Grow Your Business with a Trusted PPC Agency

What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. This is a model of digital marketing where companies pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of their advertisements. In essence, you are buying targeted visits to your website, landing page or app. Paying for clicks is not a problem if PPC advertising is done correctly. This is because you earn more money from customers buying your product or making use of your services than you pay to make your ad be seen.

PPC can also be described as SEO that you pay for.

Ads for PPC purposes come in different shapes and sizes. They can be made up of text, images, videos or a combination of them. PPC ads can be made for search engines, websites, social media platforms, and various other platforms.

Concerning search engine PPC, the ads you paid for are prioritised to be placed above the top-ranking organic results. This leads to people seeing your ad first and thus making it easier to generate leads (potential customers) for your website.

How Does PPC Work?

Search Engine PPC advertising works by companies bidding on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to appear for in search engine result pages. When one of those keywords or phrases is searched for, the company’s ad will appear among the top results and is then charged a fee every time someone clicks on their ad.

PPC campaigns target specific demographics, interests, locations and more. Companies will set a maximum bid for the keywords they want to target based on the above target specifications and keyword research. Search engines use a complex algorithm to determine which ads will appear and in what order.

The algorithm takes into account a variety of different factors such as the:

• Advertiser’s bid amount
• Relevance of the ad to the keyword
• Quality of the ad
• PPC strategy and the campaign planning

If you are unsure how PPC works, Search Engine Journal provides a complete guide to PPC marketing basics.

PPC Services

PPC companies specialise in helping you reach your brand’s target audience online through a variety of PPC services. These services can help you increase your web traffic, generate more leads, increase sales and in-store visits as well as increase phone calls to your company.

PPC Management

PPC management is the process where a company’s entire PPC ad strategy and budget are managed by either an internal marketing team or a specialist PPC company. Most often PPC management is done by a specialist PPC company because they are experts in the world of digital marketing.

A PPC company or digital marketing agency that also does PPC management normally offer the following services:

• Keyword research
• Channel target strategies
• PPC monitoring
• Competition analysis
• Campaign optimization
• Split testing

The above services ensure that all PPC efforts produce a positive return on your PPC investment now and in the future.

PPC Strategy

A PPC strategy is defined as the action we will take to achieve your company’s main PPC goal, whether it is to create brand awareness or the generation of leads.

There are various PPC strategies that can help your company. Below is a 3-step process which you or a specialist PPC company can use to create the perfect PPC strategy to fit your brand and your specific goals.

• Assess the entire situation. This process will help uncover your company’s biggest challenge(s) and strengths, what your competition looks like, and which of your current PPC goals are the most important to pursue.
• Develop a policy. After assessing the situation, you or a PPC company will create a policy that will serve as your guide in determining how PPC marketing will be used to achieve your brand goals and solve your biggest marketing-related issues.
• Creating a plan of action. The third and final step is to determine how the policy will be implemented. This is done by developing a coordinated set of initiatives and optimisations that directly supports the policy created in the previous step.

Want to know more? Search Engine Land explains the process in more detail.

PPC Ads

PPC ads can be personalised to suit your company’s PPC and brand strategies.

• Format – Your PPC ad can have only text, images and text, carousels or even videos. It’s all up to you and your PPC strategy
• Target audience – You can choose who you want to target with your ad based on demographics and psychographics. For example, location, age, gender, interests etc.
• Links – You can decide where the links on your PPC ad go. For example, the main page of your website, a specific webpage or a landing page.

There’s a lot of thought that goes into creating the perfect optimised PPC ad. Here are 9 Google Ads examples, to inspire you.

PPC Keyword Research

As with most digital marketing avenues, keyword research is essential for successful PPC marketing. If you want your ads to show up when people search for a specific keyword, you need to bid on that keyword.

But how do you go about selecting the right keyword?

• The first step is to do research. We use keyword research tools to identify a list of relevant keywords that are popular, recurring, high-volume, low competition, generate more leads and whether to use timely or evergreen keywords.
• After the keywords are identified, they need to be grouped and organised into smaller groups of closely related types of keywords.
• Next, negative keywords are chosen. These are keywords that you don’t want your ads to display for. This prevents unwanted clicks, which saves money and increases the chance of attracting the right audience and thus generating more leads.
• The final step is to determine your PPC budget and choose the best-performing keywords to bid for.

