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PPC marketing is a proven effective method for driving leads and growing your business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local service provider, global enterprise, ecommerce platform or otherwise.
While you have probably heard time and time again that Google Ads and PPC marketing are powerful and a worthy investment of your time, getting started can be a scary task.
It can feel like you’re at the base of a mountain and without all of the tools you need to hike to the summit. Worse yet, there is a fear that you’ll blow through your budget and have very little to show for it.
This study guide is designed to alleviate this pressure and help you along in your PPC journey. By the conclusion of this guide, you’ll have all of the fundamental knowledge and tools you need to not only create your first PPC campaign, but to also optimize that campaign and unlock the power and potential of online advertising that you’ve always heard about.
Without any more delay, let’s begin.
In this first section, you’ll learn the very basics of PPC marketing, including what it is, how it works, the key terminology you need to understand this strategy and more. This will form the foundation of your knowledge that will be helpful in later parts of this guide.
PPC is an acronym for pay-per-click. This describes the payment model for how the majority of ads on the Internet function. It’s fairly straightforward and simple — when someone clicks your ad, only then do you pay for that click, otherwise you don’t.
You can think of PPC marketing as a means of paying for website traffic. This is a way to supplement your existing organic traffic. Some websites even find ad traffic to be more valuable than organic visitors, despite the small cost of a click.
If you use your website to handle any part of your business, whether it is sales, lead nurturing or another valuable activity, then driving more visitors to these pages is key to the growth and success of your company.
Knowing how the PPC process works is an essential part of understanding what PPC marketing is all about.
There are two ways to define the first step in the PPC process. You could argue that the first step occurs when someone makes a search or visits a website that has available ad spots. When this occurs, an instantaneous auction occurs that determines which advertiser’s message appears.
That said, you could also argue that the PPC process begins long before this. It starts when you select your audience profiles or keyword targets, enter your budget and determine how much you want to spend for each click because these steps will decide when and where your ads appear.
Choosing these options and getting involved in ad auctions is decided by the advertising platform you choose. Google Ads is the most popular service, but there are many platforms available to businesses.
Google Ads is not only the most popular ad platform, but also one of the most powerful and easiest to use. Thus, it is a very attractive option for beginners. Google Ads allows you to create online ad experiences that reach almost every user on the Internet.
Here are some of the powerful advantages to using Google Ads.
On the topic of Google Ads and search campaigns, it’s important to discuss all of the different types of PPC campaigns available.
Search Campaigns: The modern method of finding information and new products is through search engines. Search campaigns allow you to place ads at the top of search results pages. A paid search result on a network as vast as Google’s can produce a lot of traffic, especially because these ads often appear above the top organic results.
Display Campaigns: Image, video and other rich media ads that you see on your favorite websites are the work of display campaigns. Display ads can be placed on websites that have partnered with the ad platform’s service. The owners of these sites receive a small cut of the cost for each click that occurs on their sites.
Shopping Campaigns: If you have a broad lineup of products to offer, you can upload your inventory to the Shopping Network. This is a product-centric campaign type that takes advantage of consumer searches and the “Shopping” tab on Google. It’s an excellent strategy to make more ecommerce sales.
Video Campaigns: Video content is understandably the most engaging and you can convey a lot of information in a very short span of time. Video campaigns allow you to place video ads on streaming sites like YouTube, as well on certain websites.
Smart Campaigns: This is a feature in Google Ads that uses AI technology to match ad content to users. The Smart Campaign feature is designed to maximize ad relevance. It can be used to create just one campaign for your company that shows multiple products and targets diverse audience segments.
Discovery Campaigns: When you want to get the word out about your brand, discovery campaigns are a great option that uses Google’s channels to put messages in front of new and interested audiences.
App Campaigns: If you want to advertise a mobile app or you find value in advertising in front of app users, this is the ideal campaign type.
There is a lot of jargon associated with PPC marketing. When you start your first PPC campaign, you’ll be exposed to a wide range of metrics and unfamiliar terminology. Having working definitions of these terms will help you know what’s going on with your campaigns and your overall PPC strategy.
Impressions: Whenever your ad appears on a user’s screen, whether on a search results page or another website, this is an impression.
Clicks: If someone clicks or taps the blue link of a search ad or interacts with your display ad in some manner, it counts as a click.
