Introduction
If you are a business owner who has contracted an agency or freelancer to build your website, you may be surprised to find out that owning a website isn’t the same as people actually visiting it.
Although very important, designing a website that is easy to navigate is only the first step to achieving good digital presence. In order to drive successful traffic, you need to market your business online and focus on getting a steady stream of visitors interested in your products and services.
This can be done by advertising with PPC management.
Table of Contents
A brief history of PPC Marketing
In the early 2000s, search engines emerged as a way to target people looking specifically for certain terms, websites and solutions. Marketers soon realised that they could use these softwares to drive traffic to their website and make sales.
Companies could create an ad based on specific keywords (like “dancing shoes” or “skateboarding”) and pay only when their website was displayed on a search engine like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This was a revolutionary concept that worked for everyone, but it did not come without its challenges.
Due to the increasing competition from other businesses, rising budgets and more complex ad designs, specialized agencies were created with the experience, knowledge and resources to create effective ad designs and promote them to relevant users.
This form of digital marketing is now a proven revenue maker for many businesses around the world and has shaped how both consumers and marketers interact online.
We ain’t playing by your rules anymore, pops.
What is PPC Management?
Pay Per Click management is where you only pay for an advertisement if somebody clicks on it. These ‘clicks’ are then tracked and the advertiser will be charged for each click, plus a small fee.
With PPC marketing, entrepreneurs can drive targeted traffic and improve the conversions of their sites. This is an excellent means for small and medium businesses to reach out to a large audience without having to spend too much money or effort doing so.
The benefits of PPC Advertising are:
- Targeted traffic – make sure that the advertising you do online is relevant to your products or services so you can appeal only to your target market. In other words, only people who are interested in your product will see your ads. This is more beneficial than the ‘spray and pray’ approach of traditional advertising.
- Track conversion rates – PPC advertising allows you to track how many people click on your ads and then purchase from your site. If the people who are looking at your ad don’t buy from you, then you can figure out what stopped them from making a purchase.
- Increased sales – if you are able to identify how people arrive at your site (through PPC engine advertisements), then this is a great way to find out what sort of products or services they are interested in and cater your website and sales team towards those needs.
To the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
If you are new to the world of digital marketing, you may be wondering how customers find your business online. The answer is: on Google.
It may not come as a surprise to you that 87% of global users search on Google for products and services, considering that the search engine has been the most popular for almost two decades now. But check this out: 92% of users never – EVER – go beyond the first results page!
Mesmerizing. Right?!
In fact, there is an inside joke that goes: “the best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google’s Search Results”. I can’t say if it’s true or not. I’ve never been there.
If you are not showing up on SERPs or if you are only showing up on the second or third page, you are losing a lot of business because nobody is going to scroll through pages looking for a business that they do not know about.
To add insult to injury, 41% of search clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on a query. You’ve seen them, right? The paid ads at the top of the SERP? They look like this:
So it’s clear now that if you want your business to grow, it is paramount that you understand how to get on top of Google’s search engine results.
The more you know. You can also get to the top of Google’s SERPs organically – meaning “for free” – with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is extremely reliable but will take at least six months to show some results. For faster results, we complement our SEO strategy with PPC Management to take us immediately to the top for the right price.
Affordable SEO let’s you surpass your competitors in a sustainable way, providing visitors to your website and turning them into recurring customers.
How to drive premium traffic with Google Ads
What we’ve learned so far: to get visitors to your website, one must achieve high ranking positions on Google’s Search Result Pages, and a fast way to do that is through PPC Advertising.
The dancing shoes ads we just showed you were made on Google Ads, a platform for advertisers to create and display ads on Google’s SERP as well as third-party websites.
To start advertising on Google Ads, a company has two ways to do it.
- The first option is by doing it manually which allows an organization to have the most control over their ads, how they look, where they’re displayed and so on. The disadvantage of this method is that it requires more effort and time to manage ads if you are doing it manually since each one has to be set up separately by hand.
- The second option is by using automated advertisements which are better for starters that have not yet mastered the tool. This method allows you to set up a lot of campaigns at once, and Google automatically optimizes them for you (when you do this you end up spending more money on things that are irrelevant, but let’s save that for another article).
The thing is… if you’re investing time and money on something, you want it done right. So let’s go with the first option and see how the pros get it done.
Keyword Research
When you advertise on Google, you can buy different keywords related to your product that will attract relevant audiences and draw in customers.
Let’s say that you sell skateboards and there are a few search queries associated with your product: “skateboard”, “skateboarding”, “cheap skateboards”, etc. What you need to determine is which of these terms have the highest potential for generating conversions (in this example, sales) from Google Ads.
Keyword research is a part of the process for search engine optimization that involves finding out what people are searching for on search engines such as Google. By finding out what people want to search for, then you can market your products and services to them.
