What is PPC Marketing?
Pay per click, also known as PPC for short, is an advertising model in which any user can advertise online, however only pay when a user clicks on your ad. In other words, your ad can show up thousands of times, but if nobody clicks on the ad, then you aren’t charged. On top of that, you have control over how much you would like to pay when someone clicks on it, hence, pay-per-click.
There are many places you can find PPC advertising models, whether it be on a banner network, individual websites, blogs, etc. The most popular place to find PPC media is on search engines. If a user types in a particular keyword into the search engine, results will appear. Depending on what words an advertiser is interested in, their ad would appear in the “sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” section.
While you can find PPC advertisements and PPC networks all throughout the internet, the largest networks are search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN – commonly referred to Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter – are the biggest players on the market, accounting for 95% of the search engine traffic on the internet. The other 5% come from other search engines such as Ask, AOL, Miva, Kanoodle, etc.
Why PPC?
There are many places to advertise in today’s age, whether your company may be product based or service oriented. Newspapers, Yellow Pages, radio, television, billboards, flyers, even planes dragging banners behind them. However, while these advertising vehicles may be great for brand awareness, maybe that isn’t all that you are going for.
PPC advertising allows for one to target which customers you want to target and track them at an unmatched level. How do you know traffic was driven to your website by that ad you put in the paper? How do you know the person that ordered your product on your site got there from the flyer in the mail? PPC allows for real-time feedback of your online marketing success. While it is easy to track success, it is also just as easy to track which mediums – keywords and ad copies in this instance – aren’t efficient for you and your business.
Recently companies big and small are shifting many of their advertising dollars from conventional marketing vehicles to PPC and enjoying great success – success that they can track. Unlike any other advertising medium, PPC campaigns can be modified, optimized, and tracked all at your fingertips with real-time results.
PPC in Search Engines – How does it work?
You might be asking yourself - how can I drive traffic to my website via search engines? It is a simple question to answer, but making PPC work for you is more intricate. When an advertiser bids on a term, or keyword, the PPC ad will appear on the results page. Where it appears on the page – top of the page or bottom of the page – depends on how much you are willing to bid on the term, or how much you are willing to pay for a click through to your site.
However, as mentioned before, you are only charged when your advertisement is clicked on. If your ad is clicked on multiple times by the same user, you will still only be charged once. The advertiser is allowed to create the ads – the title, the description, and the URL below the ad. The great part about PPC marketing on Search Engines is you can control your budgets and spending very easily. There is no minimum spending requirement. If you don’t want to spend money on a particular day, you don’t have to. You can set a maximum of spending $5 a day, or $500 a day. You can also determine how much you would like to pay for a click.
What are Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Media Cost, CPC, and Average Position?
These terms are the basic language of PPC marketing. Very simply put, here are the definitions of these terms:
Impressions – when you have 5 impressions a day, that means your ad was triggered, or served, 5 times – think of a print advertisement; every time someone drives by a billboard, whether they read the billboard or not, that would be considered an impression
Clicks – anytime your ad is clicked and the user visits your site
CTR – short for click-through rate, this is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions
Media Cost – this is simply the amount of money spent on clicks in a given time period
CPC – short for cost per click, this is the media cost in any given period of time divided by the number of clicks in the same time period
Average Position – also known as average rank - depending on the search engine you are advertising on, there can be anywhere between one and twelve ads on the search engine results page; if your average position or rank is 4, that means that, on average, your advertisement has 3 ads higher up on the page than yours
My business is local and I don’t need people from across the country visiting my site. Can I drive local traffic to my site based on where the user is?
Of course. As it turns out, a large percentage of search engine searches are local searches. You can advertise your business locally and you will get traffic for a fraction of the cost of other media verticals. Advertising locally on search engines using PPC can reach more people than Yellow Pages, is more traceable than billboards, and is much more cost effective than all of the above.
What kind of local websites and business can benefit from PPC advertisements you might ask? Attorneys, Beauty Salons, Landscaping, Restaurants, Churches, the list goes on and on. If you have a very niche business and you are not sure, feel free to contact us to see if we can help you!
What kind of budget do you need to start a PPC campaign?
You can test out the waters by spending a mere $100 a month (about $3 a day). There is no minimum amount that you have to spend. You decide how much you would like to spend, and we’d be happy to assist you on how to spend your budget most efficiently.
Search vs. Content PPC – what is the difference?
Good question. The biggest search engines, Google and Yahoo, both have something called the content network. This is where any website owners can sign up with Google and Yahoo and place Google AdWords advertisements onto their website. You might have seen ads like this but not have recognized it until now, where you are browsing a website and see advertisement banners that are text ads that say on the banner somewhere “ads by Google”.
Google and Yahoo presents these ads based on the content and context of what is shown on the site. For instance, if a news website has a breaking news report about a new bill that was passed that raises taxes by 100% and this website has Google or Yahoo content network ads placed on the site Google and Yahoo will trigger ads that are relevant to the text on the page. Therefore, advertisers that are bidding on keywords such as “taxes” and “foreclosers” may show up.
You can potentially double or tripe the amount of volume coming to your website. However, content traffic is in general less likely to become a quality user on your site in most cases, as the user is less inclined to buy a product that you may be selling or look into a service that you may be providing. The user didn’t find your ad through a search that they performed; they found your site through an advertisement on another site that triggered your keyword that you are bidding on.
Don’t be let down by content networks though. Content network keywords and campaigns may be tweaked until you get the right kind of traffic that you are looking for. On top of that, the price of clicks in content networks is in general less than search clicks. If you are looking to drive high volume to your site at all costs, running a PPC campaign through content networks may be your pot of gold.
What is the difference between PPC advertisements and natural listings?
Natural listings – also called free listings or organic listings – are results that the website does not have to pay for while paid listings, or PPC listings, are results a website does have to pay for only if the user clicks on the advertisement.
Click here to see a visual of what the difference is between paid and natural listings
Why use paid listings then if you can obtain clicks that cost nothing? Well, let’s suppose you have a bakery that is in Atlanta and you would like to drive traffic to your site. A keyword that would be important would be “Atlanta bakery”. There are probably hundreds of bakeries in Atlanta, and fortunately for you, only several of these bakeries have discovered the ease of PPC marketing on search engines.
Many novice marketers and small companies, generally avoid using PPC ads because they're afraid it will cost too much. But in fact, PPC ads may be the only way you'll get any decent traffic to your site at all, unless you have a rather non-competitive business or have optimized your website to rank high in natural search for the keywords important to you. Optimizing for natural search for important keywords like “Atlanta bakery” can be done, but results can usually take several months before you begin to see traffic to your site. Not to mention it can be very difficult to obtain these top positions. If you type in “Atlanta bakery” right now in Google, you will receive almost 5,000,000 websites in the natural search section. However, at this point in time, there are only 3 PPC ads. This is where PPC advertising and its advantages come into play.
The big advantage of PPC advertising when considering spending budget on PPC ads vs. natural listings is that you can get up-to-speed literally within minutes of when you start a new PPC campaign. Should you rely on paid search entirely? Outsourcing search engine optimization, also known as SEO, begins at about $1,500 for the first few months and goes up to $10,000 per month or more, depending on the size of your site and competition for your keywords. You can also control the amount of traffic you drive to your site through PPC. It is easy to reach the top of the search results and much quicker than SEO.