What is PPC Marketing?

PPC marketing is short for pay per click marketing and it is a method of advertising on search engines like Google. Instead of ranking organically in Google’s search results, businesses can pay Google to appear in the ads at the top of results. What’s great about PPC is that you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ads, hence the name.

PPC advertising is a great way to get users to visit your business without having to do all the hard work needed to rank organically. It is particularly good for brand new websites that would struggle to rank in Google anyway.

But it’s not perfect. Google’s PPC platform can be expensive, particularly for the most competitive ads. It’s not uncommon to be paying north of $10 per click for some of the most competitive terms. It can be hard to decide whether you should invest in PPC or not. But this article is here to help.

How to PPC ads work?

Let’s start by looking at how PPC ads work in general.

You start by creating your ads in Google Adwords. Each ad can have a title, a description and a link to a page on your website that you want to direct searchers to. You’ll also need to set which keywords you want your ad to appear to and set a budget of how much you are willing to spend in total and each day.

Once Google has approved your ads, they will start showing immediately. Exactly where they get shown is difficult to say, however. It’s not simply a case that the ads that bid the most get shown at the top. Google uses a couple of other factors to rank adverts.

One is the quality score of your ad. This is a score out of 10 based on how good Google thinks your ad is. It uses a number of factors to calculate this including your ads CTR, your landing page and the relevance of your ad.

A second is whether or not your ad has an ad extension. Google lets advertisers add extensions to their ads like a link to their website, a call out or the option to call your business with one touch on a mobile device. If your ad has an extension, there’s a good chance Google will give it priority.

What are the benefits of PPC to small businesses?

Using PPC ads has several benefits for small businesses.

One is that it lets them see results much faster than they could achieve with SEO. It can take months of hard work to rank organically in Google, but just minutes to set up a PPC ad. You’ll also know roughly how many people you can expect to visit your website, too.

Another benefit is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This effectively means you get free brand awareness every time someone sees your ad but doesn’t click on it.

PPC is far from perfect, however. Unlike SEO, you’ll stop seeing traffic as soon as you stop paying for it. This leads many business owners to invest in SEO for long-term success instead.