What is Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising?
Search Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads on Google or Bing
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are an extremely effective form of advertising to help drive leads, sales, and awareness for your business. Search PPC ads appear on search engines like Google or Bing when someone enters a query. If you do a search right now on Google, you will see that the top four results are in fact ads. Below that are the organic (or unpaid) results. Over the years, Google has continued to add more prominent ad placements to the search engine results page (SERP), pushing organic content further and further down on both mobile and desktop.
To run Google Search Ads you typically will select a list of keywords you’d like to bid on to have your ad appear in the search results when someone searches for those keywords. So if your business offers cleaning services you may bid on keywords like “commercial cleaners” or “cleaning company.” Every time a search is done, advertisers compete in a dynamic auction process that determines which ads appear in the results. The great thing about Google search ads is that your business can be at the top of search results right away, while your website may take many months to rank in the organic results. You can learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to rank organically here.
Search PPC ads are a tactic deployed to capture users at the bottom of the marketing funnel. These are users going to a search engine like Google and raising their hand to say, “I am looking for the services or products you offer right now.” As you might imagine, Google search ads are an incredibly effective way to drive leads or sales for your business. A thoughtful digital marketing strategy will almost certainly include well-funded and well-optimized search campaigns.
As a Google Premier Partner agency we have a dedicated team at Google providing advanced support, account reviews, training, access to betas and more.
This is an example of a Local Services Ad. These ads appear above regular Google search ads and are a key placement for many of our clients.
Google Ads
Google is the most popular search engine in the world and thus it is the most competitive PPC market. When you need to meet your customers where they are, PPC advertising on Google is a great start. You can also reach users across the Google Display Network (GDN) and on YouTube through the Google Ads platform.
Microsoft Ads
Bing is a popular search engine competitor to Google, and can be an important part of a comprehensive pay-per-click advertising program. Advertising with Microsoft Ads also enables you to reach Yahoo! search engine users.
Facebook & Instagram Ads
With over 2 billion active users worldwide, Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms available. For certain businesses, a Facebook advertising campaign can present a huge value that cannot be matched by other PPC advertising platforms. Reach potential customers right as they scroll through their feeds.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn is the largest professional social network available and their PPC advertising platform allows targeting of users by unique traits such as industry, company, and even job title. If your PPC advertising campaign needs to target professionals, LinkedIn could be your best bet. Reach users in their feed or through message ads.
YouTube Ads
YouTube boasts 122 million active daily users. Whether you’re looking for awareness or driving conversions, YouTube is a key site to reach people in your audiences. Video is an especially compelling ad format and effective campaign type. And once you have your video assets ready, you can leverage them on other social media platforms as well.
Other Social Ads
Depending on your business, it may make sense to include other social channels like SnapChat, Twitter, or Pinterest. We can work with you to create a customized digital marketing strategy to make sure you’re reaching your target audience where they spend their time.
Google Local Services Ads (LSAs)
Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) are a newer ad format offered by Google which appear above Google search ads. Yes, that’s right, ABOVE the regular Google ads - this is prime real estate on the search results page. LSAs are only available in select cities/regions and for select services or industries. The setup and application process is rigorous and includes a background check. For some clients, Local Services Ads are an important part of their PPC strategy. Chair 10 Marketing has been running and managing LSAs for our clients since the launch of this ad type, and we have extensive experience navigating the detailed approval process with Google to get your LSA ads live and optimized.
Our Approach for PPC Success
-
Goals
We want to understand what success looks like for you. What are your KPIs and what are your goals? In this discussion, we’ll learn more about you and your business or organization and then fine-tune our digital marketing plan to meet or exceed your goals.
-
Targeting & Audiences
This is a huge piece of the puzzle and it can make the difference between successful and unsuccessful campaigns. We need to figure out who you’re trying to reach and find successful strategies to do just that. This might mean leveraging first-party data, remarketing lists, custom audiences, affinity audiences, lookalikes, and more.
-
Messaging
This is essential for ad copy and also for your website and landing page. What do you want people to do? Fill out a form? Call you? Schedule an appointment? Get a quote? Talk to an enrollment coach? Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, we can work backwards to get the copy just right. Messaging that resonates with your audience can be a key to PPC success.
-
Landing Page
This is the page a user is taken to after they click on the ad. Why isn’t this just your website? Well, because a landing page is designed to convert. Since you’re paying for this traffic, you want to give the user the best chance possible to convert. A landing page should concisely tell users what they need in order to convince them to take your desired conversion action. A good landing page will have less information than your whole website, but both are important to overall success for your digital campaigns.
-
Conversion Tracking
It is essential that you implement tracking on your site so that you can measure the effectiveness of your pay-per-click ads and make changes accordingly. This may seem like it goes without saying, but there are many agencies out there who only talk about the impressions and clicks they’re driving. We need a complete picture of conversion tracking to help you reach your goals.
-
Smart Bidding
The advent of smart bidding strategies has revolutionized how digital marketers work to optimize campaigns. But smart bidding strategies are just one tool in how we optimize PPC performance. It’s essential to thoughtfully choose the correct smart bidding strategy, and then ensure that the ad platform is receiving the proper conversion data on a regular basis so that it has accurate information to optimize towards. Then the work to really differentiate your performance from competitors begins, including ongoing optimization of campaign settings, ad copy, keywords, and landing page(s) to get the desired results
-
Testing & Iterating
Your digital marketing strategy will evolve as your goals change and as we get more and more actionable data to inform our recommendations. Our initial strategy is our first test, and from there we will continue to test and iterate to improve performance.
-
Transparency
We want you to know what’s going on and have access to data and performance whenever you need it. We offer monthly reporting as well as a dashboard where you can easily export any data you need.
Contact Us Today for a Free Pay-Per-Click Advertising Consultation!