Pay-per-click advertising (PPC ads) is a popular form of online advertising where your ad is eligible to be displayed on the Internet in the paid advertising section such as with using the following:
- Search Engines (Google, Microsoft & Yahoo)
- Social Media (Facebook & Twitter)
- Online Advertising Networks
You only pay for pay-per-click advertising when someone actually clicks on your ad to visit your online business or marketing campaign.
(to open an advertising account with one of the following search engines, click on Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising)
Pay-per-click advertising can quickly generate a huge amount of online traffic to your online business or marketing campaigns with potential eager customers. There are many online marketers and online businesses who prefer to get traffic to their websites as quickly as possible. This allows them to “test” and see how “responsive” the market might possibly be for what they are promoting rather than having to wait to get free traffic from search engines using SEO (search engine optimization). Search engine traffic can take much longer for it to come to fruition, especially in markets which are highly competitive for keywords that you are also trying to organically rank for.
PPC advertising offers a lot of flexible for running your ad campaigns including:
- Display (24/7) or Set Specific Day or Time Frames
- Countries to Target
- Keyword Match Types (see below)
- Pause Ad
- Plus More Options!
(to see our 50+ traffic sources to start getting traffic quickly to your online business or marketing campaigns, click on Traffic Sources For Your Website)
Keywords “The Catalyst To Trigger PPC Ad Campaigns”
With pay-per-click advertising, keywords are used as the catalyst to trigger your online ad campaigns. You will need to make a keyword list so that search engines and ad networks will know when to match your keywords to someone’s search queries for your ad to be eligible to be displayed on the Internet.
In making your list of keywords, they should be targeted and relevant to whatever you’re promoting or selling to help bring greater success for the intended goals of your ad campaign. By doing so, it can result in having higher click-through rates, higher conversions and higher ROI (return on investment).
Tip: Your keyword list should be reviewed periodically to optimize it by adding new promising keywords while getting rid of the ones that are not performing to your expectations.
(to learn more, click on Learn How To Use Keywords)
Keyword Match Types
You can choose different keyword match types to tell search engines (like Google) under what conditions you want your ad to be triggered when using pay-per-click advertising. Keyword match types include the following:
- Broad Match
- Phrase Match
- Exact Match
In addition, learning how close keyword variations and negative keywords work with the different keyword match types will give you a better understanding of when your ad will be eligible to be displayed (or to not be displayed) to someone’s search query.
(to learn more, click on What Are The Keyword Match Types)
Cost And Bidding Of Keywords
With Google, keywords come with their own suggested bid estimates that you can openly bid on to have your ad eligible to be displayed on the Internet. You can get suggested bid estimates for keywords by using Google’s Keyword Planner.
However, the amount that you choose to bid on your keywords is usually not the final cost that you will end up paying. Many times it can actually be much less. The amount that you will pay will ultimately be determined through an ad auction system which takes into account other factors than just the highest bid amounts. The final amount that you pay is called your actual cost-per-click (CPC).
Other factors that determine the CPC for a keyword to run your PPC ad includes the following:
- Maximum Bid Amount
- Quality Score
With respect to Quality Score, factors such as anticipated click-through rates, relevancy of keywords and ad, and user’s experience with your site can all have an influence on the quality score, which ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest score. The higher the score, the greater chance of paying less for pay-per-click since the user is more likely to have a better experience with your website than with someone else’s website. Having a higher quality score can also result in a higher ad placement over the competing ads.
The maximum bid amount that you are willing to pay for keywords times your quality score equals your Ad Rank. Ad Rank has to do with ad placement as to how high above or below the competition your ad will be displayed.
Still other factors in determining your CPC may include:
- Quality of Search Engines/Ad Networks. Google (first-tier) vs. Advertise.com (second-tier)
- Seed Keywords vs. Long Tail Keywords
- Keyword Competition
Furthermore, keywords that have similar meanings to one another can all have different costs. For example, keywords such as: “cheap tickets” vs “discount tickets” vs “inexpensive tickets” can all have different costs associated to them.
You can set how much you are willing to pay for each keyword or set the maximum cost that you are willing to pay per ad group that would apply to your entire keyword list within that ad group.
Bidding On Keywords For PPC Search Ads
When you bid on a keyword, it will be put to an auction with other competing bids. You can put bids on keywords either on an ad group level or to each individual keyword.
- You can have all of your keywords placed in an ad group where all the keywords in that ad group would be set to the same maximum bid amount by default. This would be the most you would pay for a click, but may be less than that since all you have to do is pay just enough to beat out all the other competing bids
- You can use different bid amounts for each keyword within an ad group by manually entering individual bid amounts as to each keyword.
Setting A PPC Ad Campaign Budget
You will need to set a daily budget for your PPC ad campaign. Otherwise, if your ad is not converting profitably and you let the ad campaign run without any daily budget limits, it may result in unwanted financial losses. Setting a daily budget will depend on your financial situation.
As long as you are making a satisfying net profit on your PPC ad campaign than it’s most likely worthwhile to keep it running. For example, if you spend $500 per month to earn $1,500 per month in revenues (or more) on a PPC advertising campaign than it’s profitable with a net profit of $1,000 per month.
Tip: It is highly recommended to test your advertising campaign first with a limited amount of funds. This will help limit the financial risk as to whether or not the ad campaign is going to convert profitably before committing larger funds to scale it up.
Finally
Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to start getting traffic to your website quickly and start turning prospects into possibly buying customers.