PPC advertising may be a complex subject, but don't worry; we have rounded up the most frequently asked questions about ppc marketing to provide a comprehensive overview of this internet advertising model, including details of the different advertising platforms, terminologies, capabilities for advertisers including business owners, and how to get started.
PPC stands for pay-per-click, an advertisement model of internet marketing in which advertisers place ads and pay a fee every time their ad is clicked. The term PPC can apply to paid ads on search engines, like Google and Bing and on social media networks, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• You should utilize PPC because it’s the fastest method to get targeted visitors
PPC provides immediate, consistent, and targeted traffic. PPC can help achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals.
With pay-per-click, you set the budget to your needs. As you align your marketing goals with your advertising budget, you’ll appreciate both the impact and the efficiency of PPC advertising.
The pricing model can accommodate any budget, while the reach and targeting capabilities make PPC a flexible way to achieve any online marketing objective.
PPC is expensive if you’re managing your ad spend poorly and getting no ROI. But if your business has an ad campaign that generates serious return, expense isn’t an effective measure of value. Anything in your marketing campaign that is not generating positive results is expensive.
In 2019, the average monthly spend of small and medium-sized businesses on PPC is $10,000. Pricing is dynamic for PPC and always changing.
Advertisers generally set a bid for clicks to their websites based on the keywords and/or audiences they are targeting. Pay-Per-Click Advertisers enter an auction against other advertisers for each click. The advertisements that show are based on the bid and an Ads quality score or relevant score.
Bids can really vary depending on the markets you are in. How much you are paying for click generally depends on how much revenue each click can drive to your business.
For example, if you’re a lawyer, you are willing to pay $50 per click because one client can equal thousands and thousands of dollars but for home décor, even though you are selling high priced items sometimes, you are still making a certain amount for each sale, so you might be bidding $1 to $2.
It really depends on what keyword you’re targeting, what audiences you are targeting and because you are entering an auction against other advertisers, the amount you are willing to pay for each click depends on the other advertisers as well on how much they are willing to pay for each click.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a broad category, which includes a wide variety of platforms and mediums. However, most kinds of PPC ad campaigns can fit into one of two categories: Google Ads and Social Media Advertising.
-https://farotech.com/blog/how-does-ppc-work-a-beginners-guide-to-pay-per-click/
• PPC is a broad category, which includes a wide variety of platforms and mediums. That being said, 99% of what you need to know can be broken down into two major categories: Google Ads and Social Media Ads.
-https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/how-does-pay-per-click-work-on-google
• In Pay-Per-Click advertising, ads are subject to a bidding system known as the Ad Auction. It’s an automated process followed by major search engines to determine the validity and relevance of the ads that appear on their search engines results page
Pay-Per-Click Advertising is a form of advertising where the advertiser pays for each click to their website or app. Advertisers only pay when their advertisement is clicked.
PPC ad spend is the amount of money spent on PPC advertising.
• Google Ads
Google Ads is the most popular ad network due to the volume of searches done in the Google search engine and large number of websites on the Google Display Network (GDN).
Google states "Google Ads display ads appear on over two million websites and in over 650,000 apps, so your ad can show up wherever your audience is."
• Bing Ads
The Bing search engine share of searches on desktop is growing faster than Google with 145 million searchers not reached on Google.
Bing Ads has tools for advertisers to import campaigns from Google Ads, simplifying the process of getting started.
Microsoft has the advantage of exclusively serving Yahoo search traffic, powering several voice searches, and access to LinkedIn data, so look for even more opportunities as advertising technologies advance.
As the top social network on the planet, 2 billion people use Facebook every month. User targeting can get very granular with demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Yes, people click on online PPC Ads that are relevant to the information they search for online. Paid search advertisements help businesses engage people who use search engines to find information online. That is why it is important to have the perfect keywords or interesting ads.
The flexibility of pricing on PPC campaigns is one of its biggest benefits. You are in charge of your online advertising costs. You have extreme control over how much you spend and when you spend it, and you can increase or reduce your ad spend in real time that you think fits your needs.
We are going to breakdown exactly how much it costs to advertise online.
Google Ads:
PPC ads are priced on a cost per click basis (CPC). This means that the advertiser is changed every time somebody clicks on an ad. Your individual CPC is calculated every single time your ad appears to a process known as an ad auction, it is the Google’s way of deciding which ads to display when someone performs a keyword search, what order to rank the ads in and how much each online advertiser pays per click.
