search queries and history. Keyword Management refers to keyword research and keyword grouping, which helps in delivering the ads to concerned people. Keyword research is an essential aspect before running any campaign.
The keywords which are used to increase the visibility of the website should match the customers’ search. Which means the keywords have to be relevant to the customers’ search. If the keywords are relevant, it also indicates that your business website is prioritizing over competitors’ websites.
Without the relevant keywords, the performance of the campaign becomes poor and can waste the budget. Usage of negative keywords is useful in protecting the appearance of ads from unnecessary and irrelevant keywords. Ad grouping refers to the management of a group of keywords that have a common target.
3. Effective Call-to-Action
Call-to-Action is the button embedded in an ad with some words or phrases to encourage the potential customer to take action. CAT is the marketing strategy that is used to promote the sales or advertisement of the product. Incorporating CTA in the ads increase the lead in the website.
When adding CTA in the ad, the advertiser must focus on motivating the potential customers to click on the CTA button. In order to do this, the advertiser must use the mind striking words and phrases to draw the attention of the potential customer. Along with this, adding a prominent CTA button will also encourage the potential customer to click on it.
Call-to-action (CTA) helps targeted audiences for performing the next step to complete specific actions such as buy, register, order now, etc. It should be clear and concise. CTA is useful in increasing the Click-Through Rates (CTR) either for generating leads or for encouraging them into the sales funnel or purchase funnel.
4. Ad Extensions
According to Google, the CTR increases by 30% with the usage of ad extensions. Ad Extensions are extra snippets of relevant information about the business. It includes business’ phone numbers, ratings, location, offers, etc. Moreover, the ads extension is useful to show site links, relevant page links, structured snippets, etc. There is no cost for adding ad extensions to the campaign. So, why not to use ad extension for better performance of the ads?
Moreover, this feature encourages customers to visit the landing pages and perform the necessary actions. Using the right extension can also increase the conversion rate. And the most interesting part is that this feature is available in Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
5. Landing Pages
The ads, when clicked, redirects to the website page, which is called a landing page. The conversion and sales generation depends upon the design of the landing page. The landing page profoundly influences the ad quality score. Thus, the landing page should be relevant and highly associated with PPC ads.
The design of the Landing page includes a proper color scheme, call-to-action, and fewer escape buttons. Copywriting Skills are essential for grabbing the attention of the audience. Furthermore, exit popup boxes help in a better conversion rate for email marketing.
Some marketers are unaware of the fact that the landing page can affect the performance of the ad. When the landing page is designed in an attractive manner, it convinces visitors to perform necessary activities, which indicate that those visitors can turn into potential customers.
6. Split testing
No campaign becomes effective without testing different variations of ads and landing pages. You might not be aware of whether your campaign can generate more conversions.
Split testing, commonly referred to as A/B testing is a process of testing two different versions of web page for determining which version performs better in boosting the conversion. Split testing involves changing headlines, call-to-action-buttons, forms, etc. It’s a great way to understand audiences. Split testing is necessary because the same design doesn’t work for every business.
When you play with the ad design, it will give a different report every time. This happens because customers are responding differently in every version of the ad. Moreover, it tells you about which ad is being preferred by the customers most.
It’s a great way to understand audiences. Split testing is necessary because the same design doesn’t work for every business.
7.Know your competitors
Every business platform has competitors, and the digital marketing platform is not separate from the businesses; thereby, this field also has competitors. Hence you need to know and understand every action that your competitors take.
PPC campaign is useful as it gives a report about the ad performance, which helps in the analysis of the reports. This helps you know about the response of the customers or potential customers.
Using SpyFu reveal the performance of the competitors. Analyzing the performance of the competitors and report of your ad will tell you which loopholes are to be filled to enhance the performance of your PPC ads.
8.Create an effective ad copy
While creating a PPC ad, it has to attract the customers. Therefore you need to create an effective ad to attract the customers.
You need to write an ad copy which is different from the competitors and which meets all the requirements of your target customers. When you create an ad copy, you need to use those text and images which draw the attention of the customers. You need to create appealing ads to attract customers.
In order to create appealing ads, you need to research your potential customers, on your competitors and the keywords. You need to have detailed information about these before you finalize your ad.
Should you do PPC Marketing?
It’s evident that money earns money, but which marketing strategy to choose. PPC marketing can be useful for your business. With proper optimization and necessary research through A/B testings, you can’t imagine how higher ROI can a business achieve?
PPC helps in providing faster results. Here, you need to pay only when people click on your ads. Moreover, advertisers can choose their audience by targeting geolocation, relevant keywords, age-groups, etc. Also, the performance report and tracking system make it more reliable in optimizing the campaign for generating more sales. Make sure you do A/B testing for optimization and increasing the conversion rate. Control over budget and schedule are the additional features of PPC Marketing.
Conclusion
Once you focus on all the mentions factors and start creating your PPC ad, now you need to concentrate on improving the conversion rate. You need to monitor the performance of your ad and keep yourself updated so that you can improve your PPC ad.
On the base of the report, you may improve the keyword bidding, and if possible, you may test new ad copy. Continually testing new ad copy until you get the best ad copy will help you know which ad works least good and which works the best.
Though there is no restriction on which business should use PPC ad but, what you need to understand is that budget matters in PPC strategy. If you are not able to allocate enough money in PPC marketing, then there is no value of using PPC marketing strategy as it will not bring a significant change in the business revenue.
Even though if you follow all the strategies mentioned in this article, you may have to go through a lot of problems. There is no formula to understand which PPC ad is better for which type of business. Thereby, you have to keep experimenting PPC ad to understand which PPC format draw more conversion to your website.