PPC advertising for businesses

Welcome to the alluring world of pay-per-click or PPC advertising! Imagine your business at the top of search engine result pages, immediately grabbing the attention of your target audience. Doesn't that sound remarkable?

PPC is akin to a magic wand that can open new doors of potential success for your business. However, before you dive head-first into this advertising model, you need to understand the intricacies of PPC and determine if it's the right fit for your distinct business objectives.

The truth is that PPC ads are all around us as they have the potential to bring paid traffic to your website in large numbers. But is PPC for you? Is it worth your effort and time, and will it increase your visibility, boost your conversions, and offer a remarkable ROI?

After all, pay-per-click advertising involves creativity, technical knowledge, a compelling ad copy that connects with your audience, and consistent campaign optimization and management. Whether you're a new business exploring PPC for the first time or a seasoned marketer looking to benefit more from PPC, this guide will help you make an informed decision.

So, without ado, let's unravel the true potential of PPC advertising and see if it's the right choice for your business!

What Is PPC Advertising?

Pay-per-click is a form of digital advertising that requires you to pay a fee each time your ads are clicked. When you choose a PPC ad to market your business, you pay for targeted visits to your website, landing page, app, etc. Since you only pay when a user clicks on your ad, PPC is considered a cost-effective form of marketing with a healthy ROI.

When done right, PPC can earn you quality leads, and the fee you have to pay per click offers a splendid return on investment. For instance, if you pay to pay $2 for a click, but it ultimately results in a $200 sale due to a seamless user journey, then you have made a significant profit.

PPC ads come in various shapes and sizes and can be a combination of images, texts, and videos. They appear as display ads on social media sites, websites, and search engines. SERP PPC ads show up when the user types specific phrases or keywords into the search engine. If a user clicks on the ad that gets displayed on the SERP, you will pay a designated fee for that click.

Pay-per-click ads appear as the first few search results on a SERP. Here's what a PPC ad looks like on a Google search engine result page:

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The highlighted word "sponsored" indicates the search result is an ad for the entered keyword. The following are the organic results for this keyword that you can find after scrolling down the SERP:

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Apart from Google Ads, here are some other popular marketing platforms for PPC:

  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • Amazon
  • Yelp
  • Etsy

Paid social and shopping ads are typically integrated with other social media and website content.

PPC vs. SEM

Before we delve deeper into PPC advertising, let's clarify the confusion most people have regarding PPC and SEM. Contrary to popular belief, PPC does not equal SEM. However, pay-per-click advertising does fall under the vast umbrella of search engine marketing (SEM).

  • PPC refers to sponsored ads that direct visitors to promotional landing pages.
  • SEM is an umbrella term for strategies that fall within the realm of PPC and SEO. So, it includes both paid and organic traffic generation.

What Are the Crucial Parts of a PPC Ad?

The essential parts of a PPC ad are its headline, display URL, description, and destination URL.

  • Headline: It should be written to attract searchers to click on your ad.
  • Description: It must give information about your offerings in a compelling way within the given character limit.
  • Display URL: It's your website's main URL, i.e., your homepage's URL.
  • Destination URL: as the name suggests, this is the URL the searcher will go to when they click on your ad.

The 4 Fundamental Components of Paid Search Advertising

Here are four aspects that can help you build a successful paid search or PPC campaign:

Keyword Research

Paid search platforms, such as Microsoft Ads and Google Ads, operate on keywords that serve as triggers to display relevant ads. For instance, if a user searches for “fun socks ny” on Google, it will display ads from businesses that have used those keywords or variations of them, as evidenced here:

Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of PPC campaigns. So, you must understand your target audience's search intent to bid on keywords that will help you get the coveted top sponsored result spot on SERPs. You can also look up more affordable, long-tail keywords that are less competitive.

Ultimately, choose keywords and phrases with a high click-through rate (CTR), maximum conversions, and cost-effective cost-per-click (CPC) rate. Content Development Pros can help you with comprehensive keyword research and incorporate them into your PPC ad copy for optimal engagement.

Ad Groups

You must make different ad groups to house the primary and related keywords, corresponding ad texts, and landing pages. To drive optimum results, ads within one group must carry a consistent message and target a focused set of keywords. Their copy should align with your target audience's search intent to improve your CTR. With multiple ads in your ad group, you can better organize your keywords, landing pages, and ad copy to cover different aspects of your business.