The overall range of CPC goes from a low of $1 in the e-commerce industry to as high as $6 for the legal industry. The average cost you can expect to pay will vary depending on your budget and industry but contrary to popular misconception paid search marketing isn’t just for huge brands with deep pockets, small businesses can effectively grow their business with the reasonable budget in Google Ads. While advertising on Google Ads tends to costs you than advertising on Bing or Facebook, search intent is truly hard to beat and these ads are extremely effective at capturing sales right when people are ready to buy which makes them worth a little extra cost.
Facebook:
Similar to Google, Facebook advertisers can set a daily budget for their campaign and when that daily budget is depleted, ads are paused until the next day, this happens regardless of what objectives advertisers choose when creating their online advertising campaigns. Advertisers will also set bids to control how their overall ad budget is allocated. Just like the bids in the Google Ad Auction, bids on Facebook allow advertisers to control how much they spend on certain actions such as a user downloading a piece of content or signing up for a newsletter. This gives advertisers gives advertisers a great deal of control over how and when their ad budget is used.
The average cost per action on Facebook is significantly lower than on Google Ads. The average on Facebook Ads is $20 whereas it’s about $49 oin google search and $75 for the Google Display Network.
Overall Facebook Ads perform extremely well and offer outstanding return on investment particularly for small businesses or brands with a niche focus. Due to it sophisticated targeting options there aren’t many online advertising platforms that offer a decent return on ad budget of $50 but even this modest sum can go a long way on Facebooks Ads. Remember, people browsing or wasting time on Facebook don’t show as much intent to purchase as people searching for exactly what they want on Google ads but running Facebook Ads is an excellent way to reach new audiences influencing them towards your brand when they’re ready to buy.
Depending on your industry, keywords can be extremely cheap or grossly expensive.
And if you’re targeting high-volume keywords with tons of monthly searches, you could be paying a higher price for that traffic or click.
The following are the factors that determine your PPC cost:
Keyword Bids: The most obvious determinant of your keywords' cost-per-click is in fact your actual bid! Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter all utilize a maximum CPC bid model for calculating ad position and ultimately your final cost-per-click. If you bid low, your keyword price will be low. If you bid high, your keyword price will potentially increase.
Quality Score: What's a conversation about PPC without mention of the 800 lbs. gorilla in the proverbial paid search room. Quality Score is primarily a factor when advertising in Google Ads, though both YSM and adCenter have their own similar quality initiatives. This post is about keyword price, so I'll save the nitty gritty on Quality Score for another post. A great Quality Score can allow you to rank your ads higher at lower CPC, and inversely a poor Quality Score will force you to increase bids to achieve higher ad position. Suffice it to say, Quality Score plays a *major* role in determining your keywords' price by influencing actual CPCs, estimating the first page bid thresholds you see in your Google Ads account and affecting how high your ad will be ranked
There are many possibilities, platforms, and types of campaigns to choose from. You can tailor your brand and message in any way you see fit and consistently test to see what works and does not. Eventually, you will strike gold and find yourself with more quality leads and conversions as a result.
The key to Pay-Per-Click Advertising is testing and optimizing your campaigns. Large companies use PPC Advertising every day with million dollar yearly budgets to drive more leads and sales. PPC Advertisement is worth it for businesses of all sizes, but it requires testing and knowledge of PPC Ad Networks.
• PPC Contributes to Business Goals
This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.
Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.
• PPC Works Well With Other Marketing Channels
Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now. With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, Google Ads is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content investment.
• Incredible Targeting Options
This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors, or focusing on specific audience demographics on the display network.
By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of Google Ads is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.
All sort of businesses can Advertise Online. There are so many options for you to choose from and a variety of different campaigns to suit your every need when considering paid advertising. Online Advertisement is so unique that you can tailor it in any way that can accommodate the type of business you are trying to advertise.
• Depending on your spend and the age of the campaign, you might be making changes weekly. As time progresses you can stretch this out to once every two weeks, but this is stretching it.
This is a common question asked by clients and these are some of the main reasons why:
Your Campaign Ran out of Budget - When your campaign reached the set daily budget, your campaign will stop showing the ads for the rest of the day. So make sure to check your last impression shared to budget column in AdWords to see how much of this market share you are missing out on.
