Did you know roughly 50% of businesses invest in pay per click (PPC) marketing?
If you’re struggling to generate new clients, you should learn how PPC marketing works. That’s because if you learn about this marketing tactic, you may be able to turn your business around.
This post will provide you with a brief introduction to PPC marketing and some tips on how you can get started. Whether your business is in a good or a bad state, you’ll soon see how PPC can help you take things to the next level.
Let’s begin!
What Is Pay Per Click?
To begin with, let’s take a brief look at what pay per click marketing is and how it can help you generate more business.
PPC is a form of paid advertising offered by different platforms across the internet. With PPC marketing, you only pay whenever someone clicks on your ads.
The price of a “click” is often determined by how competitive a given ad market is, as most platforms use an “auction” mechanism. For instance, say you want to run Google Search Ads, and you want to target the keyword “dentist new york.” Well, the amount you pay for a click is going to depend on how many other people are targeting this keyword.
The person who is willing to “bid” the highest will get the best ad spot. The rest of the ad spots will then be offered in accordance with everyone else’s bids. So the second-highest bid will get the next best spot, and so forth.
Most platforms will tell you what the top bid is for a given ad spot, and you can then decide if you’d like to pay this amount.
In any case, that’s pretty much the basics of pay per click marketing, and in the rest of this post, we’ll explore how you can get started.
Choosing a PPC platform
Now that we’ve covered what PPC marketing is, we will now discuss how you can select a suitable PPC platform.
When choosing a PPC platform, these are the platforms you may want to consider:
- Google Ads
- YouTube Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
All of these platforms have their own benefits and downsides, and the one you select is often dependant on the kind of business you run. For instance, if you run a B2C company, you likely won’t get good results with LinkedIn Ads.
That said, Google Ads tends to work for the broadest range of businesses, and so for the rest of this post, that is the platform we will focus on.
Selecting Keywords
If you want to create a successful Google Ads campaign, you need to identify keywords that will generate a return. Luckily, this isn’t difficult, as the ‘Google Keyword Planner‘ can help you with this task.
To use this tool, you first need to create a Google Ads account, and you then need to login to your account. Once you’ve done that, you need to click on the “Tools and Settings” icon, and you then need to click on the “Planning” subheader. After doing this, you should then see an option called “Keyword Planner,” and if you click on this, you will then be taken to the tool.
This tool might seem very complicated at first, but it’s generally quite easy to use. To get started, all you need to do is provide the tool with a “base keyword” associated with your niche. So, if you’re a dentist in New York, a base keyword might be something like “dentists in New York.”
The keyword tool will then return a list of related keywords you can include in your advertising campaign. Alongside these keywords, you can see each keyword’s search volume and how much it costs to target a keyword.
Does Search Volume Matter?
While search volume is a helpful metric, it’s actually not something you should focus on too much.
What you should really pay attention to is the cost per click (CPC) of each keyword, as this metric will help you spot which keyword offers the best results.
This is because the most expensive keywords typically produce the best returns. After all, other people wouldn’t be willing to bid so much if the keyword in question didn’t deliver results.
Creating Your Ads
Once you’ve identified a few viable keywords, you then need to create your actual ads. When writing your ads, you want to focus on the benefits people will experience if they work with you.
For example, if you run a dental practice, it may be the case that people can get an appointment within the week. If that’s the case, you should mention in your ads that people can be seen within the week.
Alternatively, you might offer low prices in comparison to other dentists. Following this, you might want to mention in your ads that you are cheaper than other dentists.
When you’re listing these benefits, it’s a good idea to be as specific as possible. That’s because if you’re specific, your ads will be more believable, and thus people will be more likely to click on your listing.
It’s worth mentioning that writing good ads can be difficult, so you may struggle with this task.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this, and if you find yourself in this position, you may want to consider contacting a PPC management company.
Such companies specialize in running PPC ads, and so they’ll know how to write Google pay per click ads that’ll generate great results.
Is PPC Marketing Right for Your Business?
Pay per click marketing is something you should consider if you’re looking to invest in a new marketing strategy. It takes time to dial in PPC campaigns, and so you might lose money after launching your first campaigns.
This is to be expected, but you can fix the issue by optimizing your keywords and ad copy. If you have the patience to do all this work, you should soon end up with a great ad campaign.
Visit our “How to Google AdWords” section if you want to read more about running Google Ads!