What is PPC?
PPC stands for pay per click, a form of internet advertising in which you bid against other businesses to get a business ad placed on the first page of a users search results with the hope that they will call your business or click on your ad and land on your website, eventually leading to a sale.
How does PPC work?
Create ads
It begins with an ad designed to describe the service, sale or special you want to promote. The ad may include a phone number and an image and should link to a specific page of your website.
Target
By restricting which users are able to see your ads, you won’t waste your money on clicks that don’t lead to sales. A geographical restriction can be set so your ad is only visible to users in your service area. You can select the country, state, city or select a custom region; you could even select a certain radius from your business location.
You can also target by website type, audience type or remarketing. All of these options allow you to get the saturation of online marketing without getting lost in the vastness of the internet as a whole.
Bid
Select specific keywords or keyword phrases that customers are likely to type in when searching for the products or services you provide. When a user types one of these keywords in the search box, your bid goes up against other businesses who have selected the word for their PPC campaigns. If you win, your ad will pop up to the side or at the top of the organic search results. You pay the bid amount only when a user clicks on your ad.
Review and adjust
Countless statistical results related to your ads will be at your fingertips. Review what percentage of people who see your ad are clicking through, and how many clicks are leading to sales. Make adjustments to keywords, bid strategy, targeting restrictions or ad verbiage until you find the combinations that work best for your business.
What are the benefits of PPC advertising?
Reach relevant customers
This is the major goal of any marketing campaign. You want to reach the people who are seeking your product or service without wasting your dollars and resources on others who might unintentionally get lumped in to your reach. Achieving this is very difficult through most other forms of marketing, but PPC makes it easy to target your ideal customer and reach them at the perfect time – right when they’re searching specifically for your product or service.
Instant results
Your ad will start appearing on the first page of search results the moment you turn on your PPC campaign. Of course, the number of times that will happen is dependent on your budget. The alternative, first page ranking through organic keywords, involves keyword research, SEO optimization, strategic content writing, local listing management, backlink creation, mobile-friendly web design and more. It can take several months to see rankings improve organically. Especially for brand new businesses or websites, PPC is a great way to get noticed and get traffic to your site quickly.
Cost
You are in complete control. In addition to a monthly budget, you have the option to set limits for each keyword and each individual ad campaign. Your campaigns will be turned off once your limits have been meet and you always have the option to adjust your budget as you see fit. In a successful campaign, the cost of a click will be insignificant compared to the resulting sale.
Anyone can set up a PPC campaign, but running an efficient and successful campaign can be tricky. If you’d like to use our experience to skip past some of the learning curve, give us a call: 303-940-5544. We’d love to help your company thrive!