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If you’re new to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you may wonder how does PPC advertising work? The first thing you need to know about PPC is that it’s all about relevance.
Global users search for specific services, products, and information, every second of every day and PPC advertising managers have the ability to show a targeted ad to these users, at the very moment they’re searching.
The PPC ad will be successful — if it’s relevant.
In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know about PPC advertising, including tips and tricks you can use in order to answer the burning question, “how does PPC advertising work?”
PPC marketing is a way of generating traffic to your site by leveraging search engine advertising, which is the alternative to earning clicks organically. You can see PPC ads at the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERPs) – look for the green “Ad” text in a rectangle next to the meta title.
However, in order to really understand PPC marketing, we need to ask a few more in-depth questions about this unique and profitable service.
To have your ad appear in search engine results, you can’t simply pay extra for more prominent ad space.
To discover how PPC advertising works, we’ll need to look at Ad auctions first — a fully automated process that Google uses to determine the validity and relevance of PPC ads.
Once the advertiser has created their ad and included their keywords within a search engine advertising platform, they can set bids, depending on how high up in the ad section of the results page they wish their ad to show. This is just the beginning of the ins and outs of PPC ads.
Before we get into this, it’s important to understand the difference between a “search query” and “keyword”.
A search query is a phrase or word users type into search engines to find what they’re looking for.
A keyword is a particular word or phrase that describes the content of a webpage.
Since you’re looking into the business of search marketing, you should be focused on keywords.
Ads are also prepared within your PPC campaign. They are what the users will see if you win the bidding auction. Each ad contains a URL, headline, and description. These ads show up in the position you win from the auction.
Your budget tells Google how much you can spend. Setting a budget for each individual campaign creates a huge advantage since you can ensure the majority of your ad spend is going where it’s most needed.
As opposed to dividing your full Google Ad budget evenly among all your campaigns, you may decide to increase your budget for a certain campaign such as:
Keep in mind that your ad results will be limited entirely by your budget.
Google Ads operates on an auctioning system, meaning that the highest bidder typically gets the top spot.
When deciding on your bid, consider what you’re bidding on and keep in mind that optimizing for conversions sometimes costs more than optimizing for impressions. You should also keep in mind that just because you’ve set a large bid, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically pay the full amount. You only have to pay one penny higher than your competitor.
When wondering how does PPC advertising work, learning how the bidding system operates is an important step.
Winning auctions and holding the highest bid isn’t the full story. Search engines evaluate other factors to decide which ads should hold the most valuable position in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
These determining factors include:
Make sure you strive for a quality score higher than 7 to maintain ad relevance. You may bid for good keywords, but if your quality scores are low, then Google is unlikely to display your ads in SERPs. The takeaway? Aim to create engaging and relevant ad copy with high-volume keywords.
The relevance of your ads depends on the keywords you choose to target your audience with, however, there are other factors that help accurately target your audience as well, which can be leveraged through your PPC campaign.
When it comes to PPC advertising, conversions are always the ultimate target. These are the actions users take after clicking an ad – actions that help you towards your campaign goals.
Depending on your business type, a conversion can be:
Once at this stage, you should measure the conversions to understand how well your PPC campaign is doing. Now that you’ve learned how PPC advertising works, there’s one more important step to ensure you succeed with your campaign.
Reporting tools from PPCexpo measure your PPC process to help you understand if you’re on the right track. These innovative reports are powered by interactive PDF technology, so you can use data visualizations and interactive features, which makes campaign analysis easier and enjoyable.
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