Table of Content:

• What is PPC? How Does it Work?
• Why Do PPC Marketing? How Effective is it?
• Key Points to Remember When Designing an Effective PPC Marketing Campaign
• PPC Yardsticks

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The facts don’t lie. Paid advertising is wildly popular for approximately three-quarters of brands.

However, navigating this sea of paid advertising is overwhelming. Yet, there are some basic tools that are important to understand for everyone.

One such common technique is the PPC or the ‘pay-per-click’ internet marketing strategy.

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What is PPC? How Does it Work?

Say, you search for ‘best watches in Bangladesh on Google. If you click on a Google ad that appears alongside the search results (often shown as sponsored ads), your click will be counted as PPC for which the advertiser will pay a specific fee to Google.

Example of PPC Sponsored Ad

In this picture, the 5 branded watches appearing is an example of PPC sponsored ads.

PPC or ‘pay-per-click’ essentially means that every time you (or anybody else) clicks on an ad that is placed on a platform, the advertiser pays a fee to that platform. Instead of organic growth, PPC is a way of ‘buying’ one’s way to growth.

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Why Do PPC Marketing? How Effective is PPC?

Profit margins of PPC marketing tend to be quite high. In the above 'best watches in Bangladesh’ ad, say the PPC cost is $3 a click. If that click succeeds in a sale of $600, profit is 200 times the cost!

Search engines are the best way to locate your leads. This is where customers always come up with queries for products and services. If this is what you offer, then you’re bound to make good sales through click advertisement.

PPC is an easy effective way of driving traffic to your website. Especially when you’re just starting out, want to expand your geographical reach, or retarget your market.

See, the thing about PPC is that if the keywords are performing poorly, you can always discard it and go for other keywords. This is a good way of testing the market. The further you refine your keyword search, the further is your probability of figuring out the success rate in various niches.

Being relevant to the keyword search and guiding customers to your website is a sure-fire precise way of targeted advertising. At the same time, you’re collecting data on keyword insights and ad auctioning, which helps you improve the efficacy of your PPC marketing campaigns through evidence-based analytics.

Lastly, PPC marketing enables you to stay in full control of your ad-spending. It can be tracked and monitored easily, which is useful when customizing your campaigns.

A boon when it comes to budget control! No wonder a report found that PPC is the third most popular way of high-volume lead generation.

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Key Points to Remember When Designing an Effective PPC Marketing Campaign

First thing to note is that PPC fees vary. Competitive keywords can be pricey and so can industries like the legal industry. If you’re looking for agencies to help you out with PPC marketing, they will charge you thousands of dollars per month for a set number of keywords.

SMEs and solopreneurs must thus be careful in creating effective campaigns that are worth this huge investment: ensure that the ads posted on the platforms are relevant to the estimated keywords.

The most popular search engine being Google, its Google Ads is the most widely used PPC platform. Therefore, every business must know the ins and outs of Google Ads to rank higher for prospective customers.

Keyword matching and figuring out how to get a higher ad-ranking is hefty work.

Here’s another guide that can help you figure out better how to devise an ingenious PPC campaign.

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PPC Yardsticks

Without yardsticks, it is impossible to determine the success of your campaigns and whether they’re growing your business. Here are some basic but essential ones to keep in mind:

i) Impressions - the number of times your ads are viewed, whether they’re clicked or not.

If impressions are high, but clicks are not, it’s a signal that your ad isn’t structured properly eg ad copy needs to improve or your audience is targeting is off-track.

ii) PPC ROAS - the return per dollar on advertising

Even if you’re drawing in traffic, if your ROAS is low it means sales conversion is low which means you might need to change your strategy.

iii) Cost per Acquisition (CPA) - this is the cost per sale. This helps you track your expenses behind sales. A higher CPA can indicate that you’re not getting enough value for your money and will either need to upgrade your sales strategy or lower costs.

iv) Cost per click (CPC) - this shows the price paid per click. It is generally shown as the average cost of all clicks of a specified keyword.

This is obviously a cost, so a higher CPC indicates that your budgeting is off-track. One solution is to improve your Quality Score so that Google charges you a lower fee. Or, you might have to adjust your bidding tactic on ad auctioning.

v) Conversion rate - this shows the frequency of sales conversions from a click.

Although the average is 2.5%, this varies across industries. Thus, as a standard, businesses should always aim for higher rates, like at 10%. Your goal isn’t to be better than your average competition, but to be better than the ones who are outperforming the market.

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Well, that’s it!

This guide is a starting point on learning about PPC marketing. If you do it right, you’ll fare far better compared to using other conventional strategies like TV advertising or email-marketing.

Remember that the key to success is crafting a relevant campaign that focuses on high-quality relevant keywords and landing pages.

That being said, PPC marketing is a specialized field of digital marketing which requires expertise. While going inhouse may save you bucks, it may not get you the value you seek. Agencies can be a good choice.

Of course, having sound knowledge of PPC marketing basics will definitely help you make sense of all that’s going on.

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