Beginners guide to PPC
The world of marketing is full of weird and wonderful terms, especially to the lay person, but for business owners and those running the day to day operations, uncovering their meaning and working with them can help open new revenue streams and new customers. In our latest entry, we discuss the importance of PPC, what it means and how you can start to use it to drive a raft of new traffic to your pages and funnels…
Written by Liam Bland
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What is PPC?
An acronym that flies over the head of almost everyone outside the marketing world, PPC is essentially advertising on Google search results, or Bing, if you’re that way inclined. It stands for Pay Per Click, which refers to how the game works, as users pay for each click their website receives from their ads. The size of the fee you pay, well, that depends on a range of factors, as does your position in the listings, but we’ll break that down later.
All you need to know for now is that PPC is an advertising model – and a pretty effective one at that! In fact, it’s reported Google alone earns more than $162 million per year through its ad platform.
Common Terms
CPC
Here’s another acronym for you to jot down, CPC, otherwise known as Cost Per Click is the amount you pay for somebody clicking on your ad. In the ‘auction’, the one that determines where you place in a user’s search results, CPC acts as your bid – so as you can imagine, the higher the bid the higher your listing – well, not quite.
Ad Rank (Google Specific)
That’s because CPC is just one of the factors that goes into making up your Ad Rank, or the score that determines where you place. Just like organic results, ad rank is made up of a multitude of factors but it’s commonly believed the biggest are your bid, expected click through rate (CTR) and ad relevance.
Quality Score (Google Specific)
Quality score has huge influence on the effectiveness of your ads, and ultimately it determines how much you pay for each click (that’s CPC for those who’ve been reading intently so far). However, unlike the overarching Ad Rank, Quality Score just refers to the strength of your ad group keywords. Though similar to ad rank, it’s made up of a number of factors that include; click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
Ad Group
Ad Groups are subgroups made from your overall PPC campaign, they contain
keywords, text ads and of course, your landing pages. They help you organize your campaigns and are especially useful if you’re utilizing techniques such as A/B testing to get the best results from your ads.
Keywords
Perhaps the most important part of any campaign, keywords help you define your audience and the terms you’re going to use to target them on search engines. All good campaigns spend a significant portion of time in keyword research as your ads will likely live or die by the choices you make here.
Landing Page
Most successful ads send the user to a standalone page on your website that is more relevant to your ad copy, than say your home page. Building a page that contains the keywords previously set in your ad group are crucial to scoring high on both quality score and ad rank, as is the overall experience a user has on your landing page. So, it’s important to be wary of anything that might cause them to bounce, such as slow load speeds, misleading titles and bad content!
Benefits of effective PPC
• Is capable of delivering a high volume of visits, and most importantly, the right traffic to your website.
• Easily manage and track performance of ads and your visitors.
• Full control over how much you pay.
• A plethora of research tools to help you reach your target audience.
• Multiple ad formats to deliver your message in the right way.
• Data from PPC campaigns can be used to inspire and define your SEO and social media campaigns.
• Helps you rank on Google, even if you have low domain authority.
Case Study - Camp Emerson
In a recent campaign for our friends Camp Emerson, we helped them to bring in campers from across the U.S and attract staff from both home and abroad with simple text and display ads on Google.
In fact, we managed to help them save an incredible $22,129.16 against what they would usually spend with a summer camp specific agency for each lead.
Check out more of their astonishing results from the campaign below…
• 76 new enrollees from the ad campaigns alone generating revenue of almost $300,000.
• 32,400 unique clicks through to their landing pages.
• Average CPC of $0.84 – Industry average considered between $1-2
Get in touch
If you’re looking for help organising, optimising or simply to work alongside yourself to deliver effective PPC campaigns, then why not speak to our marketing team by using the contact info below.
From local to international campaigns, we can help take your business to the next level and find the right traffic for your products and services, all you have to do is get in touch. We hope to hear from you soon.