CTR: This is an acronym for clickthrough rate, which is the frequency of how often people click on your ads.
CPC: This is an acronym for cost-per-click. This is how much that you pay for each click on your ads.
Ad Rank: When your ads appear, there are several positions on the page that are available. These are known as ad ranks.
Quality Score: This is a measure that Google Ads created to evaluate the quality of your ad experience, including your keywords, ad copy, landing page and more.
Conversions: The ultimate goal of bringing a user to your site is for them to take a particular action. Purchasing an item, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a case study — these are all valuable activities that may be considered a “conversion.”
You’ve heard about the positive and significant impacts that PPC campaigns can have on your business. There is a lot of value to be had by publishing and managing ad campaigns. Here are some of the most notable benefits that you may be missing out on by continuing to neglect this important strategy.
Anyone can launch a PPC campaign and begin advertising online, especially with platforms like Google Ads that are incredibly friendly and intuitive to new users. That said, you don’t want to just advertise online. You want to advertise successfully.
Now that you have the foundational knowledge necessary to understand what PPC marketing is and how it works, it is time to begin building the framework of a successful strategy that you can bring to Google Ads or another ad platform.
This next section will look at the stages of PPC marketing and the steps you need to take to develop a strong, successful strategy.
No matter what dimension of marketing or business that you’re approaching, there always needs to be significant planning and preparation involved. This is very true of PPC marketing, particularly because there is a direct investment of money involved.
Define Your Goals: The very first step is to set a goal or mission for your PPC campaign. No strategy can be successful when you shoot from the hip. Therefore, you need to have a very clear direction and aim for your strategy. Think critically about why you want to advertise online and what your business’ end goals actually are. Remember, PPC is a strategy that can gain progress towards any marketing objective or goal!
Set A Budget: PPC marketing requires a budget. This is another aspect that needs to be planned carefully. You need to think about your targets, particularly your keywords, and what the costs of those will be. You don’t need a big budget, but it is good to commit enough that you can manage your bids and test new keyword opportunities.
Analyze The Competition: PPC marketing is a very competitive space. You absolutely need to understand who your competitors are in the PPC marketplace and what the competitive landscape looks like. These competitors will directly affect your strategy, including how much you need to bid for certain keywords, which keywords are actually valuable, when it is best to advertise and much more.
Analyzing the competition is so important that many PPC marketers invest in smart PPC tools to monitor and track competitor movements. Google Ads also offers features that help advertisers outrank competitors with bidding.
Keyword Research: Keywords are an essential building block in PPC marketing, particularly search campaigns. Every search ad starts with a user entering a keyword into a search box. You need to know what keywords your target audience is using, as well as the ones that are valuable and relevant to your business. This requires very deep and detailed keyword research that uncovers short tail (1-3 words) and long tail keywords (longer phrases including more than three words).
Another factor when researching keywords, aside from length, is intent. Search intent is crucial in choosing the right keywords for your business. Ideally, you want to select keywords that suggest a user is looking to complete the desired conversion activity or are in the stage of your marketing funnel that you’re hoping to target.
For instance, if you want to drive sales or target people at the bottom of the marketing funnel, then investing in keywords that include the word “buy” is a great strategy. However, for users at the earlier stages of your funnel, you need to implement a different approach to keyword targeting.
Because of the importance of keyword research, it is strongly recommended that you look for a third-party tool. PPCexpo Keyword Planner, for example, will help you identify keywords with high search volumes and substantial opportunity in the PPC market.
In the execution phase, you’ll begin setting up your account, building your first campaign and executing your plan from the previous stage.
Account Structure: Setting up a Google Ads account is fairly simple and straightforward. You should have no problem following along with each step. The difficult part is knowing how you will actually structure your account.
Account structure refers to how you’ll define your campaigns and the ad groups within each campaign, as well as how you’ll set your budget. Most users have a few broad campaigns, with more specific ad groups and the budget is applied at the campaign level.
While this is the recommended structure, it isn’t set in stone and you can develop a unique account structure that suits your business.
Define Your Campaigns: As you get into the individual parts of your account, the first stop is campaigns. To start, look at your goals and the keywords that you’ve selected during your research in the planning phase. You may decide to develop campaigns for each individual goal or keyword theme.
