5 frequently asked PPC questions

PPC (Pay Per Click) is a paid advertising strategy used to drive web traffic, generate leads & sales. The term ‘pay per click’ literally means you pay a fee per click that your ad receives.

In a previous blog, we talked about Paid vs Organic Marketing, and the pros and cons of both strategies. In this blog, we will be focusing solely on PPC, and five frequently asked questions surrounding it.

Why aren’t my ads at the top?

Your ad rank or quality score is possibly too low. These two aspects are scores from 1 to 10 comprised of accounts budget, bid, click-through rate (CTR) & landing page experience. To move higher in search results, you’ll need to improve all of these areas equally, over time to see better ranking position. If you want to be right at the top, it could be quite costly, especially if the keywords are very popular.

Try to use a mixture of broad high volume search terms & more specific low volume search terms to even it out and if you have the money to do so, experiment to see which keywords work best for you.

How effective is it?

PPC is perhaps the fastest way to get instant results from running an advertising campaign. If it costs you £1 per click, but the click results in a sale worth £200, then you’ve made a great profit. However, improved results only come from PPC after optimising based on previous findings, this can take time & more investment to get the results you want, but PPC is very effective channel of generating a good ROI.

What tool can you use to help with keywords?

Google AdWords Keyword Planner is the best tool you can use; you may as well learn from Google themselves if you’re using their services. There are others you can use, such as Ubersuggest and WordStream Free Keyword Tool which all help with keyword planning.

How expensive can it be?

PPC is budget-friendly; there is no minimum cost of how much your budget should be. You choose how much to pay for a click and how much you want to spend on the campaign. However, there is a level of ad budget which should be met in every industry if you plan on competing & this is different for every business, industry & sector.

For small locally targeted  campaigns this is not the case all the time, but for anything bigger, you need to be allocating enough budget in order to compete with the competition. If you check metrics often and analyse your data, you can see what’s going right and wrong, meaning you can alter your ad to help it perform better if does need improving. This does mean it can come at a cost but usually nothing drastic.

Can it give my brand good exposure?

By running a PPC ad, you are instantly putting your brand in front of people who may not even know who you are. Google kindly provides you with various different types of ad formats to enable you to achieve whatever objective you may have.

Google ads operate over the following different formats: - shopping ads, display ads, video ads, search ads & remarketing ads, each format has their own strengths & weakness & are applied to accounts based on the relevance.

Your ad is placed at the top of the search results page, so if anybody was to search for your listed keywords, you’re exposed to a large audience of people. So yes, it can give your brand better exposure than if you just worked on organic SEO to rank on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).