The Ultimate Guide to PPC Marketing (Pay-Per-Click)

Think for a moment about what your marketing goal is. How soon do you want to achieve it? And how much are you willing to give for it?

Now, to our moment of truth.

When it comes to marketing and promoting your product or service, you could either be gaining traffic for free. Or you could pay for it. While building for free sounds like a good deal, sometimes paying for it also gets the work done faster. At the end of it all, it’s really about how well you can balance both.

For more clarity, Pay-Per-Click marketing is how you reach your goals by spending a little cash. On the other hand, engaging in the best search engine optimization practices will also get you to your target for free. Sadly, only a few know about PPC marketing. And as you’re here now, we sure can’t let you go yet without a concise guide to all that PPC marketing is.

What is PPC Marketing?

As the name suggests, Pay-Per-Click is a form of search engine marketing that charges you for every click you get from a search engine result page (SERP).

It starts by perceiving the value of a keyword or audience you’re sure will get you to your goals. By bidding on these via an ad, you get charged when someone does click on your ad.

PPC marketing is employable for all goals. Talk of increasing your sales, getting more leads, or creating more awareness. All these you can do with PPC. But only if you know how best to go about it. And the trick is in how relevant you can make your ad.

The relevance of your ad and its content increases your quality score. The higher your quality score, the less you get to spend per click while getting even more clicks.

Best PPC Marketing Platforms

Now, I’m sure you want to know where to start this form of advertising. Well, there are a couple of platforms to use. But before going deeper into that, here’s something to keep in mind.

Three things are essential when choosing a platform to use. What keywords you are bidding for in your campaign. Where your audience is, and how much you are willing to spend.

You might want to join in on popular platforms. But the more popular they are, the more likely you’d have to spend more. Well, that said, let’s see some of these platforms.

Google Ads for Google searches.
Bing Ads, which offers you a lower cost-per-click, and a slightly larger audience
Facebook Ads for native Facebook and Instagram advertisement
AdRoll is better for you as a retargeting platform as it goes beyond the google space to social media. With it, you can sell to the one you’re confident shows interest in the product in question following a previous visit.
RevContent puts your ads on a page next to content containing the keyword you’re targeting. With this, you get to spend less and still get a reasonable amount of traffic.

How to Build Your First PPC Campaign

Well, congratulations! You now have a basic understanding of what PPC Marketing does. And you also know where to get yourself started. Now, let’s see how you take that step in creating your first campaign. You don’t necessarily have to follow the following step by step, but one thing is sure. You need to go through this list to create a working marketing strategy.

Get Your Parameters Ready

You wouldn’t want to start something you’d pay for without direction. So, parameters are a must even right from the beginning. And what does this entail?

To think of including PPC marketing, you must already have your ultimate marketing goals in place. Then, the point is to ensure your PPC campaign fulfills these goals perfectly. Start by determining what your ads will accomplish. It could increase sales, get more leads, raise awareness, etc. Also, note how much you’re able to spend on this campaign.

Generally, your parameters would include determining the following:

Your target audience
The theme of the campaign
How success is to get measured
The type of campaign you’ll run

Set Goals and How You Plan to Measure Them

As we cannot overemphasize the importance of setting goals, I must now talk about them again. But first, note that your ultimate marketing goal is slightly different from what you hope to achieve with your ad.

Your ad goal is a subset of your ultimate goal. Thus, how you measure your ad goal is different from how you measure your ultimate goal. But for now, what goals can you set for your ads?

You could decide to raise awareness. For this, display ads work best! And you can measure this by checking out the engagements, taking surveys, and checking your traffic.
An almost similar goal to the above is when your focus is to drive traffic to your site. Only ensure you’ve got your best content put up.
On the other hand, you could set up your goal towards generating leads with your ads. All you need is a landing page with the necessary tracking details.
Lastly, you could also set your goal to make sales directly with your ads.

In all, there’s no limit to what you can achieve with your ad. Only ensure you’ve defined your wish clearly.

Select Your Campaign Type

At this point, you know where to go to set up your campaign. But you also need to know how to set up your campaign. And one thing to get correctly at this point is the campaign type that suits your goal.

Search ads are the commonest and are the same you often see on the SERPs.
The other campaign types you readily see on SERPs are the google shopping ads that display an image with price and title. With this, users can make direct purchases.
With display ads, you get to put up your ads, usually image-based, on external websites, including the social web.
With social ads, you can create an ad from within social media platforms and are best for running native social ads.
Remarketing relies on showing ads to someone who showed interest during an earlier visit.
You’ve often seen websites ask if you’re okay with their use of cookies. These tell you your audience’s interest and help you know what to present to them the next time they visit. Apart from cookies, you could get contact details during an earlier visit for your campaign.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Getting your keywords right is key to getting the right kind of visitors. But don’t fret! You don’t have to get it 100% on your first go.

Now, here is how you go about it.

First off, ensure your keywords don’t exceed five per ad group. Also, ensure they correctly align with the theme of your ad group. If you’ve got a keyword you’d love to use but doesn’t fit well with your ad group, create a separate group for it.

Keeping your keywords relevant is vital here. It’s how you increase your quality score. And you know, the higher that is, the lesser you spend as cost per every click.

Also, don’t shy away from using negative keywords. If you plan to sell your products at a price, you don’t want your ad showing up to someone searching for free products. By noting that “free” is a negative keyword, the platform ensures anyone who searches for a “free” item doesn’t see your ad. That way, you avoid unnecessary clicks and prevent waste.

Set Up Google Analytics and Track Your Data

As we bring this text to a close, one final note is the Google Analytics software. See this as the mother ship that gives you all the data you need about how well your site is doing.

With this, you can plan for your future marketing campaigns — including PPC marketing campaigns.

To read more about PPC in Digital Marketing, check out What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in Digital Marketing? article.