Amid fierce competition, businesses can stand out from the crowd with solid pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies. The PPC model offers a simple yet effective way to enhance visibility on major search engines and generate quality leads.
What Is Pay-Per-Click?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising model that brands use to drive traffic to their website. Advertisers are charged whenever a user clicks on the ad, giving it its name.
Bidding on keywords will help your ads reach the right audience. Aside from the keywords, you need to create a highly-targeted and valuable landing page, which is where prospects end up after clicking your ad. It must meet the search intent of prospects and encourage them to convert.
Having a high-converting landing page can improve your Quality Score, a metric that many search engines use to determine the relevance of your ad. A high score can improve your ad placement.
The Advantages of Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
- Fast and easy: PPC campaigns are easy to set up. Not only that, they have immediate results, unlike organic tactics, which can take months to deliver positive outputs.
- Measurable: You can track conversions and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. With PPC advertising, you can easily calculate your return on investment.
- Customizable: While your campaigns are running, you can make slight adjustments to optimize and maximize your results.
- Highly targeted: Instead of targeting a broad audience, you can focus on specific demographics, locations, devices, and more.
- Cost-effective: You only pay whenever a user clicks on your ad. The cost per click (CPC) varies widely across different industries and business types. However, the average CPC is $2.
Types of Pay-Per-Click Advertising
There are several forms of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which can be used to achieve a myriad of marketing and business goals.
- Paid search
Search ads are the most common form of PPC advertising. They appear on search engines like Google when you perform a search, especially when you’re looking up businesses or products. They are labeled with a small “ad” logo that indicates paid content.
Organic traffic takes a lot of time to earn. Instead of relying solely on it, you can use paid search ads to drive more traffic to your business.
- Display ads
Unlike search ads, which pop up whenever you look up a query on a search engine, Display ads are the ones you see on websites. They tend to be more eye-catching as they can consist of images and text.
Display ads can be used to target specific audiences, who you think are the most likely to pay for your products or services. You can focus on a specific target market. You can also focus on Compared to paid search ads, they have a lower click-through rate. However, they are very useful for brand exposure.
- Social media ads
As the name suggests, social media ads appear on social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You don’t need a large presence on the network to run ads, just an account.
Social media ads are more fun and creative compared to other PPC ads. You have more freedom to share pretty much anything you want. For instance, you can promote content, drive people to landing pages, or share lead generation forms using these ads.
- Retargeting
Retargeting campaigns allow you to reach out to prospects again after leaving your website. Seeing your brand again might be able to convince them to return to your website and perhaps make a purchase.
Dynamic remarketing is very useful as it shows the exact products or services that prospects were viewing. These ads can keep your brand on top of their mind when they start thinking about other options.
- Google shopping
Aside from paid search ads that appear on Google, you can run PPC shopping ads on the search engine. They appear right above the Google search results, allowing users to see products and prices before they click on a business website.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising comes in a wide range of ad formats that can help you achieve various goals. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, rank for keywords, or promote marketing initiatives, you can stand out from the crowd using a solid PPC strategy.
