Basics and Benefits of Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

If you’re looking into internet marketing for your business, there are a few important areas to investigate. One is SEO, or search engine marketing – a number of factors contributing to your business’s ranking on Google and other search engines for vital keywords.

Another that often doesn’t receive enough attention in certain industries is called pay-per-click marketing, or PPC. What is PPC, and how can it benefit your website and its marketing goals? Let’s take a look.

PPC Basics

Pay-per-click is a service where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads receives a click. It’s effectively a way of “buying” visitors for your site, rather than “earning” them organically.

One of the most popular forms of PPC is search engine advertising, which allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links section. The top bidders show up extremely prominently in these preferred spots at the top of search results pages. Every time one of these ads is clicked, that advertiser pays the search engine a small fee.

When things are working well, this fee is a drop in the bucket – every visit is worth much more than you’re paying for it. Getting to this point, however, requires a lot of detail: keyword selection and organization, PPC landing pages optimized for conversions, relevant and intelligent targeting and several others.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is the largest and most popular PPC advertising system out there. It allows businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine, and other Google properties. Google uses a number of factors to choose “winners” from a pool of AdWords advertisers every time a search is initiated – a big factor in this is an advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying CPC bid (highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and Quality Score (a value based on clickthrough rate, relevance and landing-page quality).

Keyword Research

PPC can be time-consuming to manage, but it’s vital. An effective keyword list should be all of the following:

• Relevant: Paying for web traffic that isn’t related to your business is a waste of time and money. Look for targeted keywords that will lead to a high rate.
• Exhaustive: Your research should include not only the most popular terms, but also the long tail of search. These are more specific and less common terms, but they add up to account for the bulk of search-driven traffic. They’re also less competitive, and therefore less expensive.
• Expansive: You need to constantly refine and expand campaigns, and create an environment where keyword lists are constantly adapting.

Managing Campaigns

Regular account activity is one of the best predictors of success, so you’ll need to stay on top of managing campaigns after they’re created. A few adjustments to make:

• Add keywords
• Add negative keywords: Non-converting terms added as negative keywords will improve relevancy and reduce wasted spend
• Split ad groups: Improve clickthrough rate and Quality Score by splitting ad groups into smaller, more relevant groups
• Review costly keywords: If certain keywords are more expense than they’re worth, consider shutting them off
• Refine landing pages: Modify content and calls to action to align with individual search queries and bolster conversion rates. You never want all your traffic routing to the same page

Want to learn more about pay-per-click, SEO or any of our other online marketing solutions. The experts at SEO Werkz are standing by to assist you.