Are you looking to read up on the topic of PPC advertisement for beginners?
Are you looking to start a PPC advertisement campaign and you wanted to educate yourself on PPC in general?
Perhaps you are just curious to know what are the juicy PPC content we have in store for you!
Great news!
We’re are talking PPC advertisements here.
In this article, we will look at what is PPC, what is Google Ads, how does Google Ads work, keyword research for PPC, your PPC advertisement campaign, your actual PPC advertisement, Ad Rank, Quality Score and more.
We have divided this article into the following sections to help you navigate to the section more relevant to you:
- What is PPC?
- What is Google Ads?
- How does Google deliver ads?
- Knowledge of your target audience
- Keyword Research for PPC advertisement
- Your actual PPC Advertisements
- PPC advertisement budget and bids
- PPC Ad Rank
- PPC Return on investment (ROI)
- PPC advertisement success
- Takeaways
Let’s dive right in.
What is PPC?
The first appropriate question to tackle in this PPC advertisement for beginners’ guide is to understand what is PPC.
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click.
Pay-per-click is an advertisement model allowing you to advertise on different advertisement platforms where you pay every time a user clicks on your ad.
PPC advertising is quite popular on search engines.
We can also refer to it as search engine advertising.
You can target relevant keywords for your business and have the search engine propose your website to their users.
When you pay search engines for a PPC advertisement campaign, they will place your link strategically on the search engine results page to maximize click-throughs.
If the user clicks on your advertisement link, then you will pay the search engine platform a specific price per click.
Some PPC keywords are highly competitive and others are not.
PPC advertisement services like that offered by Google Ads and Bing Ads deliver advertisements based on a real-time private auction.
With the pay-per-click type of online advertising, you are buying visits to your website.
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is the most popular PPC advertising platform.
Google is the most popular search engine in the world and so Google Ads will naturally ride on that popularity as well.
In case you wonder, Google Ads was formerly called Google AdWords.
Using Google Ads, you will pay Google to create ads that appear on their search engine results page or other Google properties.
Google’s objective is to deliver relevant ads to their users.
Your objective with your PPC advertisement campaign is to increase your conversions.
You can create beautiful landing pages in such a way that if a user clicks on your Google advertisement, you can strategically target them and provide them a call-to-action.
But how does Google determine what ad to deliver to which user?
How does Google deliver ads?
Google delivers ads to users based on multiple factors.
When someone does a search on Google’s search, Google will look into its inventory of advertisements and selects relevant ads to deliver to its user.
The ads are selected based on the ad relevance, the relevance of the keywords used in the ad, the budget the advertiser is willing to spend per click and so on.
Based on Google’s selection criteria, some ads will be selected in a split second and delivered onto the search engine results page.
This is like an auction process.
How does this auction work?
Essentially, each Google selects who appears on the page based on the advertiser’s Ad Rank calculated by multiplying two factors with one another: CPC Bid multiplied by Quality Score.
A CPC bid is the highest amount of money an advertiser is willing to spend on an advertisement per click.
The Quality Score is the value awarded by Google to the advertiser based on the quality of the advertiser’s website, click-through rate, relevance to the ad and page quality.
There are a number of factors that Google will consider but your keyword relevance, landing page quality, Quality Score and the quality of your content will impact how successful your PPC campaign will end up being.
Google’s ad selection process follows an auction-type of selection process.
The ad will typically go to the highest bidder with the best Quality Score.
With an auction-type of selection process, Google ensures that the most relevant ad is delivered to its users based on the advertiser’s budget.
Knowledge of your target audience
PPC advertisement just like any other type of digital marketing advertisement will require that you know your target audience.
If you already have a digital marketing strategy for content creation and SEO, you may already have a good idea of who you are targeting.
If you don’t know who you are targeting, you’ll need to do your homework and find out as you will be putting money in PPC and you want to target your ideal customer.
Identifying your customer persona will help you strategize your PPC advertisement campaign.
Are you targeting users locally?
What type of keywords will your typical customer persona be using to search?
What does your target audience like?
What are their interests?
Based on that, you’ll have a much clearer idea of the type of content you should put on your PPC landing page, the type of keywords to select in your campaign and more.
Keyword Research for PPC advertisement
It’s important that we talk about keyword research in this PPC advertisement for beginners article.
Doing the right keyword research is extremely important to have a good PPC advertisement campaign.
You can target keywords that give you volume or others that give you quality leads.
The keywords you’ll target will affect your overall advertising budget and success.
To ensure you select the right keywords, you’ll want to focus on relevant keywords, do a complete research on the applicable keywords and look for new keyword opportunities from time to time.
A keyword can be relevant for your PPC advertisement campaign if you select keyword terms directly relating to what you are looking to sell.
If you are not targeting your keyword well, you’ll end up paying for a lot of irrelevant traffic that will not bring you any business.
Keywords offering you a high PPC click-through rate, a good cost-per-click and good conversion on your site is what you’re looking for.
Make sure to also include long-tail keywords in your PPC advertisement campaign.
Long-tail keywords are composed of four, five or more keywords.
