PPC Marketing Guide: How to Boost Your Online Business!

As a business owner, you’re constantly looking for ways to grow your business and increase your revenue. One of the most effective ways to do this is through advertising.

But with so many advertising options, knowing where to invest your advertising budget can be challenging. One option that’s gaining popularity is PPC Marketing.

In this article, we’ll explore what PPC Marketing is, how it works, and how you can use it to maximize your advertising budget.

Search Engine Marketing is the game name where you need to invest your money to accelerate business growth.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is an advertising or marketing model that is ruling search engine marketing or paid advertising on the internet.

This means you cannot ignore the significance of PPC marketing and advertising in the online retail business.

Here is a simple guide for small businesses to introduce you to this new economic model.

What Is PPC?

PPC ( Pay-Per-Click) marketing is a type of marketing or online advertising strategy where advertisers have to pay for their ads every time a user clicks on the ad.

Advertisers, in this case, you being a small business owner, bid on the perceived value of these ad clicks depending upon the platform, keyword, and audience category.

It is an economic model established under the category of something you can define as SEM i.e, Search Engine Marketing.

PPC is almost a synonym for paid search for most marketing and advertising professionals.

The measurement of PPC advertising or marketing is CPC (Cost Per Click). PPC marketing is among the most powerful and highly effective tools for small businesses and marketers.

It is the best fuel for the e-commerce industry to rise dramatically by facilitating most of the marketing models, such as affiliate marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Pay-Per-Clicks work best when the relevance meets the right marketing strategy.

First, you have to understand how it works at the ground level where prospective buyers are involved.

Image Source: WordStream

When a user searches for “camping equipment” on Google, he or she is supposed to see many results ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Apart from that, you often see the top few results different from the organic results with a tiny label attached to it saying “Ad.”

On the other side, there is a partition showing some selected results with pictures and pricing from e-commerce websites with a tag at the top saying “ Sponsored”.

Both of them are pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.

How Does PPC Marketing Work?

PPC Marketing allows advertisers to bid on specific keywords or phrases relevant to their business.

When someone searches for one of these keywords, the ads associated with that keyword are displayed at the top of the search results page. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad.

How to Get Started with PPC Marketing

If you’re interested in getting started with PPC Marketing, here are some steps to follow:

➜ Set Your Advertising Budget:

Before launching a PPC Marketing campaign, you must set your advertising budget. This will help you determine how much you can spend on each click.

➜ Choose Your Keywords:

Next, you must choose the keywords or phrases you want to target. These keywords should be relevant to your business and your products or services.

➜ Create Your Ads:

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you must create your ads. Your ads should be compelling and include a call to action, encouraging people to click.

➜ Launch Your Campaign:

Once your ads are created, you can launch your campaign. Make sure you track your results so you can make adjustments as needed.

Types of PPC Ads:

PPC advertising includes various types of ads that businesses can use to promote their products and services. Some of the popular types of PPC ads are:

Search Ads: These are the most common type of PPC ads that appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Search ads are targeted based on keywords and appear when someone searches for a specific term.
Display Ads: Display ads are visual ads that appear on websites, apps, and social media platforms. These ads can be targeted based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Video Ads: Video ads are short videos that appear on video streaming platforms like YouTube. These ads can be targeted based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Shopping Ads: Shopping ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches for a specific product. These ads include product images, prices, and other details.

Targeting Options:

PPC ads offer various targeting options that help businesses reach their target audience. Some of the popular targeting options are:

?Keyword Targeting:

With keyword targeting, businesses can target specific keywords for their target audience. This helps reach out to potential customers interested in the business’s products or services.

?Location Targeting:

Location targeting helps businesses target customers in specific geographic locations. This is useful for businesses with a physical location or targeting customers in a specific region.

?Demographic:

Targeting: Demographic targeting helps businesses target customers based on their age, gender, income, and other demographic factors.

?Interest Targeting:

Interest targeting helps businesses target customers based on their interests and behaviors. This is useful for businesses that want to target customers who are interested in a specific topic or product.

The Benefits of PPC Marketing

Targeted Advertising: With PPC Marketing, you can target specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. This ensures that your ads are only shown to people interested in what you offer.
Cost-Effective: PPC Marketing can be a cost-effective way to advertise your business because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Measurable Results: PPC Marketing provides measurable results, which means you can track your ad performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Quick Results: Unlike other forms of advertising, PPC Marketing can provide quick results. You can launch a campaign and start seeing results within hours.

Why Must PPC Marketing Be Integral To Your Business Marketing Strategy?

First of all, let’s address the elephant in the room! The very confusion regarding the interchangeability of the terms “PPC Marketing” and “PPC Advertising.”

Well, it is because PPC is an economic model that blurs the line between advertising and marketing.

On one side, you see it as an actionable strategy with being leads and sales-oriented like marketing.

Then, it is indeed the paid visibility that makes it more like an advertisement.

As a small business owner, it is highly unlikely that you have already tried search engine optimization and social media advertising or paid ads.

And you must have also seen lead generation through networking, content marketing, and other strategies.

PPC makes the most sense right now that your business demands after all other strategies have been tried and tested.

But don’t get convinced here. Take a look at all these compelling reasons or, more like, the benefits of using PPC ads for your marketing strategy.

Pay Only When User Clicks

Advertising often sounds too costly, especially if you are well aware of the PPC concept.

It is not about putting your brand name on giant billboards or coming on television ads.

Such ads are costly but more relevant to reach a larger audience with non-niche messaging.

PPC is far more effective as it only shows up to the users who are relevant and potential buyers of your product.

But the most important difference is in its very name, “pay per click,” as the advertisers or small business owners only have to pay when someone clicks on your advertisement.

So basically, the ads are free in a way as far as the impressions are concerned. You would only pay for its clicks.

Easy To Measure & Track Results

Unlike traditional marketing or advertisement, the best part of digital marketing is it is measurable and trackable.

With PPC advertisements, you can always measure the views, impressions, and click-throughs.

The campaign has a real-time tracking feature where you can see everything in the works.

It allows you to understand what’s happening and change, customize, or adapt accordingly for better results.

Helps You In Precise Targeting

Targeting is the most crucial part of creating advertisements or promoting products.

The more you focus on targeting your audience, the more likely you will be better at personalizing the ad, making it easy to appeal to, and having better conversions.

PPC marketing or advertising best targets the core audience you want to tap into.

This works even better for those small businesses with a very specific type of product looking forward to a target niche audience.

It helps you go for precise targeting even in the most crowded industry. The best advantage you get is to cut all the competition around it.

Boost Your Marketing Competence

Search Engine Optimization is always considered one of the best ways to attain brand visibility and derive traffic to your website.

But there is no doubt that it takes time to achieve that. Even with social media marketing, it takes time to build a following, develop a track, or maintain engagement.

PPC Advertising can boost your marketing capacity and derive effective results in a very limited time.

In fact, PPC ads are more result-oriented and target-driven, increasing the core competence of your marketing strategy.

Stop Anytime You Want

It may not sound as much of a big deal if you are unaware of traditional advertising campaigns.

Usual advertisements or paid social media marketing bleeds small businesses with heavy cash over time.

It is disastrous when you see it is not working but hooked on to be working eventually.

PPC marketing is so convenient and easy to stop giving full control and sanity to advertisers.

In fact, you can stop any PPC ad campaign within 5 minutes from any device with the internet.

There is no clause, agreements, guaranteed payments, or any such constraints that you must be concerned about.

PPC Is More Action-Driven Than Visibility-driven

We already talked about how PPC is quite sitting in the middle of being both an advertising and marketing strategy.

However, if you want to dig deep and establish the core of the PPC strategy, it is more action-driven than visibility-driven.

In fact, it is pretty much clear as PPC ads are shown on the search pages when users are looking for a particular product or service.

PPC is indeed focused on encouraging users to take action by clicking on a particular ad and buying from it.

The PPC ad is not helping much in the brand’s visibility for many reasons, from first to be non-intentional.

What is Google Adwords?

Simply put, PPC advertising or marketing is synonymous with Google Adwords because it is clearly the most popular PPC advertising campaign platform.

It allows small business owners and marketers/advertisers to create Google ad campaigns to contain all their PPC ads.

You get to create these ad groups where each of them enlists numerous keywords that are highly relevant to every ad in that particular group.

For Example,

If you sell footwear, you might have an ad group like “women’s sports shoes,” “ black men’s shoes,” “sports shoes,” “men’s boots,” and so on.

Each ad group must have up to 30 relevant keywords associated with it with custom-created advertisements targeting specific kinds of customers accordingly.

Image Source: Munro

There are hundreds of relevant keywords associated with many ad groups helping plenty of advertisements run or are yet to be run in multiple ad campaigns for large enterprises.

Google AdWords offers its premium tool, Keyword planner, which helps you find relevant keywords to target the audience and create ads.

Definitely, you can look for plenty of keyword planners outside. However, the Keyword planner is really effective and free to use.

How does Google Adwords PPC Advertising work?

Google Adwords is a very user-friendly format where even for newbies, it becomes really easy to create accounts and manage ad campaigns.

However, for the first time, it might require a little bit of working around to get hold of things.

But it doesn’t mean that PPC advertising is easy to win.

It takes time, experience, and a lot of trial and error to grow your marketing skills, just like with any other marketing strategy.

However, it always remains in the order it appears in the ad.