What is PPC Advertising and How Effective is It?

How far we’ve come from billboards, flyers, and door-to-door selling. The entire agenda from the very beginning was to grab the target audience’s attention, but with the advancement in technology, convenience was bestowed upon the world like never before.

Where am I going with all this? Just leading to one of the most popular ways to advertise that has revolutionized the way modern businesses work – Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

According to PPC Protect, 79% of marketers believe that PPC Advertising is vastly beneficial for their business. 62% of marketers stated they will increase their PPC budgets for the following year. This was in 2019, and the demand for PPC advertising is growing by the minute.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising?

Simply put, Pay-Per-Click or PPC Advertising is a model of advertising where the advertiser pays every time someone clicks on their online ad. These ads are commonly visible on the top 2 or 3 search results when you look for something on Google.

If you’re wondering how Google ranks different advertisements, it’s because of bidding. The advertisers bid on certain keywords that their potential consumers typically search for, and the more sellers bid on the same keyword, the higher the bidding amount goes.

For examples, if you Google “book a flight”, here’s what the search results would look like:-

What you see in the top 3 results are advertisements. How did these companies know to pop up exactly at the time someone would search “book a flight”? Well, because they all had bid on the keyword “book a flight” or “book flight”.

You’ll also notice that these 3 businesses are ranked differently. That’s because they all spent different amounts on bidding on that particular keyword. These keywords have different bidding amounts because of the forces of demand and supply.

Based on the number of competitors that have bid on that keyword, the bidding amount could be too high or too low. In the practical implementation, you’ll see that there’s a monthly budget dedicated to a bunch of relevant keywords.

How to Find The Right Keywords?

Google keeps on updating its algorithms and changing how different links should rank, and it’s all so that the consumer meets the right seller. Google’s intent is to improve the relevance of the search results and minimize spammy and unethical activities.

Your goal should be to find keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. In layman’s terms, you have to find keywords that your target audience will likely search for, and ideally something that your competitors don’t bid on as much.

Let’s take a look at 3 steps for finding the right keywords:-

Research Relevant Topics

Based on the nature of the business you’re in, you’ll have to find the topics that would be the most relevant to your target market. You can make that list by using tools like Keywords Everywhere, where you’ll get to know what keywords are relevant to your business.

Use your own creativity in that process and list out all the relevant topics that could be associated with your business.

There are tools like Google’s keyword planner, SEMrush, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc. Use them to find the search volume of these topics and conduct a competitor analysis. The search volume of each of those topics will give you an idea of how significant they are to your target market, according to which you’ll have to produce more content for those.

Research Keywords

Now that you have the topics that give you an indication of how much demand there is for certain topics, it’s time to use keywords relevant to those topics. Knowing how to research keywords the right way will narrow down what people are looking for, even further.

For example, if you’re selling musical instruments, you’ll have to find what most people are looking for. If Guitar is the most searched topic, then you may use keywords like “buy electric guitar” and “buy acoustic guitar”. If the KD (Keyword Difficulty) of these keywords is high, you’ll know you need to invest to rank for these.

Keyword Intent and Relation

This is more like an additional factor you need to keep in mind while searching for keywords. You’ll have to understand the intent behind a person using keywords. For example, if your target market is searching for “guitar lessons” and you’re spending on a keyword like “buy Guitar”, it wouldn’t be relevant.

As a tip, you should also invest in keywords that are related to what you’re selling as well. For example, if you are selling a guitar, you can even invest in keywords like “Guitar cover” or “Guitar strap” so that it gives your potential buyer to visit your landing page.

Remember, the goal is to add your target audience to your sales funnel, and to do that, knowing the user’s intent to search with a particular keyword is necessary.

Benefits of PPC Advertising

In order to understand how effective is PPC Advertising, you need to understand what it does for your business. Here are some amazing benefits of PPC Advertising:-

Easy Entry

Have you ever tried consistently posting on social media, updating content, and metadata on your website for improving your organic visibility? If not, then you don’t know how painstaking that process is.

It doesn’t even offer any guarantee whether you’ll be able to make it big or not. Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely effective when it happens, but it is something you should put for the long run. However, with PPC advertising, it’s an entirely different ballgame.

