What is PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising? How Does IT Work?

You might have seen ads if you have tried searching for a product or service on your search engine or on online shopping platforms. You might have also seen ads on social media platforms. All these ads come under pay-per-click marketing strategy taken up by the businesses.

What is PPC (Pay-per-click)?

The PPC is the most common advertising model over the internet. In this, you can place your ads on search engines, social media platforms, etc and pay an agreed fee to the platform whenever a user clicks on your ad. So it is basically a way of buying visits to your products or services rather than acquiring them organically.

How does it work?

Building a successful PPC campaign is not a cakewalk. A lot goes into it. One needs to select the right keywords, organize these keywords into organized campaigns and as groups and set up landing pages that are optimized for conversions. Search engines charge less for clicks for campaigns  that are created intelligently. This means if your ads are relevant for the users, Google charges you with less amount per click leading to higher profits in your business. So, it is imperative that one should learn about it’s working before getting started.

There are various platforms and ad formats but all of them work in a similar process. Firstly you sign up to an advertising account with the platform of your choice. Simply start creating your ads and set the maximum cost you are willing to pay for each click. Your ads then go into an auction with those of your competitors for the same keywords. The result of the auction determines the placement of your ads on the search result page for the particular keyword you have bid on.

At the right conditions, PPC fee becomes insignificant as the visit it gains ends up bringing a worth more than that fee.

What are the advantages of PPC advertising?

Over the period of its introduction into the marketing world, PPC advertising strategy has shown reliable and profitable outcomes for various businesses starting from B2B companies to companies who look for a quick and quality traffic for conversions.

It is always better to know the usefulness of a tool or in this case marketing strategy before diving into it. Here are the benefits of PPC advertising:

PPC caters to business goals

PPC advertising offers you to accomplish a wide number of advertisement and marketing goals. From high range goals like brand exposure to goals like your products’ sale, PPC is a great tool in converting your traffic to sales. All these conversions can be tracked and generate useful data. This data inturn can be used to drive your end goals. Irrespective of your end goals, PPC can be set up easily and effectively. You can exactly know what is working for you and keep a track of your goals. This makes PPC an attractive tool for achieving your business goals.

Easy to measure

PPC marketing enables you to keep track of all your advertisements with their related performance details which include impressions, clicks and conversions. This allows you to easily measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign. You can easily check where you spent your money and how much of that is effective in conversions.

All of this provides you with invaluable information that you can use to optimize your ad campaigns’ effectiveness in the long term. This ultimately gains you higher ROI. As opposed to PPC marketing strategy, with traditional strategies you might not get the clear picture of conversion of your budget to direct results.

Quickly enter the competition

When you start your online business, you need to make sure that your potential target audience knows of your presence. With the conventional method of SEO, you might try to tweak your website or product descriptions for keywords and other parameters. With this you try to garner organic traffic but it takes a long time to get a sufficient amount of recognition.

On the contrary, PPC lets you reach a wider audience within a relatively short period of time. You are now able to reach an audience who are not part of your existing user base. You get to see your returns quickly. This all is done by the existing PPC platforms – from researching to creation of your ads. You just need to set up your ad account and create your ads. Once these ads are approved by the platforms, your ads will be live. As long as you’re eligible for the auction and your bid high enough, you can start appearing in the relevant searches quickly.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if your business is decades behind your competition. PPC marketing enables you to jump into your game quickly and get the recognition you wanted.

Controls lies with you

Beginning right from the keyword or your ad placement, PPC enables you to choose how restrictive you want to be in selecting your target audience.

With PPC you can decide the time and date of when to run your ads. You also have the control of turning off and on your ads. So if you want to take a break from the ad campaigns for some reasons you can. If you want to come back into your game again, you can do it easily.

You get to have a great control on the amount of budget you are spending daily or monthly.  If you want to start small, you can. You can even decide on how much to pay for each click . Once you see the results, and want to scale up your game, you can easily increase your campaign bids.

With this you can set up and run your ads easily with little to none involvement of your development teams. This doesn’t include the work in setting up your conversion tracking and your desired landing pages. One of the greatest flexibility offered by PPC platforms is that you can make quick edits to your existing ads and optimize them regularly with new tests. If you don’t find an ad working for you, you can pull it before it completes its contracted media cycle.

Other types of traditional marketing strategies don’t allow for this flexibility and are often cumbersome to manage.

Easy to reach your target audience

The prevailing PPC platforms enable for a remarkable depth of targeting. This means that you can show your ads only for those who you see as fit for your customer demographics. So, PPC helps you in reaching your target audience with great precision that cannot be achieved by traditional marketing strategies.

As you have seen, you have great control over selecting your keywords and tweaking your ads. This enables you to test out a range of ads and either increase or decrease on how far you cast your net in reaching your target audience. This further allows you to  see what works best for you and thereby focus your resources in the same.

Not only that, PPC targeting also allows you to reach people who are not in your existing audience. Isn’t that great? It simultaneously enables you to expand your brand reach. Currently many businesses employ PPC strategy to increase their traffic and sales for their target audience.

With PPC, you get a great opportunity to reach your audience and simultaneously expand your business at a nominal expense. You also get to gain valuable data which can be used to optimize your products and services accordingly in the long term.