8min
There is one very important factor that will decide whether your campaign delivers the kind of return you’re after, knowing how to make all of your keywords work for you! We’ll begin with the basics and move on from there, so please read on
What Is PPC?
PPC is a popular and effective way for advertising your business. It works by placing text ads on a network like Google or Microsoft and then paying them to display them on their site or app.
The purpose of an advertisement is to get customers who click it to go directly to your website where they can find something you’re selling right away, usually in exchange for their contact information. This can be useful if you sell custom-made goods or something that people would love to hear about immediately, like real estate listings.
Search engines provide the most popular host platforms used by advertisers. They have real-time bidding (RTB) advertising, where advertisers bid on real-time inventory. This means that advertisers can target the most relevant audience quickly and therefore save money! Consumers gain a better browsing experience by only being served relevant ads. This is better for the customer, and therefore for the company that has its name attached to these ads. It's a win-win for everyone! Continue reading to learn how paid search works.
The Paid Search Process
Whenever you conduct a search on a search engine, you will get a SERP with a list of results. When you click on a result, you are brought to that page that generates income for the company. For these companies to pay for the ad space that they're using, they hold an online auction for the most competitive keyword. In these auctions, the websites that pay the most for the keywords get the most prominent placement on the search engine results page.
Numerous factors, such as bid amount and ad quality, determine the winner who appears at the top of the search results.
A PPC campaign cannot run smoothly without these auctions. When people search for something, the auction starts.
Advertisers who bid on specific keywords in response to a user's search query will trigger an auction if they're interested in showing ads relevant to their search query. The winning ads are then displayed on the search engine results page.
These auctions allow users of platforms such as Google Ads to set up their ads, determine where and when they want their ads to appear, and participate in these auctions.
The accounts are divided into campaigns based on locations, product types, and other useful categories to facilitate management and reporting.
In addition, campaigns are further subdivided into ad groups containing relevant keywords and ads.
Keywords
The first step toward making money is to find places to spend it. For advertisers, keyword research is an important starting point. By coalescing keywords together, one can gain an advantage over competitors. To best optimise your PPC campaign, you need to go into your marketing strategy with a specific goal in mind. What exactly will your ad say? You need to develop a long-term strategy. By creating multiple ads with slight variation, you will reap the benefits of increased traffic from a variety of sources.
Keywords are the popular words that searchers use to describe their problems. For example, a person looking for a dentist in the Los Angeles area might type “dentist in Los Angeles” into a search engine. A keyword manager would then look to match that user’s query with ads. PPC lets advertisers show their ads when a user seeks out these keywords. So, whether you’re an eCommerce company, a local business, or an app developer, PPC can help you give your potential customers exactly what they’re looking for!
- Queries - Search engine operators use queries to find results when users type their search terms into their search box.
- Keywords, meanwhile, work to match these users' search queries with marketing campaigns.
A keyword can be a rather abstract thing to understand and grasp. It is an abstraction of search queries that reflect searchers', or end-users, needs. Keywords are affected by spelling errors, which may or may not have a major effect on making an ad relevant for the search query.
A keyword is a type of meta tag. Meta tags are embedded within each web page's code to give additional information about the page itself to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Keywords are meant to be used by advertisers as well as content writers to optimise the amount of traffic to their respective pages that they want produced by these search engines. With the use of different match types, advertisers can choose the amount of precision they would like associated with each keyword they bid on during an auction.
Marketers can match searches just about precisely dependant on the "keyword match types" they use.
In this case, marketers can choose to match keywords exactly or make allowances for variations, including spelling differences and different word orders.
Additionally, negative keywords can be defined, which restrict ads from being activated based on searches that contain those keywords, thereby reducing irrelevant traffic. Additionally, negative keywords can be defined, which restrict ads from being activated based on searches that contain those keywords, thereby reducing irrelevant traffic.
Ads
While keywords are one of the most important aspects of a campaign, you also need to plan your ads. While there are plenty of things to consider, you need to think about what your target audience wants. What would attract them and make them want to click!
Content doesn't need to be about your product or service but your target audience.
This is done by grouping them into ad groups that use the same keywords and have common themes.
It's essential to get the ads right since that's what users will see if the auction goes well.
Most of them include headlines, descriptions, and a URL.
You might find them on top of the SERPs or at the bottom.
A good practice is to test multiple versions of an ad copy to see which one works best.
There are several ad extensions available in services like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
A site link extension, which displays more links in your ad to different pages on your site, and a call extension, which shows your phone number during business hours, are two examples.
Ad extensions are a great way to get a user's attention. With ad extensions, your ads will not only be more visually appealing and informative, but more engaging to users. According to Google, ad extensions help increase clicks by up to 30% and improve the CTR of your ads. Ad extensions can help you be more successful in your PPC campaigns as you can tell users more about what you're selling, and you can provide more information to users who are not yet sure about buying your product. Ad extensions may be eligible based on specific ad formats and requirements. Learn more about Ad Extensions here and watch this video to get a better idea of how they work!
