PPC Advertising stands for pay-per-click advertising. It’s an internet advertising model where advertisers pay each time one of their ads are clicked.
Why is the PPC advertising model important?
For starters, PPC advertising has changed the way advertising media has been purchased and it gives power back to the small to medium size businesses.
Historically, traditional advertising models consisted of purchasing ads in lump sum for exposure and coverage. This allows radio, television, and print industries to set the rate at which an advertiser can advertise their products or services regardless of a potential prospect having any interest or not.
Traditional media is also much harder to track. Not only are advertisers locked into the rates that the big time publishers set, but they are also relying on “lift” from these outlets to justify the amount that advertisers have spent with them. Advertisers often need thousands of dollars to notice any change in average performance for their business.
This opened up an opportunity PPC advertising where advertisers only pay if someone clicks on their advertisement. This allows for much smaller businesses to advertise at much lower costs.
The advertising paradigm has shifted.
Google launched Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), its ad serving platform, in 2000. Since then a number of players have entered the space including Microsoft’s Bing Ads network and Yahoo’s Ad platform, but Google Ads remains the largest player in terms of total monthly search volume and users.
PPC also solves the tracking issue that traditional advertising models lack. Now advertisers can track back to the specific keyword or search phrase that resulted in a sale for their business. This allows for much tighter and optimization for advertisers than ever before.
WHY YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS PPC
PPC advertising may not be relevant for all businesses and business models, but it has advantages for most. Aside from proper tracking, PPC advertising allows you to target customers much more directly than traditional media outlets can.
For example, if you are a barber in North Hollywood, CA looking to expand your business, you can set a monthly ad budget and serve ads specific to the geo location you are in.
This allows you to only target ads to customers looking for “barbers in Noho” as opposed to a general blast to all of Los Angeles.
You can also use the tools that Google Ads provides to target customers based on age, gender, interests, and much more.
HOW TO GET STARTED IN PPC
All you need to do to get started in PPC advertising is to navigate to the Google Ads account creation page and follow the steps to create your first Google Ads campaign. You will need basic info like business name and address as well as credit card information.
From there, you can begin conducting keyword research to help target searches that you want your ads to show up for. Google’s keyword planner tool is a great resource for accessing search volume within your industry and seeing how much competition there is.
THE BASIC PPC ACCOUNT STRUCTURE
The PPC account structure is broken down into 4 parts:
Account > Campaigns > Ad Groups > Keywords
THE ACCOUNT LEVEL
At the account level holds your business, website and billing information. It is advised to only have 1 advertised website within each account, but if you are a small advertiser with many websites, then you can set up specific campaigns for each website to get started if needed.
THE CAMPAIGN LEVEL
Next, you have your campaigns. It’s important to set up campaigns that are unique to the products and services that you are trying to sell. This will help with quality score optimization and lower costs-per-click in the future.
For example, you may be barber who not only sells hair cut services, but also hair gels and shampoos. You would want to set up “hair cut services” as its own campaign. Similarly, you can create a hair gel campaign and a separate hair shampoo campaign.
This will help keep your ad groups relevant to the campaign in which they are housed in and create ads relevant to the products and services that you are selling.
THE AD GROUP LEVEL
After you have set up your campaign, you will set up your ad groups where you will set your max CPC’s or bids for each keyword. We always suggest bidding at they keyword level, but you will need to enter a value on the ad group level first before drilling down to the keyword level.
Your ad groups should be separated by the keyword variants that will be housed inside of them.
For example, if you are a barber and you set up the “hair cut services” campaign, then your potential ad groups could be “line-ups”, “Brazilian blowouts”, and “hair coloring”. This ensures that you can write ads specific to the keywords that you are trying to target. Again, this is important for quality score optimization and decreasing your costs-per-click.
THE KEYWORD LEVEL
Lastly, you have your keywords. Your keywords are broken down into 4 main match type categories:
- Exact = [line-ups in noho]
- Phrase = “line-ups in noho”
- Broad = line-ups in noho
- Modified Broad = +line-ups +in +noho
It’s important to tier your bidding strategy with the highest bids on exact keywords and your lowest bids on broad and modified broad keywords. This will help you control your daily spend amounts without blowing through your budget too quickly.
Read our blog on keyword match types and mapping for a more in depth guide on match types.
It’s important to revisit your keywords monthly or bi-monthly to extract which keywords are working and which aren’t. An often overlooked step is the use of negative keywords.
For example, if you’re a barber and have accumulated some click data, you may realize that a large percent of your daily budget is being spent on keywords that are not relevant to your business such as “hair extensions” or “hair brushes”.
You can negative those keywords out of your campaign to help isolate spend on only the products and services that you actually sell.
THE METRICS YOU NEED TO TRACK
The Google Ads platform and other search engines provide you with a lot of metrics to consider. The key to running a successful PPC program is to hone in on the specific metrics that move your business forward.
The 7 main metrics that you will need include:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- CTR (=clicks/impressions)
- Cost
- Conversions (you’ll need to setup conversion tracking separately to bring this in)
- Cost-per-Conversion (=cost/conversion)
- Conversion Rate (=conversions/clicks)
If you are a barber, you will want to track the keywords that are delivering value for your business. To do this you will need to setup conversion tracking on your website. This usually involves pasting a conversion pixel on the thank you or confirmation pages of your website.
Once installed, you will be able to make optimizations based on the specific keywords that drive sales or appointments for your shop.