Welcome to our first Marketing Monday Episode, where each Monday we’ll be choosing a marketing topic and diving into it, in the hopes of helping you all understand each marketing strategy that can help boost your site.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising, or PPC, is the act of creating ads and bidding for them to appear for keywords in the search engine results page (SERP). PPC involves many different steps, and the ads that you bid to place in the SERP appear higher than the organic results.
PPC works by you creating an ad and then bidding for the keyword using your spending budget as a reference.
Before you start any marketing strategy, let alone PPC, you first have to outline your goals, whether it’s website traffic, product sales, lead generation, or brand awareness. Having a goal gives you not only a direction to go but also an idea as to what metrics you should keep track of (KPIs).
PPC advertising is actually a common practice on most platforms, and ranges from search engines to social media. This is best decided with your goal in mind, and most people choose to do search engine-related PPC, like Google Ads.
Firstly, what is a keyword? A keyword is a word or phrase that people search for in order to find products, services, information, or answers to their queries and a keyword's search volume (number of monthly searches) and the keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank for) often determine what keywords you attempt to rank for using PPC.
The budget is a crucial part of any PPC strategy and is essentially the largest amount of money that you're willing to pay for a click. You should also ensure to choose the best bidding strategy for you, whether it's Manual, automated, or enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) based upon your goals.
Write clear, engaging ad copy with a strong call-to-action. Ensure you include headings, descriptions, and relevant extensions like sitelinks or callouts.
Ensure the page your ad links to is relevant, fast-loading, and optimised for conversions. A great ad means nothing if the landing page doesn’t deliver.
Once live, track performance metrics like click-through-rate, cost per click, and conversion rate. Use this data to refine your strategy.
One of the best things about PPC is that you won’t pay if your ads are not functioning correctly. With PPC, you only pay if you get the results you’re after.
Unlike organic marketing like SEO, PPC results are almost instant, meaning that if you are in need of traffic then and there, then PPC may be the way for you.
While SEO builds long-lasting visibility, PPC fills in the gaps by driving traffic instantly, even for competitive keywords.
Even if users don’t click, your ads still appear in front of them, boosting brand awareness and recall over time.
PPC is ideal for generating instant visibility - perfect for new websites, product launches, or time-sensitive promotions.
You can create targeted campaigns for individual offerings, ensuring your ads appear when users search for those exact items.
By targeting keywords with strong commercial intent (like “buy now” or “near me”), PPC helps attract users who are ready to convert.
To many of you, PPC may seem like this really advanced strategy, but it can be broken up into the basics to help you understand each of the moving parts.
In PPC, you bid on keywords that your audience is searching for, and the more relevant your landing page and ad copy are towards this keyword, the more likely you are to appear for the keyword. When finding keywords to target when it comes to PPC, you should take into account the monthly search volume of that keyword, the difficulty and the CPC or the Cost-per-click.
Your ad's placement depends on the amount of your bid and your ad’s quality score. Your ad's quality score is affected by your expected click-through rate, landing page experience and ad relevance. By improving any of these, you could increase your ad’s quality score and help place your ad higher than others.
PPC includes five main types of ads: search ads, display ads, shopping ads, and video ads. Each one of these ads serves a different role in the buyer's journey.
You can control how much you spend daily or monthly. Bidding strategies can be manual or automated, depending on your goals.
The clicks you get from your ads are only half the battle, your landing page must be relevant, fast-loading, conversion-friendly friendly and offer your prospects value.
Now that we have the basics out of the way lets talk a bit about the advanced strategies.
Instead of showing the same ad repeatedly, build a sequence of ads that tell a story or address different objections over time, almost like a mini sales funnel but in ad form.
Instead of bidding the same amount for every click, you can use machine learning to bid based on predicted customer lifetime value. This helps prioritise high-value conversions over just volume.
Coordinate your bidding strategy across Google, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn to maintain consistent messaging and avoid cannibalising your own traffic.
Well, that’s it for the first instalment in our Marketing Monday initiative. We hope you’ve learnt something useful or perhaps revised some important techniques.
So stay tuned, stay super, and I’ll see you next time!