For example, if you sell clothes, you may make a campaign that is focused on selling blue jeans. This is a method of defining campaigns by keywords.
Define Ad Groups: The next level is ad groups. While your campaigns may have very broad campaign themes, your ad groups will drill down and be more specific. You may have only a handful of keywords in each group.
For example, if your campaign is focused on selling jeans, you may have ad groups for keywords associated with women’s jeans, men’s jeans, kid’s jeans, etc. You want to keep your ad groups as tight as possible. In some cases, you may have only one or two keywords per group.
Write Effective Ad Copy: Once you have your structure, campaigns and ad groups defined, you can turn your attention to your ad copy. When your ad copy is compelling and relevant to the targeted keyword, it can increase your CTR metrics, as well as your Quality Score ratings.
Writing effective ad copy is not something you achieve overnight. More accurately, you’ll slowly improve upon your ad messages over an extended period of time. Initially, you just want to do your best in connecting the ad text to the targeted keyword. After you’ve acquired some data, you can begin making subtle changes and trying to increase ad performance.
Here are a few tips on writing effective ad messages:
If you’re still struggling to make great ads, take a look at what the competition is doing. You may find some inspiration in their ad copy. That said, don’t copy too closely. You want to stand out from your competitors.
Develop Superb Landing Page Experiences: After your ad copy, landing pages are the next hurdle. A landing page is the specific place on your website that you link from your ads. This is where users will “land” on your site after clicking an ad.
There’s a lot to consider with landing pages. Here are a few important strategies to keep in mind:
Remember, the key objective of your landing page is to facilitate conversions. Anything that gets in the way of this should be addressed and remedied.
With your campaigns planned and executed, you may think that your job is done. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. One of the chief responsibilities in PPC marketing is managing your campaigns. This includes frequently checking in and monitoring for potential problems, while simultaneously exploring possible opportunities to increase your performance.
In other words, you should always be making tweaks and course corrections to your campaigns and advertising strategies with the intent of improving your efforts.
Identify Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are keywords that hurt your campaign, instead of help it. There are a number of reasons why a keyword may be considered negative. It could be a brand, product or service that you don’t offer. You may also designate a keyword as “negative” if it is costing you a lot in clicks and not providing the results you want.
When you mark a keyword as negative, it excludes the term from your targeting. This prevents them from further wasting your budget. The PPCexpo Search Query Performance Report is a great tool for identifying negative keywords in your campaigns.
Increase ROI: One of the most important ways to evaluate the success of your campaigns and optimize accordingly is by measuring ROI. A strong ROI suggests that you’re gaining more and spending less. That’s exceptionally valuable!
Your ROI will largely depend on your campaign goals. One surefire way to improve ROI in the short-term is to decrease spending on low-performing keywords and channeling that money into higher performance areas of your campaign.
If you want a more long-lasting ROI strategy, then you need to work on improving your Quality Score ratings. Again, Quality Score is determined by several factors. Enhancing your landing page experience, writing higher quality ads, stronger keyword matching and many other tactics will help you raise your Q-Scores.
The ROI benefit of this long-term approach is simple; better Quality Scores mean higher ad ranks and lower CPC values.
Measuring And Reporting: As mentioned, you’ll spend the bulk of your time as a PPC marketer managing your existing campaigns, rather than creating new ones. If you don’t commit time to measuring and reporting your campaign performance on a routine basis, management will suffer.
How and what you will report and measure depends on your goals. Luckily, PPCexpo Reports has an extensive library of options specific to Google Ads campaign data that will allow you to see detailed reports on any part of your account.
Some of the basic reports that you’ll find with this tool are:
Reporting doesn’t end here. There are many different ways to report on PPC data and analyze what’s going on within your campaigns. The more time you spend in this area, the deeper you’ll learn about what works and what doesn’t.
There is another very important analysis tool PPC Signal which helps to explore hidden opportunities in PPC and also timely give you signal if something going to happen unusual.
You can explore the signals if your CTR suddenly dropped or your cost per conversion is going to high or your Average CPC is suddenly changed from the last few points (days) and much more you can explore with this tool.
You can access PPC Signal from here.
