Pay-per-click advertising (otherwise known as PPC) is a piece of marketing lingo you may or may not be familiar with. But did you know it can drive near-immediate marketing results and make your brand easier to recognize?
There are a lot of interesting words you hear come up in marketing: pay-per-click, search engine optimization, mobile optimization, “netiquette” - you name it. There’s a term for nearly everything, but something important to really hone in on is the power of pay-per-click advertising.
Whether you’re a large or small business, advertising is essential to overall success. There are several things you can do to get your business’ name out there, including pay-per-click advertising.
Pay-per-click advertising is designed to work faster than alternatives such as search engine optimization (SEO), which generally takes 6-8 months for meaningful results. While both are equally beneficial, pay-per-click may give you the snappy results you need to get things moving forward.
But how does pay-per-click advertising work exactly? Luckily, our content team at Rem Web Solutions has the know-how you need.
What is PPC Advertising?
PPC allows advertisers to bid on specific keywords or phrases they want their ads to appear for in specified search engine results. When someone searches for one of those keywords or phrases, the advertiser's ad will appear in some of the top results. Subsequently, they'll be charged a nominal fee each time a user clicks on their advertisement.
This allows advertisers to cater their campaigns to specific audiences based on factors such as demographics, interests, where they live, and so on. This allows you to set a maximum big for each of your chosen keywords based on the target audience you’re trying to entice.
The search engine uses its algorithm to determine which ads to showcase and in what order—think of the top search results in Google, for example.
So, Why is PPC Important?
Reaching your audience is perhaps the most important objective in advertising. After all, how is anyone going to find your products and/or services if they can’t find you?
However, it's important to understand that PPC is an asset - it's not just an expense.
There are several benefits to PPC that differentiate from traditional SEO efforts and social media, such as:
1. Faster Results
PPC advertising can be a faster way to drive website traffic, whereas SEO, while provably effective, takes time and consistency to show results. Several platforms can use these ads on the same day, maximizing exposure quickly. You can also utilize multiple platforms as well as different formats to increase brand awareness.
2. Reaching Your Desired Audience
PPC advertising allows marketers to really hone in and target specific demographics with specific interests and even centre their advertisement to people by a specified location. This helps advertisers reach the audience that’s most interested in their products and/or services. Advertisers even have the option to target audiences based on specific behaviours, as social media sites such as Facebook can aid you in showing your ad to a group that’s more likely to result in a sale.
3. Clear, Measurable Results
PPC advertising offers marketers tangible results that they can actively monitor and analyze. It allows you to track your sale conversations, ROI, and other key performance indicators. The more you can measure your business’s success and possible shortcomings, the more capable you are of either maintaining or adjusting the approach to ensure maximum efficiency.
4. Cost Effectiveness
PPC advertising can offer a potentially more cost-effective approach than other, more traditional methods of advertising. This can range from television or print ads (think of the old school newspapers or billboards). For this kind of advertisement, you’re often paying an up-front fee that can range in cost. However, PPC allows marketers to only pay when a user clicks on their advertisement, allowing them to set a feasible budget for their campaign.
5. Complements SEO efforts!
While we’ve made plenty of comparisons between PPC and SEO, it’s important not to pick one over the other. Both are essential marketing tools that maximize your ability to reach your audience and have significant ROIs. While PPC is faster than SEO, it’s not a replacement for it, rather, they complement each other. PPC can even be used to supplement some of your SEO efforts. Allow us to explain: SEO focuses on increasing organic traffic, while PPC focuses on driving more immediate traffic to a website, as these SEO efforts are still ongoing. This ensures you’re not only reaching your audience quickly, but continuously.
PPC Advertising by the Numbers
Let's take a minute to examine some statistics (our writers at REM Web Solutions love statistics), according to SmallBizGenius:
- PPC offers an average ROI of approximately 200 per cent
- 90 per cent of internet users will come across a Google Advertisement
- Facebook and Google Ads are some of the top performers in terns of reported ROI amongst paid advertising channels
These are some staggering statistics that bode well for those considering PPC as part of their marketing strategy.
