Pay per click (PPC) advertising occupies a critical cornerstone of search engine marketing (SEM). Like search engine results themselves, this advertising channel serves up ads based on the context of search engine queries. You may have noticed them around your own search engine results, appearing in a yellow or green font above the unpaid, “organic” search results.
What makes PPC advertising so critical for business owners is that it not only increases the reach of their company’s ads, but it also provides a wealth of valuable audience data based on who clicks on which ads and when. With these pieces of the puzzle, you can begin to interpret the preferences of your audience. You can answer questions like “what ad copy drives the most clicks?” or “does X demographic prefer Y product or Z product?”
In other words, PPC campaigns provide a crucial data source that can improve your other marketing campaigns, both online and offline.
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Getting Started with PPC Advertising
One of the best parts about PPC campaigns is that you can get one off the ground quicker than you imagined. Platforms like Google AdWords and Bing Ads allow you to sign up in just a few minutes. They also let you connect your PPC account to other platforms, like Google’s indispensable Analytics toolset.
Once your account and business are registered, you can begin creating campaigns immediately. Simply devise some catchy ad copy and a landing page that links to the ad. Each ad currently allows for two headlines of up to 30 characters each and descriptive text with a maximum of 80 characters.
After creating your ads, you will have to decide which keyword searches you want them to appear next to. For instance, if you have a law office, you may want to display your personal injury attorney ads next to searches for “injury lawsuit.”
You can then set a maximum bid for how much you are willing to pay when customers click on each ad. These bid amounts can be compared automatically to competing bids in a process Google calls Real Time Bidding (RTB), allowing the top bidders to win out and have their ads actually appear next to searches.
Experimenting with keywords and bids offers the majority of the value associated with PPC campaigns, too. You can use tools like Google’s free keyword planning tool in order to determine which search queries stand the highest chance of you winning both bids and clicks.
Honing Your Digital Marketing with PPC
With the help of a marketing agency, businesses can maximize the value PPC data offers by strategically measuring and adjusting campaigns. Since AdWords and Bing Ads can be served with a high level of specificity, you can soon learn which keywords or ad pitches get the most reaction out of target demographics.
More importantly, you can learn with more precision exactly who your target demographics are. This information includes when they are online, what regions they hail from and what it takes for them to convert to your desired action.
Enlist the help of a Las Vegas and Henderson digital marketing agency to watch your online leads and conversions take off with the fuel that successful PPC campaigns provide. Visit our search engine marketing services page to get started today!