Find Out What PPC Is & Learn the Basics of Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing.

Online Marketing has been an area of growth across Adelaide with many digital marketing businesses popping up offering fantastic returns on investment (ROI) by using pay-per-click advertising available through Bing (Microsoft) and Google.

Once called ‘Adwords’ Google’s paid search program was rebranded on July 29th 2018 to be called Google Ads. The name change better reflects advertising across all networks and channels under Google’s control (YouTube etc.), not simply delivering text based ads, even though text ads are still, by far the better performing ads.

PPC stands for pay per click, a model of internet marketing where signed up advertisers pay an amount of money each time one of their ads is clicked on.
Fundamentally it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to ‘earn’ those visits organically through search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.

As you’d expect there are differences between the Bing and Google systems, but at the base level the principals are exactly the same, allowing advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links area on search engine results pages (SERP) when someone searches with a keyword or phrase that is related to their business offering, whether that be a service or product.
Given that Google Ads is the single most popular PPC marketing system in the world, not surprising as Google is the world’s most used search engine, I am going to focus on their operation, but know that other players operate on a similar basis.

An incredible amount of time goes into building a ‘winning’ PPC campaign with an acceptable ROI.
From researching and selecting the right keywords, organising those keywords into structured campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimised for conversions so you have a good ‘Quality Score’ all takes time and that’s assuming you know how, or have the time to read and understand all the ‘help’ pages allowing you to set everything up yourself.

There are two important points to note here:

Pivotal to everything is having a good website design with good, relevant content on your ‘landing pages’, the pages URL your ad links to.
The better and more relevant the content on your website’s pages is, the cheaper your paid search campaign will be because your ‘Quality Score’ will be higher.
You may, after time obtain a high click-through-rate (CTR) from your ads, but still have a poor conversion-rate (CVR). The most common reason for people leaving a website after a business has paid to get them there is they weren’t impressed with what they saw.
This could be for many reasons, but poorly designed websites with poor content that does not impress visitors is the highest followed by not finding what they were actually looking for.

This is why there are professionals who spend all day understanding and working on how to get the best ROI for their customers, using all the online marketing tools available.
The problem is many of the people working in this space are sales focused because that’s how they’re reimbursed by their employers. Promising the World and delivering an Atlas becomes common place, as I’m sure you’ve experienced if you’ve dealt with any online marketing company.
Another flaw is the level of skill and experience required to do the best quality work, delivering the best results and best ROI for the customer is severely lacking, hence the massive staff turnover within the industry.

PPC marketing Adelaide businesses pay someone to do for them will never give a ROI that comes close to the benefits of SEO Adelaide businesses can receive by using Thinking IT.

Pay Per Click campaigns do have their place. Set up correctly, after a website has been optimised, some paid search marketing can be of sound financial benefit, especially for targeting very specific keywords in a specific location by those owning ecommerce websites selling products or for those businesses that sell a service at a fixed cost.

Local SEO placing you at the top of SERP’s organic listings will always return you significantly more, with effective email marketing campaigns second to that.

Tip: Save A Fortune

Search engines reward PPC advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay per click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks. If your ads and landing pages are useful and satisfying to users you will receive a high ‘Quality Score’ and Google will charge you less per click, leading to a better ROI for your business.
So if you want to start using PPC, even as an addition to SEO, it’s important to have a good website design with quality content before you start.

How Does Google Ads Work?

The following explanation has been written to give you an understanding of the process, the steps involved and what happens behind the scenes automatically, not to show you how to set up a Pay Per Click Campaign yourself.

Online Auction

Yes, the process is run as an auction. The search engine’s algorithm tries to match a visitor to an advert knowing what they’ll find when they click on the URL within the advert, with the intention of finding the best match to satisfy the visitors needs.
Google promotes it’s services as best servicing the needs of its customers, people who visit the search engine to search for something. However, that’s not always the case.

A lot of information returned on its results pages is not relevant and often contains misinformation.

Ads Are Created Using Keywords

Knowing what people search for, the words they use and how specific their phrasing is will determine what is written in the adverts.
3 title lines or Headlines (each with 30 characters) can be included followed by 2 areas for description text (each with 90 characters) ending with a URL that takes the visitor to a specific page on the advertisers website.

Good ads that attract a quality customer are specific and contain targeted keywords within the headline/s and description/s.

I am a firm believer in quality over quantity and the better an advert targets the specific type of customer you’re wanting, the better the match will be. You will achieve a higher ROI as a result. Being inundated with enquiry can send you broke if you can’t or don’t want to service those visitors.

