Pay Per Click (PPC) Services

What Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

PPC is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. There are different types of PPC ads, but one of the most common types is the paid search ad. These ads appear when people search for things online using a search engine like Google – especially when they are performing commercial searches, meaning that they're looking for something to buy. This could be anything from a mobile search (someone looking for "pizza near me" on their phone) to a local service search (someone looking for a dentist or a plumber in their area) to someone shopping for a gift ("Mother's Day flowers") or a high-end item like enterprise software. All of these searches trigger pay-per-click ads.

In pay-per-click advertising, businesses running ads are only charged when a user actually clicks on their ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.”

How Does PPC Work?

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a broad category, which includes a wide variety of platforms and mediums. However, most kinds of PPC ad campaigns can fit into one of two categories: Google Ads and Social Media Advertising.

Google PPC

Google AdWords is an online advertising service developed by Google to help marketers reach their customers instantly.Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) is the single most popular PPC advertising system in the world. The Ads platform enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties. When someone searches on Google for a particular term, say ‘travel packages’, Google would throw a list of searches for you. But if you look closely, you will notice that the top and the bottom results are generally ads.

1. Search Ads

On average, there are over 63,000 Google searches across the world every second. Advertising on Google search results opens your business to a large visibility, enabling you to appear on the search results page for your chosen keywords. Like my travel example earlier, when a user searches for something on Google, the list of ads that appear above the organic listing are called search ads. For example, when a user searches for “Kashmir holiday packages”, the search results will look something like this.

2. Display ads

Have you ever noticed them? While you are reading a post or viewing a video on some random website, you see ads in a lot of different places on the page, and in different dimensions. These are display ads. Known for displaying image ads.

3. Shopping ads

If you are a retailer, this campaign type would make more sense for you. This ad type boosts traffic to your website and helps in generating quality leads as well as increasing your conversions. Google Shopping is a great tool for advertisers who have an ecommerce website. Although a search campaign can be used to advertise a website and its special offers, a shopping campaign can advertise every single product individually, without having to set bids on all of the products’ keywords.

4. Video ads

This ad type lets advertisers run video ads on YouTube and other Google Display Networks. Advertise on YouTube with Video campaigns on Google Adwords. You can choose ad formats that serve with an option to skip the ad after five seconds or as a six second buffer between videos. Campaign features allow you to extend ads with shopping campaigns and with mobile app installs. Campaign setting are straight forward here, but there are a few options to select to get started.

5. Universal app campaign

This campaign is helpful for businesses with a mobile app. Here, the advertiser can promote the mobile app across search, PlayStore, Display & YouTube. AdWords uses ad text ideas and other assets right from your app store listings. All you need to do is provide some text, a budget. And starting bid. Also, don’t forget to set languages and locations for the ad.

Keyword Research Process

Keyword research for PPC can be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also incredibly important. Your entire PPC campaign is built around keywords, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers continuously grow and refine their PPC keyword list. If you only do keyword research once, when you create your first campaign, you are probably missing out on hundreds of thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost and highly relevant keywords that could be driving traffic to your site.

Negative PPC Keywords

There are some words you don’t want your ad to show up for. That’s where Negative Keywords come in and they will help you control costs and keep your campaign from underperforming. If you sell running shoes, but not high heels, you will want to make sure that your ads aren’t triggered for the shoes you don’t sell.

Linkedin Advertisment

If your business is aimed directly to consumers, Facebook is probably going to get you the best return on your Social Advertising investment. However, if you’re in the B2B camp, it’s worth considering LinkedIn Advertising.

Although you have the option to use text-only advertisements on LinkedIn, ads with images drive 20% more clicks, so it makes the most sense to do both! From there, you can choose your audience, segmentation by company, job title, skills, demographics, and more. These pay-per-click ads can be placed at the side or bottom of a user’s LinkedIn homepage, or in the user’s inbox.

Microsoft Advertising (BING)

Similar to Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising is a pay-per-click platform showing ads on the Microsoft and Yahoo networks. The platform also utilizes Search Partners. Microsoft Advertising is primarily keyword-based advertising. As of 2017, Microsoft Advertising has 137 million unique desktop searchers on the Bing Network*.
Data taken from advertise.bingads.microsoft.com

Bing Advertisment

Bing PPC ads operate on Microsoft's three popular search engines: Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. When you use Bing campaigns, your content is shared across all of these platforms at once. With over five billion monthly searches being made on the Microsoft network, this makes Bing PPC a notable marketing tool for paid ad campaigns.

In terms of functionality, Bing PPC ads work similarly to Google ads. You bid on keywords based on their traffic volume, then your ad is displayed when that keyword is searched, and finally, you pay Bing whenever a visitor clicks on your ad. Like Google, your ad's copy can have up to 80 characters and Bing even has support tools that can help your team build a cost-effective keyword list, so you never waste money on ads that aren't being displayed.

With Bing, you can also set up targeting filters that determine where and when an ad will be published. For example, if you want your ad to only appear on mobile devices, you can select the mobile traffic option.