For example, the “benefits of a DSLR camera” is a long-tail keyword.
Long-tail keywords are really good to target as they are generally not as expensive but they convey user intent.
In our example of “benefits of a DSLR camera” you can tell that the user is potentially evaluating a DSLR camera and wants to understand what are the benefits of this camera.
The user is in the assessment stage of his or her buying journey.
Your conversion rates on long-tail keywords can be much higher than more general keywords.
Your actual PPC Advertisements
Moving on in our PPC advertisement for beginners, let’s better understand the actual PPC advertisements.
The actual PPC advertisement is the actual ad that you’d like Google to present to its searchers.
The ad is what a user will see on the search engine results page.
Your actual ad will be coupled with your selected keywords so you can present the right ad based on the keyword in question.
Your Google Ads will contain a headline, a URL and a description.
Once Google’s private auction selects your ad to be delivered to a Google user, the headline, URL and description you created for your targeted keywords will be presented on top or at the bottom of the search results page.
For any effective PPC advertisement campaign, you can play around and tweak your headline, URL and description to see which ad works best.
PPC advertisement budget and bids
For Google to present your ads to its users, you’ll need to bid on keywords and you’ll need to decide how much is your overall PPC budget for Google to consider.
The budget defines how much money you are prepared to spend on your PPC advertisement campaign.
The bid is the amount you are prepared to pay per click per ad group or a keyword.
The amount that you’ll pay per click will depend on your Ad Rank which is a multiplication of your CPC Bid and Quality Score along with that of your competing advertisers.
This is based on Google’s real-time bidding system to deliver ads.
In addition to how much you are willing to spend on ads, there are other factors that will affect your ability to win a bid.
Let’s look at the Ad Rank.
PPC Ad Rank
In addition to your budget and how much you are prepared to pay per click on a selected keyword, Google will also consider your Ad Rank to decide if you are going to win the bid on a keyword.
Each search engine will have its own ranking factors.
For you to win a Google ad space, Google will consider your bid, your ad relevance and quality, the context of the searcher such as time of day and search history and the ad format such as whether it includes extensions or not.
To determine your Ad Rank, we will also need your Quality Score.
The Quality Score is calculated based on your website’s click-through rate, keyword relevance to the ad, keyword relevance to the search query and your landing page.
The more you score high on Quality Score the cheaper your CPC cost will be.
Search engines try to provide their users with the best user experience possible.
This means that if they offer ads to their users to click on, they want the ad to be relevant, the landing page should be engaging and the user should see the value.
If you do not have good site, engaging landing page and a good Quality Score, the search engines will not be incentivized to advertise for you as they consider that you will diminish the overall credibility of their ads.
They don’t want users to click on ads and get irrelevant pages or poor user experience.
PPC Return on investment (ROI)
We’ve talked about many aspects of PPC but a PPC advertisement for beginners cannot be complete without us talking about your PPC return of investment or ROI.
Any investment we consider, we are looking to make money.
If we invest $10,000 in something, we are hoping to get anything more.
The more we profit from our initial investment, the higher the return on our investment.
The same principle applies to PPC advertisements.
If you are going to spend money on PPC advertisements, you want to ultimately make more money than you spend.
With PPC advertisements, you should do a pre-launch analysis to see how much you are willing to spend and how much you should make in ROI.
Once you launch your PPC advertisement campaign, you can then monitor the results of your campaign.
If you are spending $10,000 and making $20,000, that’s a fantastic return on investment and you should continue this campaign.
If you spend $10,000 and end up making no money at all, then you’ll need to go back to the drawing board and see what’s not working for you.
The advantage of PPC advertisements is that you can monitor your results in real-time and ensure you don’t lose all your money before you tweak things around.
If you see that you are not getting a good conversion, you can tweak your ads, change your budgets, change keywords and so on.
It’s all up to you how you manage your campaign.
At the end of the day, you want to make a positive return on investment with PPC.
PPC advertisement success
So what should be your ultimate goal with PPC advertisement?
You want conversions and ultimately you want to make money.
You should define what conversions you’d like to achieve with your PPC advertisement campaign.
Are you looking for users to register for your newsletter?
Are you looking for people to submit an online form?
Are you looking for people to download your product?
You must define what is the profitable action that a user can take when interacting with your digital marketing properties.
If your goal is to make money, then you’ll need to calculate your return on investment and see if that’s something acceptable to you.
You want to track your PPC advertisement conversions to ensure you are not just spending money to bring web traffic to your site but you are truly seeing conversions.
Takeaways
Here you have it, PPC advertisement for beginners.
PPC advertisement can be a great way for you to immediately increase traffic to your website, increase your conversions and make more money.
What’s also quite interesting with PPC advertisement campaigns is that you are in full control of the keywords you bid on, your advertisement budget along with the campaign duration and so on.
In this article, we’ve looked at what is PPC advertisement, how it works, Google Ads, the keyword selection and bidding process and more.
We hope that you have gained sufficient knowledge to build upon in order to create a profitable PPC advertisement campaign.
Have you done PPC advertising? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment.
