What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing forms the backbone of many marketing strategies. It delivers fast and measurable results and works for professionals and businesses across most industries.

It’s not always the best approach, and it can be expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. We’ll show you some of the basics of PPC marketing and help you get to grips with it.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?

PPC is a digital advertising model whereby the advertiser sets specific keywords and then pays a certain price for every user who clicks a link and visits the advertiser’s site or landing page.

How Does PPC Work?

PPC platforms rarely charge a fixed fee per click. Instead, advertisers compete for specific keywords, setting a budget and then paying the going rate at that time.

The more competitive a keyword is, the higher the price will be.

Many ecommerce keywords are available for less than $1 per click, but this changes significantly in the professional services space, where it can cost over $10 and even over $100 for a single click.

It’s a lot of money to pay for a click when you consider there’s no guarantee the user will make a purchase or even stay on the site for more than a few seconds. However, the clicks are highly targeted, with advertisers focusing on specific demographics, interests, and locations relevant to their business.

Types of PPC Ads

Depending on the platform used, PPC advertising may appear as:

Search Ads

Search ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) as a “Sponsored” link. In Google, for instance, they appear at the top and bottom of SERPs, so when a user searches for a keyword that the advertiser is bidding on, their result will appear.

Display Ads

A display ad appears on the platform’s network of websites. It can be a text link with a simple name and description or a media link with images.

Video Ads

These ads appear on videos, either as a text/banner link at the bottom or as a short commercial.

The Best PPC Platforms

PPC platforms use vast networks of sites or users to publish advertisements. You can run a single campaign and set it to appear across millions of sites, search results, or videos, and networks like Google Ads offer all three.

Google Ads

As the biggest PPC network, Google Ads provides users with access to vast quantities of data they can use to set campaigns for the search network (the Google search engine), display network (the countless sites that have signed up to host Google Ads), and YouTube videos.

Microsoft Ads

Google has the largest market share by far, especially when it comes to search ads. But Bing sits in second and it’s still worth signing up to Microsoft Ads to host placements on Bing, Yahoo, and a large network of publishers.

Meta Ads

The Meta Ads network includes Facebook and Instagram.

Advertisers post various types of ads on the two social networks, paying for engagements and clicks and tracking everything in a detailed analytics manager.

LinkedIn Ads

The advertising platform for the world’s biggest professional social media platform connects advertisers to around 1 billion users and is especially useful for B2B advertisers.

Amazon Ads

This platform is used to advertise products listed on the Amazon Marketplace, giving advertisers more exposure. There are also display ads that can appear on other Amazon-owned sites, including Twitch.

TikTok Ads

One of the fastest-growing video sites, TikTok gets billions of views from more than a billion users. The ads appear on “For You” pages as users scroll through videos.

Other PPC Platforms

Reddit
Pinterest
X/Twitter
RevContent
Apple Search Ads
Snapchat
Taboola
Outbrain
AdRoll

How to Create a PPC Campaign

There are three key steps to any successful PPC marketing campaign:

Research

Although time-consuming, research is one of the most important steps.

You need to know which keywords to target, how much to spend, and what kind of results you should expect.

You can figure this out by researching trends and competitors, focusing on:

Relevance: The best results come from the most relevant keywords. Don’t try to force relevance by using a keyword that drives a lot of traffic but isn’t fully relevant to what you sell.
Long-tail Keywords: Include long-tail keywords in your strategy. These keywords are more specific and less popular, but they are important for your overall strategy.
Learning: You will need to fine-tune your approach, so go wide in the beginning (while staying relevant) and return to tweak the campaign.

Managing

It’s time to set up your campaigns:

Bid Within Your Budget: It’s very easy to overspend on PPC campaigns, so bid competitively but don’t overdo it.
Create Enticing Copy: You need headlines that grab a user’s attention.
Use On-Platform Optimization: The platform will have its own built-in tools, including the Quality Score on Google Ads, which will guide you toward improving your ads.
Create Landing Pages: Don’t simply send users to your homepage. Create optimized landing pages designed to convert.

Maintenance

PPC campaigns are not something you can set and forget. They require constant maintenance, which is why many brands choose to hand over their PPC accounts to marketing teams:

Keep Adding Keywords: Don’t just stick with the keywords you added in the beginning. Keep introducing new ones as the campaign progresses.
Add Negative Keywords: Once it’s clear that a keyword isn’t working for you, add it to the “Negative” list to instruct the platform to stop sending traffic from that keyword.
Review Costs: Sort your keywords by the ones with the highest cost per click and review the ones that are costing you a lot of money. If you’re being forced to bid high for keywords that ultimately aren’t working for you, pause them or add them to the “Negative” list.
Optimize Your Website/Landing Pages: If a keyword isn’t working, you might be quick to blame the platform or remove the keyword, but the issue could be your site or landing pages. Optimize them to improve results. Split your ad groups and run some A/B testing to make gradual improvements.

Summary: PPC Advertising

Pay per click advertising is not a complete solution, but it is an effective one and should be used alongside strategies like SEO, social media marketing, and offline advertising.

It takes a lot of work and needs ongoing maintenance, so if you don’t have the time or the skills, you’ll need to hire someone to do the work for you.