A Beginner’s Guide To Supercharge Your Digital Marketing with Pay-Per-Click Advertising

How do you ensure your message cuts through the noise of the digital marketing world? Further, how do you ensure that it meets the right people at the right time? If you are just winging it and hoping for the best, we have some great news for you - there’s a way you can make a powerful and effective ad. It’s called a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign. 

The term PPC can sound like a technical mystery, but don’t be scared off! It really is a straightforward and controllable form of online advertising that can deliver immediate and measurable results. Yes, you read that right; immediate AND measurable. Keep reading to understand PPC and its significant benefits, and even be able to picture using it in a business.

What is PPC?

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. It is kind of like “buying” visits to your site, rather than “earning” those visits organically through a long and sometimes uncertain process like SEO. (SEO is still crucial to do! Just relying on it solely is unpredictable.) The most common form of PPC is paid search advertising, where businesses bid on keywords to have their ads appear in the sponsored results at the top of a search engine results page (SERP). You know, when the very first few websites of your search have that yellow “sponsored” tag. That is a deliberate PPC strategy!

The process is like an auction. When a user performs a search, the search engine runs a lightning-fast auction to determine which ads will be shown, in what order, and by which advertiser. Your ad’s position isn’t just determined by how much you’re willing to pay per click, it also depends on the relevance of your ad, the quality of the landing page on your website, and your ad’s expected performance. This is often referred to as a quality score, and it is a critical element that ensures the search engine provides the most useful results to its users even in paid sections. 

PPC is also used on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as various websites. The fundamental principle remains the same: the only time you pay is when a user clicks on your ad. 

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The Benefits

• Immediate Visibility and Fast Results: SEO can take months to produce significant results, a PPC campaign can deliver immediately. As soon as your campaign is live, your ads can put your business in front of high-intent customers right away. 
• Precise Audience Targeting: PPC provides a level of targeting that is unparalleled in traditional advertising. You can target users based on the exact keywords they are searching for, their location, age, gender, interests, and even past online behavior. This ensures that your ad spend is directed towards the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. 
• Complete Budget Control: You are in the driver’s seat when it comes to your PPC budget. You can set a daily or monthly budget and never spend more than what you want. Plus, you can adjust your bids or pause the campaign and restart them whenever you choose. The flexibility alone is a huge advantage to doing a PPC campaign. 
• Measurable and Trackable ROI: PPC is a very transparent campaign, you can track every single aspect! You can see how many people saw your ad (impressions), how many clicked on it (clicks), and how many of those clicks led to a desired action, such as a purchase, phone call, or form submission (conversions). You can calculate a precise ROI and make data-driven decisions for maximum profit. 
• Compliments Your SEO Efforts: When used together, SEO and PPC are a powerful duo. The data that you gather from your PPC campaign can provide insights that inform and strengthen your long-term SEO strategy. Plus, having an organic listing and a paid ad for the same keyword on the first page of search results can significantly increase your brand’s visibility and authority.

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A Quick Example: “Big Bite Donuts”

Superior Effect Marketing’s (fake) side gig is a donut shop called “Big Bite Donuts”, specializing in delicious donuts in Superior, WI. We want to increase foot traffic to our storefront and boost online orders. We decided to run a PPC campaign.

Step 1: Define Goals and Audience

The primary goal is to increase online orders and in-store visits, and so we would need to define our audience. Since we are based in Superior, we would define the audience as local residents who are foodies and are looking for a high-quality bakery. 

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Step 2: Keyword Research

What would our target audience search when trying to find a place with awesome donuts? Brainstorm and focus on broad and specific terms. Phrases such as “bakery near me” and “best donuts twin ports” might be what they are searching for. Also identify negative keywords, terms that you don’t want your ad to appear for, such as “bakery jobs” and “donut fryer” for example. 

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Step 3: The Campaign and Ad Structure

We created the PPC campaign in Google Ads, and within that campaign, we created several groups to keep the keywords and ads relevant. Group 1 could be Donuts, which contains keywords like “donuts Superior”, “big donuts”, “fresh donuts”. Group 2 could be generalized by high volume keywords like “bakery near me” and “local bakery”.

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Step 4: Crafting the Ads

Write a compelling ad copy that includes the relevant keywords and a strong CTA for each group. 

For example: “Donuts” Group; Headline 1: Fresh Donuts in Superior

Headline 2: Made Fresh Daily at Big Bite Donuts

Description: Sweet dough confection deep fried to perfection. Order online for pickup.

CTA: Order Now while they’re fresh!

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Step 5: Set The Budget and Bids

Assess the daily budget that will be set. We decided $20 would be perfect to start with. We set the bids for each keyword, sometimes higher for certain keywords for ones that will indicate a stronger buying intent. 

Step 6: Launch and Optimize

We launched the campaign and have been monitoring the performance. We see that our Donut ad group is performing very well, with a high click through rate (CTR) and low cost-per-click (CPC). The general group is getting clicks but not a lot of conversions. We decided to allocate more of our budget into the Donut ad group because it is the best-performing ad group, but are also going to test a new ad copy for our general group. 

Big Bite Donuts can now effectively reach its local customer base quickly, drive targeted traffic to the website, and measure the direct impact of the campaign spend on sales - all because of this ad process! 

(We are hungry for donuts now after this example and are sad we actually don’t have a donut shop.)

This strategic, data-driven engine for business growth called PPC is a huge advantage for businesses, big and small. If you’re ready to see the impact of what PPC can do for your business, contact us today!