Campaign Delivery Method & Ad Scheduling - By default, campaigns are set with standard delivery, this allows Google to choose what times are best to show your ads based on the ad schedule you choose. It is recommended to choose accelerated delivery and reviewing your keyword selection and ad schedule settings.
Low Ad Rank & Quality Scores - Review your last impression shared to the rank column, from campaign to keyword level, review you quality scores. Different ways to improve low scores include, adjusting ad copy and adding relevant content to landing pages. Finally, increase your bids if you’re just not being competitive enough.
• Negative Keywords. Adding negative keywords to your campaigns is a good great idea to block undesired traffic, but you must be careful, especially when using broad match modified. Review your negative keyword list and make sure that you have not added negative keywords to campaigns or ad groups at the campaign or ad group level that nullify your keywords within any given ad group.
• They have other online assets optimized
A Google My Business profile that is less complete and has fewer reviews than yours might also be showing above yours because that business has other assets that they have optimized for search as well. You see, SEO is more than just Google My Business.
hile your Google My Business profile is the first and most efficient online asset you should optimize for search, it’s just one of many. Your website, other directory listings, and perhaps even your social media profiles all send signals to Google about your business as a whole; so this other business might appear to have nothing because their Google Business listing is incomplete, but they might be strong in other areas.
• They have been around longer
Sometimes, other companies have just been around longer, which means that even if they have fewer and weaker signals to send to Google, Google has had more time to accumulate them. Plus, Google is big into trust, so if a site or listing has been around for a while without any issues, Google may be more comfortable displaying them in results than a newer site. This discrepancy will not last forever; over time, Google will come to realize it can trust your site too.
• Proximity
Google can detect location via IP address, so even if a person’s search isn’t location based, ("physical therapist near me " or "acupuncture Smithsburg"), it will still yield local results. Two businesses might be in the same town, but one business might be mathematically closer to what Google has assigned as the geographical target for a particular search.
-https://thrivehive.com/why-are-my-competitors-outranking-me/
There are several reasons why you should bid on your brand:
Now, if your competitors aren’t advertising on your name, and there isn’t anyone else there, you are probably okay to not advertise on your name, as long as you are keeping an eye on those terms on a frequent basis.
Bing Ads are basically Google Ads with a different search engine. You can take your exact campaign from Google Ads import it into Bing it will run exactly the same, you can set up the same exact conversions for the most part that you have in Google. Any of the search features that you have in Google Ads you have in Bing Ads as well and it all operates exactly the same.
Average Cost-Per-Click in Google is $20 while Cost-Per-Click in Bing is $8 so less than half. What that means is every single time that you’re using Bing instead of Google and every time you drive a click to your website you’re going to be charged less compared to Google. The Bing click is going to be cheaper and there’s plenty of volume.
• Using Bing Ads for Small Business Advertising
Bing has a smaller share of the search engine market than Google, but it's still used by millions of people every month. That's millions of people you could be reaching with your advertising! As a bonus for small businesses, Bing Ads also tends to be less costly than Google Ads.
On average, costs per click (or CPC's) on Bing Ads are 33% lower than on Google Ads. A few more reasons to try adding Bing Ads to your online advertising mix:
Bing Ads offers more granular control of some parts of your advertising campaigns Bing is especially popular among older, more affluent demographics, as well as in the travel industry Bing has better device targeting options
Your website is not mobile friendly. This is a huge one. Many companies assume that most of their traffic comes from those searching on their desktop or laptop computers.
Your website takes forever to load. Many people don’t have the patience to wait for a slow webpage to load.
Make sure that it is exactly what they are looking for. You have to definitely make sure the title is going to say exactly what they are searching for.
Make sure that your listing is fully optimized. It means that we want our keywords to be inside of our listing.
Are you spending enough or are you bidding enough for those keywords which is another way of getting traffic? If you’ve only had 15 people to see it and you haven’t had anybody to buy it, it doesn’t mean that the campaign didn’t work it just means you didn’t get enough traffic yet.
• Confirm that your date range is set for at least seven days and that you’re not looking at a small sample of data. If you’ve only received a few clicks within that amount of time, you need to be patient and wait for more clicks.
Also, keep in mind that conversion data is not immediately reported into the Google Ads system. If you’re using Google Ads conversion tracking, it can take a few hours for the data to show up. If you’re using imported Google Analytics goals, it can take sometimes longer than a day.
