Start Your First PPC Campaign?
Through this article, you can start your first PPC campaign easily. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a superb way to boost your profit while growing your business on the internet. However, if you are an amateur in this field and don’t know how and where to start, you have reached the right place. To simply put, PPC marketing is a marketing tactic that acts as an advertising model for driving traffic to various websites.

Understanding PPC Campaigns
PPC stands for pay-per-click – an internet marketing model where an advertiser pays a certain fee for every click on his ad. Generally, it’s a method of buying visits to your website, instead of earning those visits organically.

Search engine advertising is the most common type of PPC campaign. It lets advertisers bid for ad placement in the sponsored link of a search engine when an individual searches a keyword associated with their brand or business.

PPC is not just a smart advertising strategy, but also hugely rewarding in monetary terms. Common PPC forms such as advertisements are located on the first pages of search results. Though paid ads charge advertisers a minimal fee every time a visitor clicks on them, it certainly attracts new visitors who are more likely to make a purchase.

Take a Look at the 5 Essentials to Know Before Starting Your First PPC Campaign

1. The Purpose of PPC in Marketing

PPC Marketing
To start your first PPC campaign, You must know that search ads can contribute to increasing brand awareness by 80 percent. And that display advertising ups the website traffic by 300 percent. Therefore, marketers around the world use PPC to fulfill their several marketing objectives such as:

Lead conversion – Generating lead is quite a challenging task for most companies, big or small. PPC makes it possible by luring prospective customers and guiding them on a journey to becoming paying customers. And it is obvious that visitors from paid search ads result in more sales than organic viewers.
Traffic consistency – As we all know that less traffic is harmful to a business, a sudden spike can result in the crashing of a website. Thus, paid search ads maintain a balance while controlling traffic as traffic relies on the number of money marketers are ready to spend.
Measuring & Tracking marketing goals – PPC marketing aids in the measurement of the success of an advertising campaign. By using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, marketers are able to get a complete performance summary including the number of clicks, lead conversions as well as the total result of the campaign.
Scheduling & Targeting – PPC enables an advertiser to target a particular location for their paid ads. Besides, they can also schedule a launch at any day or time as per their preference.
SEO & Content Marketing Strategy – Advertisers always have an upper hand when it comes to content marketing and SEO optimization. This is possible due to a selection of performance data gathered by Google’s tools along with other details. Marketers can even take a look at their competitor’s activities by using other tools such as KeywordSpy, etc.
The Origin of Pay-per-Click
The beginning of the internet era was slow and new rules were introduced every day. In 1998, GoTo.com came with the concept of Pay-per-click marketing for advertising. And since it was a search engine, GoTo.com also allowed advertisers to bid on keywords for showing on the first pages of search results.

However initially, the whole process was flawed, and marketers with a huge budget were able to bid on keywords that weren’t associated with their business. Suppose you are searching for pet food, and all you see are ads for Nike sports. You won’t come back to that search engine again.

This is when Google came up with their own improved PPC system. Now if you are wondering what difference did it make? Well, it included a Quality Score algorithm – that provided only relevant search results.

Since its launch in 2000, Adwords rapidly became a robust platform while cashing in a lot of money for Google. In 2015, PPC contributed to 75% of revenue earned by Google. However, they are not the only providers of PPC; BingAds & AdRoll also play a vital role in PPC marketing.

2. Types of PPC Advertising & Platforms

Types Of PPC
Google Ads – Google Ads is quite popular among marketers. It is their preferred choice as ads run not just on Google, but also on other search partner websites as well as display network platforms. This signifies that Google Ads marketing is apt for all kinds of businesses, whether big or small.
Microsoft Bing Ads – Bing Ads offers PPC marketing but just on Bing and Yahoo channels. And in 2018, Bing had around 137 million desktop searches.
Types of PPC Advertising
To start your first PPC campaign you must know about types of PPC advertising. There are a variety of PPC advertising that are available, and your choice will depend on the fact that why and where you wish to be seen. Is your target audience looking for you? Did they come to your website but left before buying anything? Or are you aware that you will find them on different social media platforms?

Let’s take a look at the different types of PPC advertising:

Social Media Advertising – The number of active social media users has increased by 21%. In 2019, there were around 3.48 billion social media users, and this means that social media marketing can work excellently for your brand or business. We must know that not just young adults aged between 18-35 will more likely follow a brand on social media, but also 71% of customers will happily suggest brands that offer a positive experience on social platforms.
Furthermore, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Linked In, etc are ideal for targeting particular demographics. And by placing a PPC ad on such sites, marketers can easily enhance their brand awareness. This is achieved by placing the ad in the news feed of the potential customers or their social hangouts.

Essence Studios guides you further on how you can boost your sales by using various video marketing strategies.

Paid Search Marketing – Google & Bing – One of the most common types of PPC advertising, Paid Search Marketing aims at offering organic search results that positions the ads at the top of search results. This process involves writing an ad copy, choosing keywords, and finally selecting the most suitable platform for placing it.
(Re)Marketing/Targeting PPC Marketing – Remarketing or Retargeting makes use of browser cookies to show ads similar to a viewer’s previous online search. The main aim of this type of PPC advertising is to make visitors return to a brand’s website so that they consider making a purchase.
There are different types of retargeting marketing campaigns such as display advertising, social media ads and emails. These work as a reminder to engage visitors while keeping them linked to the brand.

Display Advertising – This is in the form of images, text, banners advertising about a product to a specific audience on various websites. The only difference between display advertising and other forms of advertising is that here advertisers can choose their target audience they wish to show their ads to.
Though the click rate is little lesser compared to search ads, it still works quite well for improving brand awareness.

Special PPC Price Offers – Let’s discuss Google Shopping Campaigns. This type of ad network along with different various price comparison websites gathers and shows special offers and prices from several merchant websites. Customers check out the product or services and purchase from that particular ecommerce website or even directly from the site where it is compared. This gives a chance to the marketers to enhance their ROI, but this is possible only if they pay for clicks as profit increases with the increase in the money invested.
Affiliate PPC Marketing – You must note that you can use all these marketing strategies together in order to make your marketing campaigns more effective and successful. The following approaches can be used to place the ad:
Targeting Sites
Search Engines
Social Media
Price comparison portals
Now you must be wondering how much would Affiliate Marketing cost? In affiliate advertising, the payment depends on the performance or Cost per Acquisition (CPA – Cost per Action). You can either outsource affiliate advertising or even do it yourself. But it carries a specific amount of risk and needs a well-made strategy, time along continuous management.

3. How To Use PPC Marketing?
   To start your first PPC campaign, you must know about PPC marketing. Paid search ads are definitely more expensive, but you cannot ignore the fact they are also the most rewarding. These act as an excellent source for increasing conversion rates.

For instance, if you wish to start a search network marketing campaign, you are required to achieve several marketing objectives. As beginners, you are already aware of Google and Bing as go-to search engines. But there’s a lot more you need to know about it.

Keywords are an important part of every search ad campaign. However, they also include ads, ad groups as well as extensions. Therefore, to build an exceptional campaign, it is necessary for you to use SEO to optimize your brand’s website for the keywords you wish to target your customers with. Also, a good quality keyword decreases the cost per click.

4. How to Find the Magic Keyword?

Keyword Magic
To start your first PPC campaign, you must have knowledge about keywords. There are thousands of keywords on the internet which are continuously changing & evolving. Plus there are millions of new searches every month on popular search engines for new words/terms you might have never heard of. So, marketers have to keep an eye on such fluctuating keywords in order to target new & unique keyword combinations.

Negative Keywords
As a marketer, you can also use negative keywords to control irrelevant/unqualified traffic on your website. For example, Google visitors might search for ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ items which do not apply to expensive products or services. Therefore, these can be used as negative keywords by the marketers for limiting their website traffic to only potential customers.

Ad Groups
Ad groups form when one or more ads are grouped together along with a set of keywords by the marketers for remarketing purposes. Once a bid is placed by the advertiser, the ad group’s keyword will make an ad to display. Also, marketers can decide a price for each keyword found in the ad group.

5. Expanded Ads
   Once you have selected your ad groups and find the keywords, it’s time you begin writing the ad. However, you must know that a successful ad has a keyword theme, a call to action along important propositions. Additionally, you must follow the platform/ website’s rules regarding ad structure with correct specifications.

Ads shouldn’t seem to deceive and must be well-written & grammatically correct. Plus, it suggested that you initially test a minimum of 2 ads from your ad group to:

Use negative keywords
Restrict the broad use of match type keywords
Use broad match modified keywords
Test several benefits & features of your product to create a good ad description
Select landing pages that are relevant to the ads & keywords
Image Ads & Product Listings
Product listings are highly used in PPC eCommerce advertising and consist of titles, product images as well as prices. A marketer will be required to open a Google Merchant Center account in order to use Google product feeds.

PPC on Digital Devices
Mobile users are a great source of revenue for marketers who wish to attract their audience. As marketers must know that their ads would show across a variety of devices including smartphones, computers, and tablets.

Besides, tablets and laptops carry the same structure, in regards to PPC ads, smartphones need few changes for a decent user experience. Marketers can use a bid modifier that will let their ads appear with consistency across all the devices.

Therefore, Mobile PPC optimization plays a huge role in any marketing campaign. And around 71% of marketers believe that mobile advertising works wonders for their business. In fact, mobile devices contribute to 53% of paid search clicks; so it’s a good thing if you incorporate it in your marketing strategy.

Final Words
The ever-evolving digital expansion has molded and drastically changed the marketing scene since the past decade, with more technological innovations being introduced every now & then. This is why marketers must keep a check on the latest trends while using the best marketing methods to achieve their goals.

The pay-per-click marketing approach has been proven a lot beneficial especially to the corporate industry. PPC advertising is a common marketing strategy used these days. It is quite evident that this form of digital advertising will continue to improve. Therefore, marketers must use it wisely in order to attract more traffic & build brand awareness.

Besides PPC campaigns, you can also post Explainer videos on your social media platforms to promote your product or service. Read about how to identify & Fix content cannibalization issues.