What is PPC? PPC, or Pay Per Click advertising, is a form of online advertising utilized by a wide variety of businesses. When you run a PPC campaign, you create an advertisement and bid on specific keywords. When someone searches for one of your target keywords, your ad will appear in the “sponsored ads” section of the search engine results. Pay Per Click advertising is a wonderful way to get your ads and website in front of a large number of highly targeted online consumers.
How PPC is Used
PPC advertising is generally used by ecommerce websites looking to attract online shoppers to their website. Since you are able to specify which keywords will trigger your advertisements, you can target those online consumers who are ready to make a purchase today. This fact allows you to see tremendous results when running a PPC campaign as you can avoid paying to advertise to consumers who are in the browsing phase of the buying cycle.
Different Pay Per Click Options
There are several different options at your disposal when looking to run a Pay Per Click campaign. Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Facebook ads are three of the largest Pay Per Click companies out there.
Adwords allows you to serve up your ads within Google’s search engine results and within their content network. Both are good options when it comes to attracting a specific type of online consumer to your website, but each requires a different approach in order to run a successful campaign.
Microsoft AdCenter is similar to Adwords in that you are able to get your advertisements to appear on the first page of the search results. When using this PPC option, your ads will appear in both Yahoo’s and Bing’s search results, allowing you to reach a large number of online consumers. Consumers who use these two search engines have different online spending habits of those who primarily use Google, so it is in your best interest to include this Pay Per Click platform when running a campaign.
Creating Facebook ads acts much like Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter but the only difference is your ads only appear on Facebook. Instead of targeting specific keywords with your Pay Per Click campaign when using Facebook, you will target a specific demographic such as race, age, gender or even location.
What Makes a Good PPC Campaign?
In order to run a truly successful Pay Per Click campaign, you need to test every aspect of your campaign. This includes your advertisement’s headline, ad copy and landing page. If you are not continuously optimizing your campaign, you run the risk of throwing money away on clicks that are never going to generate a sale through your website.
In addition to constantly split testing your campaign, you will want to track all of your keywords and ads to see which one generates the best conversion rate. If you notice a specific headline provides your campaign with a great click through rate, you can use similar headlines to see if you can optimize other ads you are running. When you optimize your Pay Per Click ads and improve your landing page conversion rate, you will notice your cost per click amount will decrease, allowing you to see an even better return on your advertising investment.
Pay Per Click advertising is a great way to drive instant, targeted traffic to your website. Using Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Facebook to serve up your ads in front of your target consumer is one of the best ways to increase your online sales.
