The ‘secrets’ of PPC.

I gather you are after the secrets of PPC? This is the first step of your PPC journey, where I’ll let you in on the ‘secret’ of exactly what PPC is, and other key things to help you on the road to PPC mastery (or if you CBF — and we get it — hire us to handle your PPC for you.)

Let’s kick this off with the basics.

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s a type of digital advertising where ads are placed on an advertising platform and you only pay the platform once someone has clicked on the ad - hence the name, pay-per-click.

PPC is a model of digital advertising most closely associated with Google, but PPC ads can be found on Facebook, Bing and in many other places.

Types of PPC

There are as many different types of PPC ad formats and bidding strategies (yes, it’s often an online auction) as there are platforms. In fact, there are more. Many of the platforms have multiple types of ad format.

For example, Google has paid search, shopping ads, YouTube ads, display ads and app ads.

Benefits of PPC

Aside from choosing your budget and only paying when someone clicks on the ads, there are a boatload of benefits to running PPC campaigns, and here they are:

1. Measurable & Trackable.
   One of the biggest benefits of PPC ads is that they are far more measurable and trackable than almost any other type of advertising. Want to try showing the return on investment for a flyer campaign to your boss? When you can take them to a dashboard and show them the exact number of sales and revenue driven by your ads, you can be sure that will get their attention.  This helps with stakeholder buy-in, and the data you gather can help you experiment and optimise your ad campaigns, which will make future campaigns better.

   1. Targeting.
      Targeting with PPC is amazing. With Google Search Ads, you can select which keywords to bid on, with the searcher located in a particular area. With Facebook, you can select from a huge number of interests and demographic information.You can even run ads based on past behaviours on your website. Not only does this allow you a huge amount of control over who sees your ads, you can also experiment to see what target audience is your most valuable, or most relates to a particular campaign.

   2. Experimentation.
      I’ve already written above about experimenting with targeting and how data helps with this — now I’m going to write about why experimentation is a benefit.With PPC and real-time data, you can test and optimise and eliminate parts of a campaign that are not working. There is a huge amount of awesome tests you can run, from ‘which CTA works the best?’ to headlines, descriptions, targeting, use of emojis or visuals (in Facebook Ads) or which extensions work the best (in Google Ads).

   3. Be more competitive.
      Everyone is on digital marketing these days. You simply have to be. And I hate to say it, but to stay competitive in this digital world, it is necessary to keep up with the Joneses (in a business sense.) ‘If you build it, they will come’ is no longer true, because no matter how much building of a website you do, if you don’t advertise then no one is coming.

   4. Hit your goals.
      PPC advertising will help you hit your business goals, no matter what they are (within reason.) Want more sales? Then set up a conversion campaign with retargeting. Brand awareness? Then we’re targeting impression share or website traffic. More leads? A lead generation campaign. I think you get the idea. No matter what your business goal, there is a way to achieve it with PPC advertising. For us, at Edison, business goals are incredibly important.We can suggest a hundred different ways to advertise but, until we know what you are hoping to achieve, then we can’t recommend the best strategy and creative direction.

   5. Low ceiling for entry.
      Even if today is your first day in digital marketing, within a day you could be advertising and generating leads and traffic. Within two days, sales. In comparison to other digital marketing channels, SEO and social media, where you could work for weeks, months or even years before you see any real benefit, PPC gives you a benefit almost from day one.

   6. Control.
      While there are some things you can’t control, you do have a huge amount of control over your PPC ads. This includes places where your ad appears, keywords to target, how ads look and what is written, and the budget. You also have the ability to change things mid-campaign if they aren’t working, or scale up with bigger budgets if they are working.

   7. Cost-effective.
      PPC ads give you control of your daily and monthly budgets and the size of the audience you want to target. There is no minimum amount to get started with Google Ads — although this does come with caveats. It’s almost impossible to achieve anything with a daily budget of $5. The quick and dirty formula we use is ‘spend 2X the CPA of any keywords you target’. If you have a keyword with a CPA of $5 then spend $10 on that keyword a day. And that's not even taking traffic, CPC, business ROAS required and targeting into account.

   8. Retargeting.
      Retargeting is one of the most important elements of PPC. This is the process of targeting ads towards people who have visited your website. If someone clicks on your ad but doesn’t purchase, you can retarget them with another ad to remind them about your business or the product they were interested in.

 

What’s the difference between SEM & PPC?

PPC and SEM (search engine marketing) are often used interchangeably these days but there is a difference. SEM is the process of marketing in search engines.

SEM encompasses PPC but it also includes SEO. And PPC also includes social advertising and display advertising, which would not be considered SEM.

 

A Basic Glossary of PPC Terms

CTR - Click Through Rate.

This is the rate of clicks per impressions. If you get 100 impressions and 10 clicks then the click through rate is 10%.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing.

Marketing in search engines like Google and Bing. This would include SEO & PPC.

CPC - Cost Per Click.

This is the amount you would spend per click on an advert.

CPM - Cost Per Thousand (M) impressions.

This is the cost you spend to get a thousand impressions.

ROAS - Return On Ad Spend.

The conversion value amount you get back per $1 of ad spend.

CTA - Call To Action.

It is a prompt to get users to take an immediate and direct action.

PPC Audit.

The process of analysing a PPC account to work out what is doing well, what could be done better, and how to develop the ongoing PPC strategy.