Pay Per Click

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a type of internet marketing that involves the promotion of a website. How? By increasing the visibility of the site on search engines. SEO, which we talked about in the previous lesson, is an organic, unpaid search. There is another way to increase visibility on search engines, and that is PPC.

PPC (Pay-per-click) or CPC (Cost-per-click) is a paid form of search engine marketing. The advertiser pays the publisher for each click on the ad.

Objectives

1. Understand what does it mean PPC
2. How it works
3. How can it be useful in business?

In this lesson, we will learn...

what does it mean PPC, and how does the process of advertising on search engines look like​.

What are the benefits of advertising on search engines?

1. You can reach the right people. It allows us to reach the right people (those who are interested).
2. We reach the user at the right time.
3. Cost-effectiveness. Your budget will only be affected when a user clicks on an ad.
4. You can control every aspect of the advertising campaign. From what your budget will be, to what your ad will look like.

The goals of advertising on search engines can be different, depending on the goal of the organization related to doing business on the Internet.

Goals can be related to:

Increase sales - A call to action in such ads is related to a purchase.

Leads - The goal of this kind of advertising is to increase people, that is, the network

Increasing traffic - Increasing visibility, site visits

How do these ads rank?

Before we get into the process of creating a single ad on a search engine, we must first get to know how the search engine decides where it's going to locate your ad on the SERP. Your goal is to get your ad first when a user types in a particular keyword. There are two key components when it comes to ranking, they are:

1. Cost-per-click (CPC) - Similar to an auction. You make an offer of how much you would pay when someone clicks on your ad
2. Keyword Quality Score - For each keyword, you specify a relevance score from 1 to 10, where 1 indicates the highest relevancy.

Multiply these two components and you get your rank.

There are many other factors you need to consider, which contribute to your quality assessment. Some of these factors are:

• Your ad text. The text of your advertisement should be attractive, simple, effective.
• Landing page. A page that can be on your site, but can also be a page that is not on your website, to which ad leads. That is the page to which the user comes by clicking on the ad.
• Page loading time. The shorter the page load time, the better.
• Search engine advertising history. If you are a user who has had campaigns in the past that were relevant and performed well, the search engine will remember you and see you as a very good advertiser.
• CTR. If your CTR (click-through-rate) is high, you will be given a higher Quality Score than an advertiser whose CTR is lower. CTR represents the ratio of the number of clicks on your ad through the number of times your ad was shown. Clicks/impressions = CTR A higher CTR means that your ad is relevant to the user's search, and the search engine as a result rewards it.

What does the process of advertising on search engines look like?

The first step is to define the campaign. When defining a campaign, you need to start with the goals of the campaign itself. What do you want to achieve with your ad? Once you've defined your goals, identify your KPI so you can track the success of your ad. If you are advertising on Google, you need to create a Google AdWords profile to create an ad. This is a tool for planning keywords, creating, running, and tracking campaigns on Google. You can then begin researching your keywords and creating your ad.

Resource: Pixabay

Once you've defined your campaign, it's time to define your campaign keywords. Start by searching and defining keywords. This is the starting point when creating a campaign and its most important part. Each of the factors we mentioned earlier is defined by the keywords you choose. If you choose the wrong keywords, your ad will appear in a search that is not relevant to you, so you will only spend money on an audience that is not your target. What you can also say when creating an ad are negative keywords. Negative keywords are used to prevent your ad from appearing in certain searches. In other words, these are keywords, which your ad will not search for. The third step is the advertisement itself. Create a unique ad copy. Include keywords and highlight the call to action in the ad copy itself. Also, your ad copy must be linked to a landing page where the user will be found by clicking on your ad. Once you’ve created an ad, track how it behaves and compare it to the KPI you’ve defined.

Conclusions

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

 –Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson

Be creative, unique, and create a clear call to action, with well-chosen keywords when creating your search engine ads. Attract people with your uniqueness and the results of your advertising will be very visible.

Here you have the contents of the lesson in PDF: