If you owned a shoe shop, you’d love to have a huge billboard at a busy road junction directing well heeled customers to your store in a side street nearby, right?

In the real world, this may not be possible – and at a price of up to £100,000 a month in certain areas of the UK for example, it may not be cost effective either.

This is exactly what Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can do for you online – and those who engage with the advert will all be folks interested in the product and not just those who just happened to be walking by.

PPC involves you paying a fee, or rather a fractional fee, each time someone clicks on your ad so that your website comes up in front of the audience you identified.

This can be done with search engine results, on social media platforms, other websites, content delivery networks, apps amongst others. You insert the keywords, and when a user types them, your ad pops up. This is of course over simplifying it but that’s the general idea.

Suppose someone is looking for “best Chinese restaurants” or “affordable trainers”, you make a customised ad that appears every time someone uses those keywords.

In a way it is similar to SEO, but the major difference is SEO is earning your way to the top, whereas PPC is buying your way. PPC is also focused on short-term conversions, while SEOs gather audiences over time. 

Search

Search paid ads are what you see as the first few options when you are scrolling through Google.

Since every business would like to see their ad at the top of the list, PPC uses an auction or bidding system, which decides the order the ads will show and how much they’ll cost.

You can use platforms like Microsoft Advertising and Bing but Google Ads has 91.8% of the search engine market share.

Display

PPC search ads appear at the top of search results when users search for your products or services using the keywords you provide. Display advertising differs as these are visual ads in the form of banners, pop-ups or video ads amongst others and are more focused on brand awareness rather than conversion.

Compared to PPC Search ads, display ads may have a lower conversion rate but they also have lower click prices than search.

Google is again an ideal choice for this as it has over two million sites on the Google Display Network, giving access to 90 per cent of internet users.

If you have a product or service that users aren’t aware about, PPC display ads are a helpful tool to build awareness. 

Video

YouTube and TikTok have made video content the dominant medium and PPC video advertising is equally important. 92 per cent of businesses say it is vital in marketing and 85 percent of them use it.

Paid video advertising gets your brand right in front of the users that don’t know you hence making finding an audience a non issue.

With the highest video consumption, YouTube is often the best place to start, with expectations of it having 2.5 billion users by 2025. Examples of video ads here could look like the skippable or unskippable ads that play before certain videos.  

Remarketing

When a user has shown interest in you, it’s important to maintain contact with them. This is where remarketing ads come in. It’s a campaign that aims at users who interacted with your brand digitally in some manner but didn’t convert or ‘bounced’. 

The good thing about remarketing is that its usually an effective way to convert those who already know about your brand and may be sitting on the fence.

Interestingly, folks usually use the words remarketing and retargeting interchangeably, however their is a slightly nuanced difference.

Remarketing is largely done directly via say email or any other push notification and retargeting is when the same is done with third party networks like Facebook.

Paid Social Media Ads

Simply, paid social is display ads delivered, at a cost, to targeted audiences over social platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.

If you’ve ever seen ads when scrolling down your socials feed that show tags like sponsored or promoted, you’re looking at a paid social ad.

A large advantage of paid social is the audience targeting and subsequent ability to see the audience that is seeing and engaging with the ad.

Another big one stems from the heavy consumption that folks generally have of social platforms especially TikTok and Instagram. Getting virality of a social ad, particularly video has a much higher probability and consequently ROI than any other type of adverting potentially could. 

PPC invariably finds its way in most marketers playbook and with good reason; its instrumental to quick growth especially when paired with other strategies. Off the bat, here are a few benefits you could expect from investing in a PPC strategy. 

Instant traffic

Compared to other strategies such as SEO for example or honestly anything else that drives organic traffic, PPC gives you that boost in quick traffic with its pay to play approach. 

Without the need of having to build an organic following, PPC and particularly socials PPC gives you quick access to a very wide, very targeted audience.  

Control over budget 

ROAS or return on ad spend is basically what you are getting out from what you put in.

PPC gives you the control to be able to spend how, when and where you want to spend. With its CPM – cost per thousand impressions or CPC – cost per click approach, you are in good control of your budget amount as well as when you want to run a campaign – think toggle on or off.

Paired with the analytics a PPC campaign provides, you are able to very quickly and continually optimise your campaign leading to *drumroll* improved ROAS.

Easier targeting

With CPM for example, you pay for every thousand impressions or views. Making each one of those count comes from how well you target the audience for your campaign.

Most PPC avenues allow for deep targeting using combinations of parameters such as demographics, interests, location, keywords and behaviours, non exhaustively. With a bit of strategy around targeting, you should be well poised to have the right folks see your ads.

Metrics

Metrics are basically the data or intelligence that you get running your campaigns. This data enables you to gauge performance and tweak things to optimise.

Several key metrics that you should expect to keep track of include the Google specific, quality score, your ad’s position in how its displayed, the impressions your ad received, the very important click through rate, the cost you are paying per click since its a bidding model and the conversion rate.

Reach

PPC ads are largely delivered through social media platforms, search engines – both search and maps, content delivery networks such as YouTube, email platforms, websites and through apps.

Most folks almost certainly interact with any one of these channels, with the very high probability of having several of these touch points any given day. When delivered via the right combination, these ads have a very high rate of landing the right punches. 

Whichever way you put it, any brand looking to scale up, fast and intelligently, needs to have a healthy mix of PPC in its repertoire. By strategically leveraging this channel, you can drive targeted traffic to your website, generate leads, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Want to learn more about how PPC can help your business thrive? Drop us a line for a free consult.