PPC refers to Pay Per Click, and is the most widely used form of online advertising these days.
With PPC marketing, an advertiser, who’s willing to generate relevant traffic to his website, will pay per every click that one of his ads has been able to generate. The cost per click varies and depends on many factors (which will be discussed in a separate post).
The main advantage of PPC advertising is that the advertiser only pays for traffic (clicks on the ads), and not for the time that the ads have been running, or for the impressions (views) that the ads have generated. This saves the advertiser a lot of ad spend that otherwise would have been wasted, as paying only for clicks is much more effective than paying Google for users who simply viewed one of your ads, but don’t have the intention of clicking them and visiting your website.
To better illustrate how PPC advertising works, let’s use Google’s ad platform (AKA Google AdWords) as an example – Let’s say that our advertiser runs a flower delivery shop in New York City.
The first step that the advertiser has to take is to select keywords that accurately represent the services that he provides. In our case a good example of a relevant keyword would be: “flower delivery Brooklyn”. Once a user goes to Google and runs a search using this same phrase (or a closely related one), our ad will get triggered and will be displayed on Google’s search results page (SRP) alongside 7 more ads and about 10 organic listings.
If the user decides that our ad is the most appealing of all others, we will be able to “earn” the users click and get that user to visit our website, after paying Google the cost associated with that click. From that point and on, if the user finds the website and its offer appealing enough, the user will make contact with the advertiser, using one of the website’s forms or phone numbers, and our advertiser will be able to seal the deal and close a sale.
The first step is launching your first PPC campaign on Google (the most associated ad platform to PPC advertising) is to select the most relevant keywords that accurately represent/describe your services. These keywords will serve as the “triggers” that will trigger the advertiser’s ads to show when a user goes to Google and searches for the advertiser’s services.
The next step is to group your keyword’s list into what Google calls “adgroup”, which are basically groups of keywords and ads that are associated with these keywords. If any of the keywords within a given adgroup is searched by a Google user, only one of the ads within the same adgroup will get triggered. This means that any adgroup has to contain, closely related keywords – keywords that represent the same service or the same product type or the same location, with a matching set of ads – ads that describe the advantages of the same services that are represented by the keywords within the same ad.
Going back to our flower delivery shop example – Our advertiser makes deliveries to the entire NYC area, in this case, if a user searches for “flower delivery Brooklyn”, a relevant ad should clearly say that “we’re delivering to Brooklyn”. The best way to do this is to create a separate adgroup that contains keywords such as “flower delivery Brooklyn” and ads that clearly mention that “we’re delivering to Brooklyn”.