If you want to get to the top of search results quickly, without investing in SEO, then PPC is the marketing channel you want. With PPC, your brand appears at the top of search results immediately once you start paying for adverts. But, there’s a lot that goes into a PPC campaign, setting up your
If you want to get to the top of search results quickly, without investing in SEO, then PPC is the marketing channel you want.
With PPC, your brand appears at the top of search results immediately once you start paying for adverts.
But, there’s a lot that goes into a PPC campaign, setting up your account and first campaigns, keyword research, writing ad copy, analysing results and making improvements to increase returns over time, this is all needed to manage PPC campaigns effectively.
This guide will give you all the information you need to start, manage and scale PPC campaigns.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a way of getting traffic to your website by bidding for the top spot on search engines and paying when someone clicks through to your website.
PPC management has a number of pros and cons. One, it can generate almost instant results, because you automatically move to the top spot of search engine results pages (SERPs) – if you bid enough.
It allows you to specifically target high-intent buyers using the keywords or phrases they use when looking for your products and services.
On the other hand, because PPC is pay-to-play, as soon as you stop paying, your ads disappear and so does your brand visibility in search engines (assuming you’re not doing any SEO).
It also needs careful management of your paid ad budget to keep click costs under control, remove unnecessary searches that can get clicks but waste your budget and continually improve campaigns over time.
So, while PPC management can be a highly effective digital marketing channel, delivering high levels of ROI, it does need careful, ongoing management to ensure your budget is used properly to deliver results.
Although its market share has been falling in recent years, Google is still the dominant search engine in the world with a 79% market share. To put this dominance into context, Bing (the second most popular search engine globally) has a market share of 12%.
Google Advertising provides a wide range of opportunities for brands to get directly in front of their ideal customers, from the basic search advertising (appearing at the top of SERPs)
To Shopping, Display and even video advertising
Google’s Display Network also gives advertisers the chance to appear on more than 2 million websites, apps and videos, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Finance, as well as a number of partner websites and apps.
Microsoft/ Bing advertising works in the same way as Google ads (using a bid system to judge where your ad will appear in search), except you appear on Bing’s search engine and Microsoft entities, like Outlook, MSN, Yahoo! and AOL.
As we’ve said, even as the second most popular search engine in the world, Microsoft/ Bing only claims a market share of 12% compared to Google’s 79%, but it still presents a great opportunity for advertisers.
One reason is that Bing tends to have lower costs per click and less competition than Google, meaning brands with a smaller budget can potentially have a much bigger result on Microsoft/Bing.
Your PPC activity will be around campaigns that target a list of keywords or search queries.
Within each campaign will be a series of groups of ad groups that expand on your main theme.
This could be a campaign for garden furniture as the overall category. Within this, you’d then have ad groups, which would include additional keywords within your main query, so:
Then within each ad group, you’d drill down even more into more specific “long tail” keywords, like
You’d then do this for every campaign you wanted to create (being careful not to spread your budget too thin)
Within PPC management, there are lots of ways to target your ideal audience based on search queries, interests, devices and demographics to ensure your ads appear for the people most likely to buy from you.
Targeting keywords starts with PPC keyword research.
This is used to understand which words or phrases your audience uses when looking for your products (glass top garden table) and then writing ads to appear for these searches. Targeting keywords provides a number of options to target different audience sizes depending on how specific you want to be.
The main keyword categories you can target are:
Broad match: Shows your ads in any search that includes your keywords, any related terms, synonyms and relevant phrases (or what the algorithm determines to be relevant). This can make your ad appear for the biggest audience, but it has the most potential to have you appear for irrelevant searches and blow your budget earlier.
Phrase match: This used to work by making your ad appear when someone searched your keyword phrase in the order you set out (corner garden table), but could include words or phrases before or after your keyword (best corner garden table for sale). It now works a lot more like broad match and needs very careful management.
Exact match: Your ads only show when someone searches your exact keyword phrase (or very close variants). This match type gives you greater control of your budget, but could limit your ability to appear for other relevant searches.
You can read more about doing effective PPC keyword research.
A big part of keyword management in PPC campaigns is adding negative keywords to your campaigns.
Negative keywords are words or phrases that you don’t want your ads to show for.
It’s important to manage negative keywords in your account to prevent wasteful clicks while controlling the searches you want your brand associated with.
For example, if you sell high-end garden furniture, you can add keywords related to searches like “cheap”, “free” or “budget”.
You can read more about negative PPC keywords.
Google ad audiences are users grouped together based on characteristics, behaviours or their interactions with our brand or around the web. It’s not based so much on keywords used, rather, it targets users based on their interests.
With audience targeting, your ads will appear for people more likely to click and convert on your ads.
You do need user data in your Google Ads account to be able to build audiences, so it might not be something you can use immediately. But it’s a useful tool once you have the data.
This is great for targeting people who already know about your brand because they’ve been on your website, so using this type of targeting keeps you front of mind. There are a few ways to target previous website visitors:
This targets ads at people who have visited your website or used your app. You can also upload customer details from your CRM.
This works the same in principle as remarketing, but it is different. This involves uploading customer or prospect lists (emails, phone numbers, etc) and then Google matches this list to known Google users (Gmail users, etc) to show your ads to them
Target users based on behaviour that indicates they’re looking to buy your products or services
This divides users into audiences based on their interests, like gardeners or fitness enthusiasts.
This allows you to mix signals like keywords and website visits with interests. You can use the searches and websites your visitors use to create audiences to target your ads at.
