What is PPC?
PPC (pay per click) is an advertising model that allows marketers to place ads on an ad platform and pay the host of that platform each time their ad receives a click. When it comes to PPC advertising, the main goal is to lead the person viewing the ad to click through to the marketer’s business website.
The visitor can learn more about the business and its products or services and potentially complete important activities such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or email campaign, or accepting an offer.
Typically, the ads in your PPC advertising campaign will appear on the search engine results page (or SERP) of a search engine of your choice. Search engines are popular advertising platforms because they garner a lot of traffic and attention and provide users with relevant results for their search queries.
Google Ads, Bing Ads and more are advertising services that work with real-time bidding (RTB), which is a system where advertising inventory is sold in private automated auctions that use real-time data.
When used in conjunction with SEO practices and other marketing strategies, PPC can make a huge difference in the success and overall reach of your business.
Why is PPC Important?
When building an online business, you need all the help you can get to gain customers, make sales, and grow. In this modern world of digital marketing and e-commerce, PPC has consistently been one of the best platforms for advertising online. Efficient, easy to use, and a shower of results, PPC is a must for growing and established online businesses.
In addition to being so useful, PPC also comes with a number of benefits that are relevant and important to your business, making it a necessary part of your marketing strategy. Some of these benefits include:
You Save Money By Only Paying For the Clicked Ads
One of the best things about PPC is that it saves you money and really helps out your budget. This is especially important for new and growing online businesses that need to keep an eye on how much they spend and where that money goes.
In a typical PPC campaign, you pay your host search engine (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc) for listing your ads above or beside the organic search listings on their SERPs. When someone clicks on your ad, you have to pay the cost-per-click (CPC) until your budget is depleted.
If this happens, Google or your search engine of choice will stop playing your add until you replenish the fund. This way, you know if you’re setting too large of a budget, not setting a large enough budget, and never have to worry about paying for something that does not directly increase your ROI.
You Can Use Targeted Ads
PPC is also important because it allows you to choose the space where you want your ads to appear. In other words, you’re able to target your marketing campaign as precisely as possible thanks to PPC.
With more targeted ads, you can ensure that the right audience will see your ads, leading to relevant leads that have a higher chance of becoming customers. What’s more, targeted ads also give you the power to deliver specific messages to certain customers at the times when they are most likely to see them engage with them, and convert.
You Jumpstart Consistent Traffic
PPC is one of the fastest ways to run an ad campaign and see immediate results. In addition to being easy to set up, a PPC campaign begins working right away so that your ads are visible in just a matter of time. This means that you don’t have to wait 24 hours or more (like some marketing tools require) to start getting results.
What’s more, the traffic and data returned by a PPC campaign can actually strengthen new campaigns down the line because you’ll have a better idea of how the target audience perceives and interacts with your ads. You can then optimize them to help with your SEO strategy!
How Does PPC Work?
As mentioned, the prime spots for your advertisements are at the top or along the side of the SERP. Of course, when you think about all the online businesses there are in any given region, it does raise the question of whether of how ad space is claimed.
When space does open up on a SERP, it begins an Ad Auction. This is an entirely automated process that Google and most other major search engines use to determine how relevant an advertisement is for it to appear on their SERPs.
An ad auction is basically a bidding system which means that advertisers have the option to bid on words they want to trigger (i.e. display) their ads. This is another form of targeted marketing because only users who type in certain keywords will trigger the business’ ad.
With this in mind, your business should only bid on keywords that are relevant to you and your products or services. This means that you are guaranteed ROI for your ad expenditures. Using a keyword tool is a great way to learn which terms you should focus on bidding for, giving your business the edge it needs to gain more attention.
PPC is an effective marketing investment that can make quite a difference when used in conjunction with other marketing methods. Directive is a world-class PPC agency that understands the importance and value of your marketing budget.
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