Right from the get-go, PPC advertising allows you to be visible to your target market without having to work on your rankings. Depending on how much you’re willing to spend, you can rank on the top few of Google’s search results, which will help you accomplish your business and marketing goals.

Measurable and Trackable

If you use Google Analytics with Google Ads, you’ll have the ability to measure how many clicks, impressions, and conversions have been made by people visiting your landing page. Statistics offer a great degree of detail about what kind of traffic you’re driving onto your website.

The entire goal of PPC advertising is to make things efficient in the long run. When you understand what keywords aren’t effective, you can stop investing in those keywords. You can even analyze your bounce rate, which is a good indicator of how much irrelevant traffic there is.

If you look closely at the above image, you can see the percentage of conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion value per cost (ROI) on various keywords for various different time frames. This is how detailed analysis helps you plan your advertisement spending. You can learn about ways to reduce your marketing costs.

Great Degree of Control

Imagine if you could choose who exactly should your advertisement reach out to. It would not only help you allocate your funds properly but would also improve the conversion rate simultaneously. That’s exactly what happens in PPC Advertising.

You control where you want to target, you control how much budget you want to allocate (you may have to pay at least something close to the market rate), and you decide when to pause or stop your spendings.

This degree of control leaves you with several choices. If your spendings work lands you enough return on investment, you can always increase your spendings. If not, you may pause, stop, or allocate the expense on different keywords.

Helps Develop SEO Strategies

The goal of PPC advertising for several businesses is to move away from it, whether partially or completely, so that they can focus on other sources that help improve their reach. One of those sources is SEO.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an organic way of reaching your target market. Like I said earlier, it’s a long process. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that organic reach is something that you need to be investing in if you want to grow in the long run.

PPC acts as a guide for SEO, based on which you understand what kind of audience responds to certain keywords. As soon as you start seeing growth in your business, you can start incorporating those same tactics on your website to improve your organic reach.

Tools to Maximize Performance

PPC advertising offers several parameters to tell you the exact demographic of your target audience and you can target them anywhere in the world. With the assistance of the in-built keyword planner tool, you can do exactly that.

More so than that, if you’d like to understand what you’re up against, you can use third-party tools like SpyFu, iSpionage, and KeywordSpy to understand where your competition is, to know their set standard in the market, and build your own profile just as competitive.

How Effective is PPC Advertising?

Fundamentally, any form of advertising is based on grabbing the attention of your target market enough number of times so that they get familiar with your name without even realizing it. That’s what billboards, flyers, even Television and Radio ads have been trying to achieve for so many years.

PPC advertising is no different in those terms, except, it’s better than any other channel of advertising that has ever existed before. Here’s why – according to Statista, there are 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world, a number that’s only expected to rise every year.

What that portrays is how accessible it is, and how much attention it grabs. According to Guardian, an average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone. You don’t need this Statical data to understand how dependent we are on technology.

Smartphones, tablets, laptops, all of those bring everyone on a common platform, where there are no barriers to entry. If everyone’s spending so much time there, and you’re practically connected with the entire world in real-time, isn’t it more impactful to advertise on the internet?

Depending on the nature of your business, PPC practically is recommended for all those products that people look for on search engines (eg. Google). Thing is, people Google everything, and if you’re offering something valuable, you’re bound to see amazing results for investing in PPC Advertising.

To be fair, it entirely depends on who’s handling your campaign(s). If you aren’t an expert, you can always hire a professional who specializes in PPC advertising, and can get you exceptional results while offering you valuable suggestions.

Conclusion

There are several ways to advertise in this day and age but we now understand how effective is PPC Marketing since it works for almost every business model. If you’d like to try PPC Marketing for yourself, you can check out this guide to PPC Marketing.

Depending on your requirements, you may advertise on:-

• Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
• Ecommerce Platform – Amazon, eBay, etc.
• PPC – Google, Bing, etc.

  This article was written for Business 2 Community by Devansh Khetrapal.
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Author: Devansh Khetrapal

Devansh is an avid content curator who loves writing about things that are mainly associated with Business and Technology. He writes about Web Development, Designing, Digital Marketing, even Machine Learning, and AI. He’s currently working with RnF Technologies. and has contributed thousands of write-ups for its clients. 

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