The ultimate goal is for your ads to rank high with low costs. To learn more about keywords and why they are vital for PPC marketing, click here.

PPC Platforms

There are various PPC platforms which your company can use for your ads. Below are some of the most popular ones.

Google

Google PPC is used by millions of companies to make their websites feature above organic search results on Google’s result pages. It serves as a cost-effective way to raise brand awareness and drive relevant traffic to your site, generating leads and boosting sales.

Google Ads is Google’s PPC platform, which allows companies to gain visibility across Google’s properties. For more information on Google Ads, please click here.

Bing (Microsoft)

Bing PPC also seen as Microsoft PPC applies to Microsoft’s three popular search engines: Bing, Yahoo and AOL. The main benefit of Bing PPC marketing is that your ads are shared across all three of the above platforms at once.

When setting up your paid ad you can choose whether you want your ad to be displayed only on mobile devices or only one of the three Microsoft search engines. For instance only Bing or Yahoo.

For more information on Bing PPC, please visit HubSpot’s informative page on this topic.

Facebook

One of the top social media platforms used for digital marketing is Facebook. Facebook PPC is an excellent and creative way to engage with millions of people and in turn generate more leads.

Facebook PPC ads are customisable, easy to track, and can be set to target your specific target audience based on your company’s exact objectives.

For more information on the benefits of Facebook PPC, you can view Echlincher’s webpage on 11 reasons why you need Facebook ads.

Instagram

Instagram PPC ads have more engagement than Facebook PPC ads in some instances because of the platform’s visual nature and approximately 1 billion users.

Hashtags are also an integral part of Instagram PPC. The more specific your hashtags are to your business, the higher the chance people will see and engage with your ad.

It is important to note that most people on Instagram do not want to see ads, thus it is vital to make your ad interesting and eye-catching for your target audience.

If you would like to read more about Instagram PPC, WordStream covers the topic in extensive detail.

Twitter

Twitter PPC is a way to engage with a very influential target audience in just a few words. Twitter ads might not have as high user engagement ad Facebook, but the competition is much lower and the audiences on Twitter are engaged in various occupations and trends.

With Twitter PPC ads, you can reach a unique audience that differs from any other PPC platform.

WordStream compiled a list of 5 really good reasons to use Twitter ads.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn PPC is a very interesting digital marketing tactic that allows you to reach a professional audience as well as participate in business-to-business advertising.

The audiences that you can reach with LinkedIn PPC ads include businesses, entrepreneurs, industry experts and an overall knowledgeable audience on a variety of topics.

Social Media College lists 5 benefits of LinkedIn Advertising.

PPC Campaign

PPC Campaigns are very important and need to be set up correctly as well as maintained.

PPCexpo provides 13 steps to launch a successful PPC campaign:

1. Set clear goals
2. Determine the budget
3. Define your target audience
4. Identify relevant keywords
5. Utilise negative keywords
6. Know your competition
7. Optimise your landing page
8. Track conversions
9. Focus on PPC platforms that work
10.  Search Network vs Display Network
11. Learn from your competitors
12. Determine device bids
13. Use the right reporting tool

A custom PPC campaign guaranteeing success can be created for your business by making use of Conversion Advantage’s PPC services on the various PPC platforms mentioned above.

PPC vs CPC

PPC (pay-per-click) and CPC (cost-per-click), are closely related – they are almost the same thing, but not quite.

PPC is a digital marketing method where companies pay when their ad is clicked on, while CPC is a financial metric to measure the overall cost of each ad click for the campaign.

Essentially, PPC is the approach, while CPC is the performance metric.

Need more clarity? Click here.

Why You Need a Specialist PPC Company

A specialist PPC company consists of digital marketing professionals who are experts in handling all aspects of PPC campaigns.

PPC companies engage themselves in the planning, creating, optimising, analysing and maintaining of PPC campaigns on a daily basis. They are well-versed in everything and anything to do with PPC, including trends, search engine updates and keyword research.

Hiring a specialist PPC company can improve and enhance your digital marketing efforts and generate more leads for your company.

Conversion Advantage is a digital marketing agency that also serves as a specialist PPC company.

Contact us to find out how we can help you.