Improving your conversion rate with Long Tail Keywords
Once you have the list of keywords that you want to target, it is time to find out which ones are going to provide a higher conversion rate. The way to do this is by using long tail keywords. They’re very specific and long phrases that are usually 3-4 words.
A long tail keyword is a search term that has low to medium traffic volume, making it difficult for the average person to compete, but easier for someone who has an expert understanding of a niche.
Sticking to our previous example, “skateboards for kids” would be a long tail keyword as it’s not something that someone would type into Google unless they knew what they were looking for.
Long tail searches don’t usually come in as huge traffic streams, they usually represent smaller amounts of visitors that are more interested and engaged in your product or service. That makes them much more likely to become repeat customers over time.
Audience Segmentation
In addition to targeting any keyword or search term that will be relevant to the products or services offered by your brand, Google Adwords also allows you to target customers who are searching specifically from their mobile devices and users from specific geographical regions.
Not only can you target audiences based on location, but in addition to that you can further narrow it down by age groups, gender and even the kind of device they’re using.
For example, if your target audience is mainly young adults between the ages of 18-25 who live around Orlando, Florida and are searching from a mobile phone, Google Adwords has the power to display your ads only to those people.
Bid Management and Budget Allocation
You might have guessed this already, but yes, there is a cost involved in setting up PPC ads. The determining factor of how much you pay for clicks on your ads depends on the bids that you make on each keyword.
The way that this works is you select the maximum amount of money you would be willing to pay for a click (in most cases, the more money you’re willing to pay, the higher your ranking will be). This is known as your max bid.
Now, when someone searches for a term related to your offer/product/service, your bid is compared to all the others that are bidding on that keyword. If you’re one of the highest bidders, they will be happy to display your ad for as long as you want, and at any time during the day or night.
However, if there are other companies that have placed a higher bid on the same keyword, then your ad won’t show up in search results. This is why you need to devote time and energy into bid management.
Why you should hire a PPC Agency
As you’ve learned by now, managing paid ads can be rather troublesome for many people, especially if you’re already in charge of financing, stocking, and serving your customers all by yourself. While it is possible to do everything on your own, chances are that you will get lost or overwhelmed in the process before even seeing some results.
On the other hand, if you decide to hire a PPC agency, they’ll provide your businesses with a vital service: reaching and connecting to your target audience in a matter of seconds.
PPC agencies have dedicated staff who specialize in PPC campaigns. They will research and find the best keywords to include on an advertisement, which will help increase the chance of it being clicked on. More often than not, this means that they will create ads for various niches in order to help you get the results that you want.
Here’s what you can expect from a PPC Agency:
- An experienced team of specialists who know their way around Google Ads and have access to the latest tools in the industry. At Somneox, we only work with the best softwares in the market, including Ahrefs to explore the most profitable keywords for organic and paid search.
- Access to a pool of data that will help you determine where you should focus your efforts in order to get more clicks for less money, and which audiences are responding best to your ads.
- A personal account manager who is available round-the-clock and will act as a liaison between you and the agency. The manager will make sure that all your questions are answered in a timely manner, and will keep track of everything from bids to budgets for you so that you can focus on running your business without having to worry about managing your campaign.
A PPC agency will work as an extension of your own team by managing bids, determining keywords and making sure that you’re getting the most out of every penny spent on advertising.
Their expertise can save you time, energy and money because they know how much they need to spend in order to rank higher for any particular term based on their research.
Conclusion
The days of newspaper and billboard ads are long gone. Today, any business that wants to gather a steady stream of customers needs a strategy to drive high quality traffic to their website in a cost-effective way, and to do that in the short-term we invest in PPC Marketing.
With the advent of internet marketing, businesses can advertise on Google through paid ads which show up at the top of search results page (a most valuable media) when certain keywords are searched.
PPC advertising is one of the best ways to get your business in front of potential customers. It’s also cost-effective, which means that you’re not investing a lot up front and can test how well it performs for you before scaling things out with additional ads or keywords.
Here are some overall takeaways from this article:
- Flexibility – you can choose exactly when the ad should display. This is useful if you want to reach a certain time zone or particular area. (example: If I have a product that is only sold in a certain area, I can choose to only show my ad during the day when they are online.)
- Targeting – you can target users by their location (an ecommerce website selling products only in a certain state will want to make sure people who see their ads live nearby), or by their interest (searching for something relevant to your business, like “Best Event Management Companies in New York” or “New York’s Best Marketing Agency”).
- Real-time bidding – you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad. This is convenient if you are unsure how much to spend on each campaign because Google will calculate the bid price according to how profitable it thinks that particular ad will be for them.
- Real-time results – You can monitor your campaigns and watch the results as it happens.
If this sounds like something that will work well for your company, then consider hiring an agency with experience in PPC management services. They’ll be able to take some of the pressure off by managing bids on behalf of your brand or even creating ad copy if necessary so that you don’t have to worry about any details at all!