How to Get the Most from PPC Advertising
When you begin planning to implement PPC, there are things you need to consider before you move forward with your campaign:
Be Specific with Your Target Audience
You need to have a strong idea of the demographics you want to reach with your ads. You have to consider everything from age, gender, location, interests, etc. For example, if you’re advertising something such as, let’s say, a protein powder, your demographic could be adults ranging from the ages of 20 to 30 years old, predominantly men in the weight lifting space, located close to your business operations. Of course, there are plenty of people who would be interested in protein powder, but every advertiser has a different demographic. It’s up to you to determine who your target audience is.
Set Tangible, Achievable Goals
There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, in fact, it’s a good thing. However, you also have to make sure your goals are realistic and achievable based on your specific goals and timelines. It’s important to make sure everyone involved with your campaign understands these goals and the milestones you aim to achieve so you can keep everyone on track.
Research your Targeted Keywords
It’s important to use keyword research tools to help identify the terms and phrases your target audience is most often researching and make sure your writers include them in your ad copy and website content.
What’s the Best PPC Advertising Platform?
If you recall our statistics section of this blog, you’ll remember we touched on some of the most popular platforms for PPC. However, these platforms are only going to be impactful if they actually reach your targeted audience. Younger audiences might be more prone to click on advertisements they find on TikTok (see the tween skincare craze of 2024), while millennials to older generations may be more prone to clicking on Facebook ads.
However, for the sake of keeping things succinct, we’re going to focus on Google Ads and Facebook, which are some of the most popular PPC platforms.
Google Ads
Google’s popularity arguably reigns supreme in terms of global impact. On average, the conversion rate of Google Ads on the search network is about 4.40 per cent across all industries. However, due to its popularity, it has some of the higher fees available for PPC advertisements.
Google is capable of processing 99,000+ search inquiries in a single second, meaning there’s a higher chance that your ad is going to reach your target audience and converting into ROI. The great thing is, is that Google Ads are great for big and small companies alike, provided you fit it into your budget.
Types of Google Ads:
- Responsive Search Ads: Responsive ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces on the Google Display Network. You provide multiple headlines, descriptions, and images, and Google automatically tests different combinations and shows the ones that perform best.
- Performance Max Ads: Performance Max is like Responsive ads, supercharged. It’s a goal-driven campaign type that uses Google's machine learning to optimize ad performance across all Google platforms like Search, YouTube, Gmail, and more.
- Image Ads: Image ads are graphical ads that can appear on websites within the Google Display Network. These ads can be static or animated graphics.
- Shopping Ads: Shopping ads are product-based ads that showcase a combination of images, prices, and descriptions of your products. They appear in the Google search results when users search for specific products or browse Google Shopping.
- Video Ads: Video ads appear before, during, or after YouTube videos allowing advertisers to showcase video content to a larger audience.
- App Ads: App ads are specifically designed to promote mobile apps across various Google properties such as Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and within the apps within the Google Display Network.
- Call-Only Ads: Call-only ads are designed to encourage people to call your business directly. They appear only on devices that can make phone calls, and when clicked, they make a call instead of sending a user to a landing page.
Facebook and Instagram Ads
Meta allows both organizations and small businesses to promote their products and/or services across the broad scope of the Meta platform, which includes Facebook and Instagram. You can find several of these advertisements in the main feed of Facebook and Instagram users, as well as the right-hand column of the desktop site or even on Facebook Stories on mobile.
Types of Facebook Ads:
- Image and Video Ads: These ads consist of a single image or video accompanied by a short description and call to action.
- Carousel Ads: Carousel ads allow businesses to showcase several different images and videos within a single PPC ad. Users can scroll through the images and videos to allow you to learn more about the products and services you're advertising.
- Slideshow Ads: Slideshow ads allow businesses to make an immersive video-like experience with multiple images that pan through several key points of visual interest in your products and services.
- Collection Ads: Collection ads allow businesses and organizations to showcase several products and/or within one ad, with a link to a full-screen view of the products or services provided. You can create yourself a tailored campaign that utilize Facebook's algorithm to show ads to the users that are the most likely to want to purchase their products or services.
PPC advertising can be an essential part to a robust and tailored marketing campaign, but you don’t have to go into it alone. REM Web Solutions is in the business of getting your brand recognized, whether or not you’re a large or small business. If you need help utilizing the many tools and analytics involved in the best possible marketing campaign, our experts have your back.