So first you need to know everything about what your ideal customer looks like. Then you can set about attracting them.

Someone ‘Googles’ Something

It has officially become a verb. ‘Google It’ is the answer to finding what we’re after online and most people, most of the time (upwards of 80%) will research online before buying something or visiting a ‘bricks and mortar store’.

People have also educated themselves to be more specific in their search, with regards to the ‘what’ and the ‘where’.
It’s also a great way of filtering out the ‘just looking’ from the people ready to buy.

Most people who know what they want will search more specifically, using more words and will include a location.

Google has increased the number of words it accepts in URL’s over the years, with 4 now used most often. These are referred to as long-tail-keywords and better match what’s being searched for.
If someone searches cars, the broadness of what they’re really after is infinite, however if the type Holden used cars adelaide, that becomes much more specific and can be targeted by used car dealers stocking used Holden cars located in Adelaide suburbs.

Note: If you’re interstate and someone asks where you’re from you will most likely respond with the capital city, not the suburb. Within the state most people will use the capital city while searching understanding that it covers the metropolitan suburbs and are willing to travel half an hour in any direction to get what they want.
Some sectors set up their adverts and website pages to attract people who search more locally than that. Restaurants and shops are good examples of that. Many people want to use or find ‘local’ businesses ‘near me’ and will use the suburb they actually live in instead of the capital city.

When the person hits the ‘Enter’ key, or magnifying glass icon on smart phones, Google looks for matches within the advertiser pool, as well as the top 10 web pages it will list organically plus how the page will be displayed and with what other content sections such as ‘Business Places’, ‘People Also Ask’ and images.

The whole process takes about 0.63 seconds for Google to complete and will return hundreds of thousands of results in its search engine results pages (SERP).

The Auction Begins

A single ad auction could have thousands of advertisers bidding on a particular search query.

There are limited places too. Up to 4 at the top and up to 4 below the organic listings at the bottom of the page.
Many categories will have all those filled but some wont, it all depends on the nature of the query and number of advertisers chasing that particular query with their advert.

The question is how does Google decide what ads get displayed and in what order?
Note: Winners aren’t necessarily the highest bidders, which is good news for small businesses on a budget.

Quality Score

First, Google assigns each ad a Quality Score from 1-10 based on three things:

1/ Relevance: How relevant your ad is to the intent of the query.
2/ Expected click-through rate: How likely your ad is to get clicked if shown, based on your historic performance in relation to competitors.
3/ User experience: how relevant your landing page is to your ad and how useful the experience is.

This highlights why it’s important to have the website set up well before embarking on a Pay Per Click marketing campaign. Apart from saving quite possibly tens of thousands over the life of your campaign, depending on your daily budget, you’ll get a better quality customer enquiry.

Ad Rank takes the quality score of the advert multiplied by the maximum bid to work out what position ads are displayed.
As you can see from the graphic image below, even with a smaller maximum bid, Peter’s advert will be shown first because of the quality score being 10/10 and Mary, even though the maximum bid was the highest due to having a poor quality score of 1 misses out and her advert will not be shown.

Yes, quality website design and content counts immensely for PPC campaigns as it does to rank high organically.

Now that the order has been determined, how much will each of the 3 advertisers pay?
The cost per click you’ll end up paying is calculated by taking the ‘Ad Rank’ of the ad below yours and dividing that by your ‘Quality Score’ as illustrated with the graphic image below.

As mentioned several times, quality counts a lot! While there are many businesses operating across Adelaide and many more interstate offering to set up and run Pay Per Click campaigns for you, most will just be taking your money each week or month, on top of what you’ll be spending each day/week on the Google Ads (paid directly to Google).

Do not get sucked in with the hype and over exaggerated claims of a massive ROI because 99% of the time you’ll end up with a negative ROI.

After A New Website Design That Ranks?

Whether you’re looking at upgrading or starting from scratch, provide services or have products you’d like to sell online, Thinking IT can design a stunning website for your business and make sure it ranks on all search engine result pages (SERP’s).
After discussing your goals and analysing what you require, Nigel will be able to let you know exactly what the costs will be to meet your unique needs.

At Thinking IT, we can handle everything to make your online presence a success. From photography & graphic design services to copywriting your pages & website’s blog, set up automated email campaigns & look after your social media or PPC marketing.

Contact Thinking IT

Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing Adelaide