PPC Auctions

Every time Google Search has to determine which ads will appear first on the search result pages, an ad auction will occur. Google will give preference to the highest bidder and consider other factors, including ad quality, to determine if the ad will contribute to Google's UX.

Here are three primary factors in determining if your ad will be displayed on Google's result pages and what its position will be:

  1. Bid Amount: This is the maximum amount you will pay for a click on your ad, i.e., the cost-per-click. Bids can be adjusted manually or with the use of the enhanced CPC on search engines, but the amount you end up paying will vary based on the popularity of your targeted keyword, the CTR of your ad, and other factors.
  2. Ad Quality: Google evaluates an ad's Quality Score (QS) based on its usefulness and relevance to searchers. If your ad has a higher QS, you can get a lower CPC at a better position on SERPs.
  3. Ad Format and Extensions: If you have additional extensions, it can increase your CTR and ad rank once the ad is created. These extensions can include your promotions, location, contact number, and app.

Quality Score

Quality Score is Google's rating for your ad based on the relevance and quality of your PPC. Google measures the expected CTR of the ad, its relevance to the user's search intent, and the usefulness of your landing page to the individuals who will click on your ad. QS is measured on a scale of 1-10, with 8 to 10 being very good. A higher QS will increase your ad rank and minimize your CPC.

How Does PPC Work?

While we have established that there are different types of PPC ads, we will focus on Google Ads to explain how PPC works, as they are the most common types of pay-per-click ads.

When a search engine user completes a search on Google, the platform determines if you have placed a bid on the searched keywords. If you have bid on the searched term, Google will display your ad on the search result page. Your rank on the page will depend on your ad's QS and your bid for the keyword.

Does PPC Actually Help Businesses?

Is PPC effective? It absolutely is! Pay-per-click is an effective digital advertising method if you have the right high-quality ads, landing pages, and PPC strategies. It works specifically well when you want quick results or have to target a specific or niche audience.

Here are some stats that prove and support the effectiveness of PPC advertising:

  • Ad spending is projected to show an annual growth rate of 8.69% from 2023-2027, resulting in an estimated market volume of a whopping US$389.80bn by 2027!
  • Most ad spending will be generated in the USA (US$118.20bn in 2023).
  • In the search advertising industry, US$231.80bn of total ad spending will be produced via mobile in 2027.

9 Benefits of PPC for Businesses

Here are some undeniable benefits of pay-per-click ads for businesses:

Cost-Effectiveness

There's no denying that PPC ad campaigns enable you to have complete control over how much you can and wish to spend. Since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, it offers a higher chance of conversion, resulting in you getting your money's worth. To maintain PPC cost-effectiveness, you can set your maximum ad spend to stay within your budget.

Swift Results

Unlike SEO, which can take its sweet time to show results, PPC ads produce quick, measurable results that you can track immediately. While we do not deny the benefits of organically ranking on the first SERP, if your business needs immediate traffic, PPC is the way to go.

For instance, startups or small businesses don't have the luxury of waiting for organic traffic to build. With smart, high-quality PPC ads, you can catapult yourself to the top of the SERP within hours and days of launching your campaign.

Effective Targeting

PPC ad platforms provide marketers with varied, highly comprehensive targeting options. They enable you to target the bottom-of-the-funnel audience that's prepared to buy your products and services by bidding on keywords that suit their search intent.

You can also target users based on past online activity, demographics, and interests. Moreover, you can employ retargeting to target people who have previously visited your website. Testing various targeting options will help you maximize your ad impressions and reach niche audiences.

Easy Testing & Seamless Control

PPC ads give you the opportunity to run A/B split tests with different ad copies to identify the ones that produce the highest ROI. It will enable you to scale the ads that perform well. You can also control the keywords, budget, and ad placement to a certain degree.

Unrivaled Visibility

SEO cannot beat the immediate visibility your brand receives when you acquire the top spot of a search engine results page. Moreover, PPC can help deliver visibility even if your business has low domain authority to get into the top rankings through SEO.

Flexible Budget

You get undeniable budget flexibility with PPC advertising. You can allocate an initial budget and then quickly scale your ad spend up or down depending on your campaign's performance. You can also stop spending if your business needs to make budget cuts and does not require vigorous PPC efforts.

Measurable Results

Pay-per-click ads can be measured and tracked using Google Analytics and Google Ads. These tools offer an insightful overview of real-time clicks, impressions, and conversions that can help you modify your campaign accordingly.

PPC management services provide measurable results

Marketing Insights

PPC campaign data can inform your content marketing and search engine optimization strategies. In fact, your paid advertising efforts must complement your SEO efforts instead of harming or replacing them.

Edge Over Competition

You can prevent your competitors from dominating SERPs by targeting brand, industry, or competitor-related keywords. However, make sure that you don't deceive prospective audiences like this, as it can turn them away from your business.

When Should You Use PPC for Maximum Effectiveness

Here are some instances in which you should use PPC:

When You Require Swift Results

Strategies like SEO demand that you build your website's authority over a long time, but sometimes you cannot afford to wait too long. PPC enables you to get your ads to prospective customers as soon as you launch your campaign. So, it works best if you are thinking of promoting a limited-time offer, sale, product launch, etc., and don't have the website authority for organic traffic generation.

When You Want to Reach BoFu Leads

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) leads are those people who are close to making a purchasing decision. PPC works wonders on BoFu leads as they are most likely to buy and are likelier to click on your ad that suits their search intent than those who are still gathering information about your business.

When You Desire Precise Targeting

When Your Website Is Not Showing Up in Organic Search Results

With pay-per-click ads, you can target precise audiences with your ads. You can choose audiences based on many characteristics, including their age, location, hobbies, buying patterns, etc. If you have a distinct idea about the niche audience you want to target, use PPC to target their search intent and bid on related keywords for maximum effect.

When Your Website Is Not Showing Up in Organic Search Results

If your business has a new online presence and your website does not feature multiple pages, you will not rank high in organic search results instantly. To build your site authority, you must build SEO-friendly content and work on on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies.

In such a situation, PPC is ideal as it enables you to promote your business and bring traffic to your website as you work on your SEO. Moreover, you can also use PPC if your products belong to a niche market or you have a new technology or product with a low search volume. You can create PPC ads for keywords related to those products to reach new clients.

How Much Does a PPC Ad Cost?

Typically, PPC ads are considered largely affordable as the average cost-per-click hovers around $1 and $2 on Google's Search Network and averages under $1 on the Google Display Network. That said, the cost of your ad will largely depend on how competitive your chosen keyword is, your choice of PPC platform, industry, ad quality, etc.

The rate you pay for each click is based on Google's formulae:

Ad rank of the ad below yours / your quality score + $0.01

For instance, if the rank of the ad below yours is 10 and your QS is 5, you can expect to pay $2.01 per click.

Moreover, your ad rank is calculated based on the following formula:

Ultimately, the cost-per-click will not matter if you can generate an impressive return on ad spend (ROAS). However, for that to happen, you will need comprehensive PPC management.

Your maximum CPC bid x your ad's QS

So, if you have a maximum bid of $3 and a quality score of 10, your ad rank will be 30. If you have a better quality score, you will have to pay less per click and earn a higher position in search engine result pages.

Ultimately, the cost-per-click will not matter if you can generate an impressive return on ad spend (ROAS). However, for that to happen, you will need comprehensive PPC management.

How to Optimize Your PPC Advertising Campaign

How to Optimize Your PPC Advertising Campaign

Review Your Keywords

Target keywords that are relevant to your business and create relevant landing pages. Don't use broad, one-word keywords with significant competition. Keep adding industry-related keywords and experimenting to find out which work. Not all keywords will perform well, despite their cost. You must review them and stop using underperforming keywords while adding more relevant keywords to expand your business reach.

Use Negative Keywords

Put non-converting terms as negative keywords in your PPC ads to improve your campaign relevancy and decrease wasted ad spend. It will help keep your ad from showing up on irrelevant search pages.

Split Your Ad Groups

Splitting your ad groups into smaller, more relevant ad groups will help you produce more targeted copies and landing pages, boosting your click-through rate and quality score. So, don't target a hundred keywords with one ad group. Keep around 15-20 keywords per group for specific, tailored results.

Make Your Ad Copy & Landing Pages More Compelling

Are your visitors bouncing from the landing page, keeping you from maximizing conversions? Work on the landing page copy to make it more compelling. Modify the CTAs and content to reduce the bounce rate and offer value to your visitors.

Are your visitors bouncing from the landing page, keeping you from maximizing conversions? Work on the landing page copy to make it more compelling. Modify the CTAs and content to reduce the bounce rate and offer value to your visitors.

Track Your Campaign Results

Whether you use Google Analytics or Google Ads, you will need a tool, professional help, or a reliable platform to track your PPC campaign results. The more data you have, the better you will be able to gauge how your campaign is performing and make the tweaks necessary to create engaging ads that drive maximum results.

So, Is PPC Worth It?

The short answer is that, yes, PPC is worth it! However, if you want your PPC campaign to be effective, you need a compelling ad, the right strategies, a converting landing page, and consistent campaign management and optimization.

The longer answer is that the worthiness of PPC advertising depends on the following factors:

Your Budget & Cost

PPC offers flexibility in allocating a budget, allowing you to set daily or campaign-specific spending limits. That said, you must evaluate your budget, CPC, and ROI to determine the worth of a PPC campaign for your business.

Objectives & Target Audience

For PPC to generate maximum worth, you must define your campaign goals (driving traffic, raising brand awareness, increasing sales, etc.) and align them with the capabilities of various PPC platforms. You will also have to target your niche audience.

Organic Visibility & Competition

Assess the competitiveness in your industry and the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. If your organic reach and visibility are limited, PPC can help you gain instant visibility to compete with established industry players and outrank your competitors in paid search.

Tracking, Analytics & Management

Pay-per-click advertising offers extensive racking and various tools to measure campaign performance via different metrics. If you have the expertise and time to use these tools or have the budget to hire a PPC management service to optimize your campaign and related SEO and content management efforts based on these insights, PPC will work wonders for you.

Ultimately, only you can determine the worth of PPC for your business based on the factors mentioned above and your distinct needs.

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Content Development Pros' Case Studies Showcasing Effective PPC Management

Content Development Pros understands your need for seamless PPC ad copywriting and management services. We specialize in understanding our client's distinct needs and ensuring they have a successful PPC campaign to meet their goals.

Here are three of our successful PPC campaign case studies that highlight the successes our clients got from our expert PPC ad writing and management solutions:

Custom Signs NY

Custom Signs NY is a New York-based company specializing in designing and manufacturing signage. The client was previously engaged in PPC activities but wasn't satisfied with the results.

Feb 2021 - Sep 2021: Metrics from when the client was running their own campaigns:

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Oct 2021 - May 2022: We took over the client's Google Ads account to set up and manage a structured Google Search ads campaign:

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Since our involvement, Custom Signs NY has benefitted from the following:

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Moreover, we gave several recommendations to the client to improve their landing page experience, which resulted in a 25.37% increase in total leads and an 18.02% increase in website traffic.

Previously, the client's campaigns had a CTR of 4.52%, while our ad copies received a 5.97% CTR. We credit this rise in CTR to our headlines and descriptions that were tailor-made for each ad group resulting in higher ad relevance.

Queen City Fab

Queen City Fab's website features an e-commerce store for which we have been running, managing, and optimizing a Google Ads campaign since August 23, 2022.

The table below details the trend in the results of the client's campaign:

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Here's an overview of the client's campaign since our involvement:

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Discount Golf Co

Discount Golf Co is an online Golf grips and accessories store. At the time of onboarding in October 2021, the client had not run any campaigns on Google Ads.

  • The Google Ads Campaign Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was 549.70% in the first month (October 2021).
  • The conversions for the first month of the campaign were 80. As of May 2022, the conversions are 343.
  • The initial cost per conversion in Oct 2021 was $13.39. As of May 2022, it stands at $3.93.

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CDP Offers Comprehensive PPC Management

Looking for reliable PPC management to ensure the success of your campaigns? CDP offers professional PPC campaign management across all platforms. Whether you need social media PPC management support or need to capitalize on your Google Ads PPC campaigns, we have got you covered.

Our professional PPC experts will understand your needs, customize your campaign with compelling content and relevant keywords, and deliver tailored results, including:

  • Increase in your ROAS
  • Boost in conversions
  • More paid website traffic
  • Decrease in cost-per-conversion
  • Rise in click-through rates & more!

So, what are you waiting for? Invest in our PPC Management Solutions today