Is that Keyword active? Go into your campaign click on the keywords, and click on the status and sort it. Is that keyword coming up below the first page bid? If that is happening you may have to adjust your bids.
Low Search Volume - If Google determines that not enough people are searching for your keywords then what will happen is, they will stop showing it. They won’t show your ad for that particular keyword.
Another reason could be, go into ads and extensions, and up to ads, look and make sure that your ads are all showing. You can click on status and you should see approved under all the ads. If not, maybe you made a mistake, maybe your landing page isn’t set up correctly.
And one of the most common reasons would be "Limited By Budget". If you’ve gone over the budget, your ads aren’t going to show. When your ads aren’t showing maybe during the end of the day, chances are you’ve already depleted your budget.
• There’s a scheduling or targeting mistake
Just as you set a budget for each of your Google Ads campaigns, you also set an advertising schedule for each campaign—thus allowing you to tell Google which days of the week and hours of the day you’d like your ads to show. Navigate to the Ad Schedule tab of the campaign you’re concerned about and make sure your ads aren’t scheduled too narrowly.
• Negative keywords are negating active keywords
Negative keywords — which enable you to keep your ads from matching to irrelevant queries—can be set at the ad group level and the campaign level. If some of your Google ads aren’t showing, it may be because you have negative keywords canceling out active keywords.
Never Google Your Own Ads - Never search for yourself. It’s going to give you unwanted impressions and could wreak havoc into your accounts. The best thing to do when you’re concerned about how your ad appears or where it may be showing is actually done to the AdWords interface.
• Keyword search volume is too low
If a keyword you’re targeting drives little to no search traffic on a monthly basis, the ads you have tied to that keyword may be ineligible to show. Once Google notices that you’re targeting an extremely low-volume keyword, it’ll make it temporarily inactive within your account. If search volume picks up to a reasonable level, Google will automatically reactive the keyword.
My AdWords approved but not running
There are several reasons why approved ads may not be running.
These are some of the steps you can do:
There are three steps you can do:
Wait -
There are already other players, and they have set up their campaigns, got their quality score and started monetizing.
So you want Google to replace their ads with yours. You have to wait for Google to check your ads and test them.
If your ads are better than the ads of your competitors in Google’s tests, then Google will start showing the ads more and more and in better positions.
So take a look at your CTR, it’s critical that people click on your ads when they see them. Take a look at your landing page also; it is crucial people stay on your page as long as possible.
Wait for one to two weeks to pass the test phase.
Check the Quality Score -
You have to check if your keywords are relevant, interesting and if they offer the best landing pages.
If there is a problem somewhere, you need to fix the problem.
If you have a relevance problem, then you need to recreate your campaign set up to have more relevant ads to your keywords.
If you have an "interest" problem, then you need to create new ads to ensure they have interesting messages that people will click more than your competitors to see.
If you have a landing page experience problem, then you need to think again if the page is relevant to the search term and fast and accurate enough to make the visitors happy.
Try to have "average" in every factor for a start. After 2 weeks we need above average for every factor to be competitive.
Turn The Campaign To Accelerated -
Go to the campaign and select the Delivery Method setting and turn it to Accelerated.
By doing so, you tell Google to show your ad on every possible search term that relate to your Keywords.
Google will stop optimizing and will start showing the ad more often so you will have more clicks.
Let this setting enabled for 2-3 weeks and then turn it to Standard as it’s a better option in most cases.
• Check Your Budget and Billing
Typically AdWords will alert you if a campaign’s budget is causing limitations on ad impressions, but be sure to double-check yourself, especially if ads aren’t showing later in the day.
If you’re consistently approaching your daily budget limit, AdWords will by default start spreading out when your ads serve to stretch the budget longer. If that happens you may need to increase budget or lower bids to get ads showing longer.
• Check Your Targeting & Scheduling
If you’ve got a lot of campaigns with different ad schedules or geo-targeted locations it can be very easy to overlook things in diagnosing AdWords not showing ads.
Check if you are targeting the locations you want to target, and at the times you mean to.
Remember that geo-targeting isn’t an exact science, especially when you’re targeting individual cities or smaller areas. You may be missing impressions from users Google thinks are outside your targeted area if your targeting is too small, so try broadening your targeted area.
