Pay Per Click
What is purchasing power of customer? How does the purchasing power work? How can you get the trust of customers that can buy your products or services? In this section, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the exciting world of paid search marketing: keywords, ads, budgets, bids, ad rank and targeting, and conversions.
Let’s start with the basics.
What Is Purchasing Power?
Pay-per-click or PPC is an advertising model that allows marketers to place ads on advertising platforms and pay for host that platform each time they click on an ad. The purpose of a PPC ad is to direct the viewer to click to use the advertiser’s site or app, as the visitor may take valuable action, such as purchasing a product. Search engines are incredibly popular advertising platforms. This allows you to show ads related to the ads users are searching the solution of their problems. Advertising services such as Google Advertising and Bing Ads operate through real-time bidding or RTB, in which ad inventory is sold in a special automated auction using real-time data.
How Paid Search Works?
Whenever an ad placement is placed on a search engine results page or SERP, the keyword is auctioned immediately. A combination of several factors, including the amount of the bid and the quality of the ad, determine which winner will appear at the top of the SERP. These auctions are going to maintain PPC gears. Auctions start when a person searches for something on a search engine. If the advertisers are interested in showing ads related to a user’s search query, the auction will begin based on the keywords that the advertisers are bidding on. The ads that win the auction then appear on the search engine results page. To participate in these auctions and advertisers use accounts on platforms such as Google Ads to create their ads and determine where and when those ads appear.
Accounts are broken down into campaigns to easily manage and report on different sites, product types, or any other useful rankings. The campaign is divided into ad groups with related keywords and ads.
Keyword
Keywords are located in cost-per-click service centers that connect advertisers to user search queries.
- Queries are real words that users type into a search engine’s search box to find results.
- Keywords on the other hand, are the ones that marketers target these users by matching their search queries.
Keywords act as a common stream for a wide variety of search queries, and there is a risk of violations such as misspellings. Depending on the type of keyword matching they use, advertisers may adjust their search queries more or less precisely.
For example, advertisers can choose to match keywords to search properly, or allow different variations, such as different word order, different spelling, or other words. You may also have negative keywords that will prevent your ads from generating ads from search queries containing those keywords to avoid inappropriate traffic.
Ads
Campaigns must set ads other than keywords. They merge into ad groups targeting a general set of keywords, so they’re organized by general themes. Ads are what users will see if they win the auction, so it’s very important to do it right.
This usually includes:
- Headlines
- URL
- Description
In the SERP they may appear at the top of the results or at the bottom of the page. It’s a good practice to check different versions of your ad text to see which works best. Services like Google Ads and Bing Ads provide features called ad extensions that enhance the look of your ads.
For Examples:
- Site links extensions that fill your ad with multiple links to different pages on your site.
- Call extensions that add a phone number to your ad during business hours.
Ad extensions are great because they increase the visibility of your ads and make them more attractive to users because they provide more information.
Budget And Bids
To enter the auction, advertisers must indicate the amount they are willing to spend on a particular keyword.
It is used by:
- Budget at the campaign level.
- Bid is at the ad group or keyword level.
Budgets are set at the campaign level, and can be exceeded on a daily basis, but will not be exceeded on a monthly basis. Budgets need to be set in line with your overall account strategy, but pricing is a more accurate way to control spending.
Ad Rank
It is more to win the auction than to get the highest bid. Search engines consider other factors to determine which ads should be in the SERP top and most valuable. Search engines have their own ways of analyzing other elements to determine the ranking of ads.
For example, Google understands:
1. Bid price.
2. Ad relevance and ad quality.
3. Search context like user device, time of day.
4. Format effects
Quality Score is a metric that determines your ad’s relevance. The components of Quality Score are:
- Historical Click through Rate (CTR).
- The relevance of the keywords in the ad.
- ds for keyword matching and search queries.
- Landing page quality.
Ad relevancy is extremely important; the higher the Quality Score, the lower the CPC. Search engines penalize advertisers who rarely show their ads, even if they have higher bids, by bidding on keywords with lower Quality Scores. That’s why it’s so important to have compelling and relevant ad text that includes large keywords. But landing page quality should not be ignored; ads will show less frequently when referring to sites with poor user experience. The website must be user-friendly, load quickly, and provide an overall user experience on all devices.
Targeting
Choosing the right keywords allows advertisers to show their ads to the right audience. But there are other targeting options for optimizing your campaigns which include:
- Device.
- Location
- Day and time.
- Demographics.
This allows advertisers to target mobile evening users or users under the age of 25 and within a certain radius to improve the performance of their ads. These targeting options are amazingly valuable because, for example, different types of ad copies may work better for one group of users than others. This can also be done with additional tools that allow you to specify a more accurate copy of your ad and adjust your budget to select or exclude visitors to your previous site who perform additional searches.
Keyword bidding can be adjusted automatically based on your targeting options, giving advertisers more control over traffic and spending by setting prices when customers value your business.
Conversions
All this hard work is not just about getting clicks. There is a real final transformation of the game. Conversions are the tasks that advertisers want users to perform when they click on an ad, depending on the type of business being advertised.
The most common examples of conversions are:
- Purchase service.
- Signup for subscription.
- Placing a phone call
It’s extremely important to track conversions to see how well PPC campaigns are doing well or how many conversions can be attributed to paid search rather than other marketing channels. Platforms such as Google Advertising can track conversions using code snippets to collect conversion data that is embedded in the source code of the conversion page which you access after a conversion, such as a thank you page.
Conversion tracking can be a little tricky because conversion funnels are more complex than just clicking on an ad and making a direct purchase. This often involves multiple site searches and visits or can result in emails, phone calls, or store visits.
Using an analytics service like Google Analytics can help determine how conversions are counted in the funnel.