Budgets & Bids
An advertiser must decide how much they are willing to spend on a keyword to participate in the auction.
Ad groups or keyword bids are determined using budgets at the campaign level and budgets at the ad group level.
Expenditures are capped at the campaign level and can be exceeded daily but will not exceed monthly limits.
Bidding is a more precise way of controlling spending than budgets, but budgets should be based on an account's strategy. The keyword-level bid overrides the ad group bid in all ad groups.
Many advertisers rely on automated bidding strategies.
Advertisers can use these to define a specific campaign objective and then let the platform decide on the best bid for each auction.
Each campaign or portfolio of campaigns can have its bid strategy.
According to RTB (real-time bidding), the actual amount paid by the advertiser depends not just on the highest bid, but also the competition's activity and ad rank.
Ad Rank
Being the highest bidder isn't the only way to win the auction.
When determining which ads should appear on the first page of results, search engines consider a variety of factors.
There are several different ways that search engines take into account other elements as they determine ad rank.
The search engine giant, Google, for instance, factors in:
- Bid amount.
- Quality and relevance of ads.
- User context (such as device and time of day).
- Ad formats (e.g., include extensions that improve the ad's format).
Quality Score is a metric that is determined by Google and is used to determine how relevant your ad is to the search query. To improve your Quality Score, you should always write high-quality keyword-rich ad text to contain powerful search terms. You can also improve it by making landing pages relevant to the ad text and relevant to the searcher's intent. There are many other factors to consider in your Quality Score, but these are the main points.
- Historical click-through rate (CTR).
- Keyword relevance to the ad.
- Whether a keyword and an ad are relevant to the search query.
- Landing page quality.
Relevance is the key to lower CPCs, the higher the Quality Score, the better.
Advertisers who submit irrelevant ads (ads that don’t address the current query) are often penalised by the search engines (e.g., they don’t show their ads as much). If advertisers can improve their ad’s QS, there’ll be a higher chance that the ads will show no matter what network or context you are in.
Thus, relevant and engaging ad copy with high-volume keywords is extremely important.
More importantly, Ads would appear less frequently on sites whose user experience is poor; landing page quality should not be ignored either.
Providing a positive user experience to your clientele is a crucial part of ensuring your business's success and stability. That's why it's important to make sure your web page has the proper information your target audience is looking for. You must have a balance between visual and text elements, as well as keep the page design simple so that your web page won't confuse users or cause them to navigate away from your site. As a web page designer, it's up to you to use all the resources available to you to ensure your page is providing the best experience for your users.
Targeting
When choosing keywords, you must think about what you're advertising, who you want to show the ad to, and what you want them to do after seeing the ad. It's important to think about the keywords you want to use. If you're advertising a new online game, for instance, you might want to use words like "fun" and "free" in your ads. Since you want to attract people who would be interested in the game, you'd want to use words that people searching for a game would use. You could also use words that are more specific to the type of game you're advertising, like using words like "arcade" and "action". The following are some ways to optimise a campaign:
- Device targeting.
- Location targeting.
- Day and time targeting.
- Demographic targeting.
Using this strategy, advertisers can target users on mobile in the evening, or users under 25 within a certain radius of a specific location, to optimise the performance of their ads.
They can be useful for determining which variations of ad copy perform best for a particular group of users.
You can also exclude or target past visitors to a website who do follow-up searches by using remarketing tools that allow for more specific ad copy messaging and adjusted budgets.
By bidding higher for more valuable customers, advertisers can gain greater control over traffic and spending.
Conversions
Clicks aren't the only goal of all this effort. What really matters is conversion.
When someone sees an ad, the advertiser expects a certain kind of engagement and impact from this type of thing being unleashed on consumers.
Conversion examples include:
- Buying a service.
- Subscribing to the newsletter.
- Placing a phone call.
- The possibilities are endless.
Conversion tracking is a necessity if a PPC campaign is to succeed and if a paid search leads to more conversions than other marketing channels.
The conversion can be tracked with a snippet of code that is placed into the source code of the conversion page (which is reached after conversion, like a thank you page) by platforms like Google Ads.
You have a tougher time tracking conversions when the conversion paths are not as simple as clicking on an ad and making a direct purchase.
In many cases, the search process involves multiple websites or an email exchange, and in some cases, an in-store visit is required.
The problem is that it is difficult to track whether a particular source generates a lead at a particular time. To solve this problem, Google Analytics uses the measurement protocol. The measurement protocol uses URLs. It tracks the campaign source, medium, campaign name, campaign content, and campaign tracking parameters.
Google Analytics can help you make sense of a website's data. There are a lot of things to measure, like where users come from and where they exit. This can give you a lot of information about your website and how users are finding it. It's extremely important to make use of these tools; they are useful in everything from deciding on a conversion strategy to optimising your web pages.
