What is PPC?
PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. It is a type of paid advertising. Every time a user clicks on your advert, you pay your search engine a small fee. This fee can come out of a prepaid amount, or be taken straight out of your bank account, but either way you set your own limits on how much you spend. Another very important vehicle for PPC is social media. You can pay to boost or promote your posts on Facebook, sponsor a post in LinkedIn or even run a campaign on Reddit. Let’s take Google as our example today. You would pay Google in order to put your website advert at the very top of the search results, above or down the right-hand side of the organic results as shown in the red boxes: To achieve this pay per click advertising, you would sign up to Google’s free service AdWords. This program enables you to set up your adverts and manage them via techniques such as picking good keywords. In order to ascertain the top spot on the advertising areas, AdWords gives every advert a quality score. The score depends on factors such as picking great keywords, the amount you pay Google, and the quality of the website page which the advert directs the user to. This latter factor is called the “landing page”. It is vital to have a well-presented page, optimised for at least the main browsers, which immediately shows the user that they have arrived at the page they need. Users consider speed and ease of use to be vital in their choices. They are more likely to come to you for business if your ad links to a page with Beko ovens on it, for example, than if your ad links to the Curry’s homepage. You are also likely to lose potential customers if your website is not suited to mobile phones. However, it is important to be careful with Google AdWords. It provides you with a lot of information. That means that theoretically you’ve got everything you might need to know – but do you really know what it all means, or where to find that one factor hidden away in a collapsed list somewhere? If a campaign is set up properly you will realise significant ROI. However, if you are approaching PPC from within your business and have not invested significant research into AdWords, you are likely to end up wasting money. 70{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} of Google’s income comes from AdWords , and thus it is more invested in getting users to pay for it than in ensuring they are getting the most from it. You as the business owner will know the most likely keywords for your client base, but do you know how to vary those keywords most effectively? Would plurals help? How do people tend to misspell that word? Are you using single words or the more useful long-tail phrasal keywords? Are your current keywords actually linking to irrelevant results and thus wasting money? How can you even find this all out? All of this takes a lot of time to set up and then regularly monitor. You may wish to hire a new member of staff specifically for this, and ensure that they have the most up to date training, or you may wish to outsource it to a dedicated PPC agency instead. It is vital to be aware of these factors when deciding how you wish to approach pay per click advertising in your business. Thanks for reading What Is PPC?. Please let us know your opinions on the article, or on PPC as a whole. What is PPC? is part 2 of our “What Is …?” series. This series gives the reader a brief introduction to the basics of digital marketing. Check out the rest of the series for information on SEO, SMO, CRO and ORM with more to come. Error: Contact form not found.