Table of contents

• What is PPC?
• How does PPC advertising work?
• What is Google Ads?
• How PPC works in Google Ads
• How to do PPC with Google Ads
• PPC keyword research
• PPC campaign management
• How to get started with PPC

What is PPC?

The digital advertising model known as pay-per-click, or PPC for short, involves the advertiser paying a fee each time one of their advertisements is clicked on. You basically pay for specific visits to your website, landing page, or app. The cost of a click is negligible when PPC is operating properly because the value of the click is greater than what you pay for it. For instance, if you pay $3 for a click and it leads to a $300 sale, you have made a substantial profit.

PPC ads can be composed of text, images, videos, or a combination of the three. They literally come in all shapes and sizes. They can show up on social media sites, search engines, websites, and other places.

Examples of ppc ads for search, shopping, display, and social media Search engine advertising—also referred to as paid search or search engine marketing—is one of the most common types of PPC. When someone searches for something related to their company's offerings, advertisers can bid for ad placement in sponsored links provided by a search engine. If we bid on the keyword "google ads audit," for instance, our advertisement for the free Google Ads Performance Grader might appear on the search engine results page (SERP) for that or a related search:

How does PPC advertising work?

PPC advertising looks different from platform to platform, but in general, the process is as follows:

1. Choose your campaign type based on your objective.
2. Refine your settings and targeting (audiences, devices, locations, schedule, etc.).
3. Provide your budget and bidding strategy.
4. Input your destination URL (landing page).
5. Build your ad.

Your budget, bid, campaign settings, as well as the quality and relevance of your ad, all play a role in algorithmically determining where and when your ad appears once it goes live.

Advertisers who create relevant, dependable pay-per-click campaigns are rewarded with higher ad positioning and lower costs by all platforms that offer PPC advertising.

Therefore, if you want to get the most out of PPC, you need to know how to do it right.

What is Google Ads?

The most widely used PPC advertising platform worldwide is Google Ads. Businesses can create advertisements that appear on Google's search engine and other Google properties using the Google Ads platform.

When a search is started, Google looks through the ads and selects a few that will appear on the search engine results page.

What is PPC advertising and an example of a Google ad? The "winners" are chosen based on a number of factors, including the size of their keyword bids and the quality and relevance of their keywords and ad campaigns. That will be explained in the following section.

How PPC works in Google Ads

When an advertiser creates an advertisement, they select a set of keywords to target and bid on each keyword. Therefore, if you bid on the keyword "pet adoption," you are telling Google that you want your ad to appear for pet adoption-related searches (more on keyword match types here).

To select which ads will appear for a given search, Google employs an auction-style process and a set of formulas. If your advertisement is included in the auction, it will first assign you a Quality Score between one and ten based on the keyword relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page quality of your advertisement.

Your Ad Rank will then be calculated by multiplying your Quality Score by your maximum bid, which is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click on that advertisement. The ads that appear are those with the highest Ad Rank scores.

With this system, successful advertisers can reach potential customers at a price that works for them. It's basically like an auction. The Google Ads auction is described in detail in the infographic below.

How to do PPC with Google Ads

Because Google is the most popular search engine, it gets a lot of traffic and, as a result, delivers the most impressions and clicks to your ads when you use PPC marketing through Google Ads. Depending on the keywords and match types you choose, your PPC ads will appear on a regular basis. Although a number of factors influence your PPC advertising campaign's success, the following actions can help:

• Bid on relevant keywords. Crafting relevant PPC keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.
• Focus on landing page quality. Create optimized landing pages with persuasive, relevant content, and a clear call to action tailored to specific search queries.
• Improve your Quality Score. Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores get more ad clicks at lower costs.
• Capture attention. Enticing ad copy is vital; and if you’re running display or social ads, so is eye-catching ad creative.

How to do effective PPC keyword research

Although keyword research for PPC can take a lot of time, it is very important. Keywords are the foundation of your entire PPC campaign, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers continually expand and refine their keyword list. When you create your first campaign, if you only conduct keyword research once, you will probably miss hundreds of thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost, highly relevant keywords that could be driving traffic to your website.

Our complete guide to keyword research can be found here, but in a nutshell, an efficient PPC keyword list should include:

• Relevant: Of course, you don’t want to be paying for clicks that aren’t going to convert. That means the keywords you bid on should be closely related to the offerings you sell.
• Exhaustive: Your keyword research should include not only the most popular and frequently searched terms in your niche, but long-tail keywords. These are more specific and less common, but they add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic. In addition, they are less competitive, and therefore less expensive.
• Expansive: PPC is iterative. You want to constantly refine and expand your campaigns, and create an environment in which your keyword list is constantly growing and adapting.

Managing your PPC campaigns

Once you’ve created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the best predictors of account success. You should be continuously analyzing the performance of your account and making the following adjustments to optimize your campaigns:

• Continuously add PPC keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
• Add negative keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
• Review costly PPC keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
• Refine landing pages: Modify the content and CTAs of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Don’t send all your traffic to the same page.
• Split ad groups: Improve click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller, more relevant ad groups, which help you create more targeted ad text and landing pages. More on account structure here.