You can target your ads at people who match specific characteristics like age, marital status, education level and income. For example, you could target your garden furniture ads at people who have recently moved house. Or, if you sell luxury garden furniture, you could target your ads at people above a particular earning threshold.
This can be good if you’re running local promotions and allows you to target your ads at people who live within a particular area (town or city) or a certain radius around your business (anyone within 20 miles)
This lets you choose where on Google’s Display Network your ad appears. This can give more control over the websites, apps or videos where your ads appear. This can be useful for expanding your ad reach on websites you know your audience uses.
This lets you match your PPC ads to the content of the webpage your ads appear on. If you sell garden furniture, your ads would appear on websites about gardening or landscape design.
This lets you target ads based on the type of device your users use. You can create different ads to show users on mobile compared to what people see on desktop.
The type of audience or targeting you choose is going to depend on your audience preference and industry. To find the right audience and targeting, you’ll need to review your campaign data to look for trends and insights into the types of targeting and audiences that deliver the best results.
Your ad copy and creative is what will ultimately convince a user to click through to your website (or not).
We’ve got a more in-depth article on writing PPC ad copy that converts that you can read.
Your search ad copy is made up of a few parts
Other ad types, like Google Shopping Ads, allow you to make your ads more visual by adding product images.
These are the types of ads you can write copy for.
Responsive search ads (RSA) involve you creating a series of headlines and descriptions, and then using Google’s AI to combine different combinations of headlines and descriptions to see which drive the most clicks.
To set up your responsive ad campaigns, you’ll need:
Final URL: URL to the landing page where users go when they click your ad
Display URL: This is a simplified version of the URL that appears in your ad.
Headlines: Google lets you create up to 15 headlines with a character limit of 30, including spaces. We’d recommend creating at least 10 (as close to 15 as you can) with a range of USPs, features, benefits or outcomes. Use relevant keywords in some of your headlines.
Descriptions: Google lets you create up to four descriptions (we’d recommend creating all four) that expand on your offer and give users more information about why they should click your ad. Each description should be unique (don’t just reword the same description, as this will prevent you from testing messages and improving ads over time)
Product listing ads (PLAs) are the image ads that appear in SERPs for eCommerce queries:
To use these ad types for Google Ads you’ll need a Google Merchant Centre account or a Bing Merchant Centre account for Microsoft/ Bing advertising campaign.
These types of ads should include high quality images of the product and often include key information, like price, delivery and reviews.
It’s important, whatever type of ad you create, that your ad, landing page and targeting are aligned in order to keep your quality score high.
We’ve written before why Google Ads quality score matters, but essentially the higher your quality score the less you’ll pay for your clicks compared to an account with a lower score. A higher score can also improve your ad position in SERPs, even if you’re not the highest bidder.
PPC management has a number of bidding strategies you can use depending on your goals and budget.
Increasingly, we’re seeing more AI functionality, like smart bidding strategies. And while we’re big fans of them (and use them regularly ourselves), there is still a need for manual bidding and human oversight to your PPC bid strategies.
We’ve written an in-depth blog on PPC bidding strategies with more information.
This is the most common PPC campaign type and involves creating ads that will show up in search engine results pages (SERPs) – as well as search partner websites – and are usually shown based on the keyword or query used by your potential customers
Display network ads don’t show up based on user queries and keywords, but display your ads (text, video or image ads) on websites and pages relevant to the content of your ad. For example, your garden table ad might show up on a blog about designing a garden. The reader might not be in buying mode, but now they’ve seen your brand in the context of what they’re interested in.
This uses search and display networks and lets you create a regular search ad and then opt in to have the ad displayed in Google’s Display Network. The only thing to look out for is that you have no control over where on the display network your ad appears, so it needs careful management to make sure your budget isn’t being wasted on irrelevant pages.
Both Google and Microsoft have options for shopping ads within their merchant centres. Instead of using keywords to match ads with searches, Google or Bing/ Microsoft match the product to the relevant query based on the product title and description (so it’s still worth matching product keywords to queries). For example, if you create a Shopping ad for running trainers, make sure they’re described as running trainers.
(Example of a Google shopping ad)
(Example of a Bing shopping ad)
Bing Shopping ad
Whether you’re doing PPC on Google or Bing/ Microsoft, you can create ads across a range of device types, including:
PPC allows you to target users in very specific locations, down to particular postcodes. This is ideal for local businesses (like landscape gardeners) that want to run PPC campaigns but only target people within a certain area that they’re able to serve.
You can also create separate campaigns based on area to see where the high-value areas are (some areas may spend more than others on their projects), allowing you to focus more campaign spend on higher-value people.
Along with precise targeting, you have the option to only run your ads on specific days or specific times of day.
For example, if you see that your ads don’t perform well (or generate wasted spend) between 2-4 on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, you could set your ads not to show during those times, reserving budget for times when they’re more effective.
PPC budgets vary a lot based on your goals and the average cost per click for the searches in your industry.
You’ll typically set a daily budget per campaign (how much you’re willing to spend on clicks before your ads stop appearing).
There are lots of ways to judge the effectiveness of PPC management, the most obvious being profit from campaigns.
What you report on will be based on the objectives for your campaign.
For example, if your goal was brand awareness and traffic, commercial goals aren’t necessarily something you’ll track.
On the other hand, if you’re running a product campaign, you’re likely to want to see and report on the sales and return on ad spend you’ve generated for each campaign.
We’ve written a more in-depth blog on the most important PPC metrics you can track.
If you want to get better results from your Pay-Per-Click advertising, get in touch with our PPC agency.
You’ll get a free strategy session and a simple plan to grow your PPC campaigns and earn more from your online advertising.
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