Learn the fundamentals of paid search advertising, the essentials of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and how to get started with PPC.
What Is PPC?
A pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model enables marketers to post ads on a platform for online advertisements and to pay the platform’s owner when those ads are clicked.
The advertisement’s purpose is to direct users who click to the advertiser’s website or app, where they can carry out a useful activity like making a purchase.
Due to their ability to display advertising that are pertinent to user searches, search engines are well-liked host platforms.
Real-time bidding (RTB), which is used by advertising platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, allows advertising inventory to be auctioned in a private automated auction utilising real-time data.
How Paid Search Works
Instantaneously, an auction for the term occurs whenever there is an ad space on a search engine results page (SERP).
The winner who will appear in the top position is determined by a number of variables, including the amount of the bid and the quality of the advertisement.
The PPC system functions thanks to these auctions. They start when someone uses a search engine to look for something.
An auction is started based on the keywords that advertisers bid on to determine whether they are interested in showing adverts linked to a user’s search query.
The winning advertisements then show up on the search engine results page.
Advertisers use accounts on services like Google Advertising to set up their ads, choose where and when they should display, and participate in these auctions.
For convenience of management and reporting of various regions, product types, or other helpful categorization, accounts are divided into campaigns.
Campaigns are further broken down into ad groups that include related keywords and advertisements.
Keywords
PPC is centred on keywords, which link advertisers to users’ search queries.
- Queries: The actual terms that users enter into a search engine’s search box to retrieve results are known as queries.
- Keywords: On the other hand, marketers target these users by matching their search queries to keywords.
When used as broad abstractions for a variety of search queries that are prone to errors like misspellings, keywords are effective.
Advertisers are able to match search queries with varying degrees of precision depending on the keyword match types they choose.
Advertisers can decide whether to need a precise match between keywords and search queries or to allow for variances like altered word placement, alternative spellings, or the addition of additional words.
Negative keywords can also be used to avoid irrelevant traffic by preventing ads from being triggered by search queries containing those terms.
Ads
These are grouped together in ad groups that focus on similar keyword sets and are arranged thematically.
If the auction is won, users will see ads, thus it’s crucial to set them right. They frequently include headlines, summary sentences, and a URL.
They may appear at the top of the results on a SERP or at the bottom. Testing many iterations of ad copy to see which performs best is a good idea.
Ad extensions are capabilities that services like Google Adverts and Microsoft Ads offer to improve the presentation of ads.
Examples include call extensions that add a phone number to the ad during business hours and sitelink extensions that add more connections to other pages of a website to an advertisement.
Ad extensions are excellent because they make ads more user-engaging and informative while increasing their visibility.
Budgets & Bids
Advertisers must choose their maximum budget before entering the auction for a certain keyword.
Budgets at the campaign level and bids at the ad group or keyword level are used to accomplish this. Budgets are established at the level of the campaign and may be exceeded daily, but not monthly.
Though bids are a more specific method of spending control, budgets should still be established in accordance with the overall account plan. There must be bids for each ad group, but keyword-level bids take precedence.
Automated bidding systems are popular among advertisers. With this, marketers can specify a certain objective for their campaigns, and the ad network will choose the best offer for each auction.
A portfolio of different campaigns or a single campaign can both use bid strategies.
Because of the RTB mechanism, the advertiser’s real payment is influenced by competitor activity and ad rank in addition to the maximum bid.
Ad Rank
Being the highest bidder is not the only factor in an auction’s outcome.
To decide which advertising should appear at the top and be paid for most on the SERP, search engines take into account a variety of additional characteristics.
Other factors are taken into account by search engines in their own unique methods to decide ad rank.
Google Considers:
- Bid amount.
- Ad relevance and quality.
- The context of the search (such as the user’s device and time of day).
- Format impact (e.g., whether it includes extensions that enhance the format of the ad).
Ad relevance is assessed using a statistic called Quality Score.
Elements Of Quality Score:
- Rate of clicks in the past (CTR).
- The keyword’s applicability to the advertisement
- The ad’s and keyword’s relevancy to the search query.
- Landing page quality.
Ad relevance is crucial because a lower CPC results from a higher Quality Score.
Even when advertisers place high bids on keywords with low Quality Scores, search engines penalise them by rarely displaying their adverts.
Because of this, having compelling, pertinent material with high-volume keywords is crucial.
Ads that connect to websites with bad user experiences will appear less frequently, therefore landing page quality shouldn’t be ignored either.
The user experience must be seamless, the web page must load quickly, and it must be relevant to the user.
Targeting
Advertising companies can only display advertising to relevant audiences by selecting the appropriate keywords.
However, there are more targeting choices available to improve campaigns, such as:
- Device targeting.
- Location targeting.
- Day and time targeting.
- Demographic targeting.
In order to maximise the effectiveness of their ads, advertisers can use this method to target people on mobile in the evening or users who are under 25 and within a specific distance of a specific area.
These are beneficial because, for instance, different ad copy variations may perform better for one group of people than for another.
It may also be feasible to target or omit previous visitors to a website who conduct follow-up searches using remarketing solutions that enable more specialised ad copy message and altered budgets.
By automatically adjusting bids for keywords in accordance with targeting options, advertisers may better control traffic and spending by placing bids when customers are more important to their company.
Conversions
The goal of all this effort goes beyond merely gaining clicks. To get conversions is the real goal.
Depending on the kind of business being marketed, these are the tasks that advertisers want viewers to accomplish after clicking on their ads.
Types Of Conversions:
- Paying for a service.
- Enrolling in a newsletter.
- Dialling a phone number plus more.
To determine whether a PPC campaign is effective and how many conversions are attributable to sponsored search rather than other marketing channels, tracking conversions is essential.
Platforms like Google Ads can track conversions by inserting a small piece of code into the source code of the conversion page, which is accessed after the conversion and functions as a thank-you page.
Because conversion routes frequently involve more steps than just clicking an advertisement and making a straight purchase, conversion tracking can be challenging.
They frequently include numerous searches and internet visits and may result in emails, phone calls, or in-person meetings.
How conversion pathways are given credit for conversions can be decided by using an analytics provider like Google Analytics