The importance of reporting, auditing and managing your campaigns is so crucial to your success that it deserves its own section. To reiterate a previous point, anyone can get started with Google Ads. However, it is a very different story to have a successful Google Ads account.
In this section, you’ll learn about how to audit your account and use reports to find areas of promise and concern in your Google Ads account.
A PPC audit of your Google Ads account is essentially a structured checkup process that will evaluate the overall health of your current efforts. In other words, it is a process for assessing how efficient your account is.
When you perform a thorough audit of your PPC account, two key things occur. First, you identify issues that are creating negative performance in your campaigns. Second, you discover actionable insights about opportunities in your campaigns that may be valuable to capitalize on.
There are three basic steps in a Google Ads audit:
While the overarching goal of a PPC audit is to check in on the status of your Google Ads account, there are some more specific objectives that this process should address. These objectives can be categorized into four primary groups.
Now that you know the four primary objectives of a PPC audit, it’s time to look at the individual tasks that make up this process. You can use these tasks as a sort of checklist when conducting your own audit. Remember, you should be routinely auditing your account. Any time you take over a new PPC account, an audit is also necessary because it will help you check the status.
i- Review Goals
Your PPC account is largely driven by your marketing goals. At the start of your audit, it’s a good idea to review what these objectives actually are. Not only will this refresh the goals in your own head, but it will also help you catch goals that may have changed recently or are no longer relevant to your organization.
Here are a few questions to ask during this stage:
Your mission for this first checklist item is to be clear about what your Google Ads account is trying to accomplish.
ii- Review Account Structure
After goals, your account structure comes next. You need to think about how this structure supports your goals. There are several ways of looking at how your account is organized. You can structure by…:
Again, there’s no universal “right” way to structure your account. The goal is to organize your account in a way that gives you most oversight into your campaigns, bids, budget, targets, etc.
iii- Account And Campaign Settings
Ideally, you’ve spent some time analyzing your campaign and account configuration settings in the past. If you have, this should be a relatively quick step and you may only need to make some small adjustments.
That said, you may have to return to this step later on to adjust dayparting settings, change your budget or switch to a new bidding strategy.
iv- Review Targeting Settings
This is another quick step in the auditing process. If you’re conducting regular audits, then you should only have to spend a few minutes at this step. There are a few key areas that you’ll want to pay extra close attention to.
v- Ad Groups
Ad groups are another important step in your audit process. When it comes to this campaign component, there are a few aspects to consider:
vi- Keywords
Keywords are a major stop on your audit tour. There is a lot to consider here. Not to mention, keywords play a massive role in successful PPC marketing. Here are some questions to consider:
vii- Ad Copy
You should be testing new ad copy at all times. When you find the right way to frame your ad messages, clicks will come swiftly and frequently. As you audit your account, look at your ad copy variations and ensure that each ad group is actively testing two variations. Also, check every ad message for the correct keywords and that it has a strong call to actions. If there are ad copy variants with low Quality Scores, consider revising these messages.
viii- Landing Pages
While landing pages technically occur outside of your Google Ads account, they are a crucial component in the journey and need to be a stop on your audit checklist. When reviewing landing pages, consider the following questions:
Throughout this guide, many PPCExpo tools and reports have been referenced. PPCexpo is a pioneer in pay-per-click campaign management solutions and tools. The aim of PPCexpo is to make your PPC campaigns more effective, thereby helping you achieve the key business goals that help your company reach the next level of success.
To achieve this goal, PPCexpo offers a broad library of reporting options, including a free Account Audit Report. Other tools in the PPCexpo arsenal help alleviate the common challenges and problems associated with managing a campaign.
In short, PPCexpo offers tools and solutions that allow you to take a deeper look at every and any aspect of your campaigns. PPCexpo offers the following:
Congratulations. You’ve just completed a crash course in the fundamentals of effective Google Ads strategy. You have a great head-start into the world of PPC marketing, which includes all of the basic information that you need to get started, as well as the strategies and steps you need to make your campaigns a success.
You should use this guide any time you have questions regarding your own campaigns. We also encourage you to take advantage of PPCexpo’s lineup of tools, including:
These tools will make managing your PPC campaigns easier and more efficient at every step, from your goals to your landing pages and every step in between. There is one tool mentioned in above list is chart library add-on for customizable analysis of your data in Google Sheet and Excel.
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