Pay Per Click (PPC) Explained

Landing pages are just one aspect of a marketing campaign. However to be useful they must act like a magnet and attract valuable web visitors. This is where Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can prove beneficial. Pay Per Click relates to the little adverts that appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
PPC marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach prospects quickly and it is a particularly useful strategy to deploy while you are waiting for your organic search strategies (SEO) to start delivering results.
Whether you are running a PPC campaign yourself or you have an agency managing it for you, understanding how it works in the wider scheme of things is crucial.

The Campaign
If you are managing a PPC strategy it probably coincides with your wider digital strategy. Each component of your digital approach including social media marketing, content marketing or SEO will all be working in unison towards a shared goal.
Keywords are important when it comes to PPC. The keywords that you target will ultimately determine the overall success of your campaign because you need to ensure that your ads are displayed to the right visitors. When it comes to PPC there are three types of keywords that you need to be familiar with:

#1 Broad Match
Enter a relevant search term into a search engine and the broad match search will bring up a whole list of keywords that are related to your seed keyword. Usually these are words and phrases that are related to, similar to or synonymous with your initial keyword idea.

Although broad match may seem like a good idea, you often lose control over who sees your ads which means that you may end up paying for clicks that aren’t well matched to your landing page. Within Adwords, there is a feature known as a ‘Broad Match Modifier’ which allows you to target your ads only at queries that contain your broad match keywords or variations which are very similar such as misspellings or plural forms.

#2 Phrase Match
This is a more precise set of keywords that will only include queries that contain a certain phrase or variant of your seed keyword.

#3 Exact Match
An exact match keyword is even more specific in that it will only target queries which are identical to the seed keyword. If for example, you set your campaign for an exact match keyword such as ‘men’s black watch’ this is the only search that you will appear in.
Exact Match keywords can be a little restrictive because they sometimes narrow the target customers a little too far.

Negative Keywords

It is also worth mentioning negative keywords. Although they are not a match type as such, they do form a crucial part in your keyword strategy. Negative keywords will stop your ads showing up in searches that you feel are not relevant. Taking the example above, ‘men’s black watches’, a negative keyword such as ‘women’s watches’ could be added to ensure that your ad does not show up in ads listed for certain search terms.

Keyword research is important. For maximum impact your ads need to be displayed to the right consumers.

Which Keywords are Best?

Although you may now understand the different ways that keywords can be matched, how do you decide the best keywords to target? Effective keyword research should be your first task for every PPC campaign.

There are countless keyword tools out there such as Keyword.io or the trusty Google Keyword Planner. Not only does the Google Keyword planner list a series of keywords to target it will also reveal valuable data such as traffic, suggested bid amounts, competition and search volumes.

Although it can be tempting to target high traffic keywords, this can be a (costly) mistake. The most popular keywords won’t necessarily produce the most successful results. Competition for one or two word phrases is very tough and it can be difficult to create effective advertisements for these types of keywords. Medium tail and long tail keywords often deliver better results.

Search for long tail keywords that are low competition but relatively high search volume.
What about Ad Rank?

Ad Rank will be used to determine where on the page that your ad appears. There are many factors that can affect your ad rank including the amount of your bid (CPC) and the quality score of your keyword. The quality score is used to calculate the relevance of your ad.

Now that you understand the key components of PPC the learning never stops. There are strategies to be mastered, testing to be carried out and ongoing tweaks to be made to optimise your Pay Per Click campaign.

If you want to find out how to get the very best from AdWords then contact us today – send us a message and we will give you a FREE performance healthcheck, Check your ad settings and offer the very best advice.

Call us today on 01483 608859.