What is PPC (Pay Per Click)? How to Use Google Ads and Bing Ads?
In addition to organic search, you will understand that in Search Marketing the PPC (Pay per Click) tools can be an excellent alternative to bring qualified traffic. One of the great advantages of PPC is that it brings results in the short term.
The use of Pay per Click (PPC) is very common in many digital marketing strategies today. Whether to capture strangers or to remarket and reach leads, the paid click is a great tool.
What is PPC (Pay Per Click) ?
Pay per click means pay per click. In this marketing strategy, today the two main players in the market are Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) – most used – and Bing Ads, which also provides a tool very similar to that of Google.
There are two very different networks on Google: the search network, which is where we search, and the display network. Google has millions of partner sites, of all types, subjects, and sizes.
In this way, Google allows advertisers to reach their audiences at various points during the purchase journey. Both networks guarantee greater coverage at different times, which is very important for the advertiser.
What do you mean by partners?
They display advertising and in return make money from it. These ads are static or animated banners, texts, or even videos.
When we talk about ads on the search network, we always talk about a list of keywords that we chose in advance and that will trigger the ad. The key to success, in this case, is relevance: appearing at the right time to the right person.
For each click received you will pay a fee to Google. If you choose the wrong keywords you will generate impressions, which are displays of your ad to the wrong people, as often in this case it will not appear what they are looking for.
If you choose the keyword “sneakers” for your ads and a customer types tennis racket, you may appear in the search and people will click, you will pay because she received that visit but the searcher will not buy because it is not the product they’re looking for.
Search Auction
When we talk about Google Ads, we are not talking about a traditional auction, in the style of “who gives more leads” to appear well-positioned in the search. The Google Ads auction takes into account the amount you are willing to pay for the click.
If a digital marketing course advertiser is willing to pay $ 2.00 per click, $ 5.00, and $ 7.00, it is not the latter that will necessarily appear first in the search.
In order to rank for an Ad, Google will take into account how much you’re willing to pay per click on a particular keyword – this is called CPC, or cost per click – as well as the the relevance of your ad or quality score: each keyword has a score of 0-10. These days, Ads using RSA also have Ad Quality Ranks which looks at the relevancy of the Ad Copy to the KWs in each corresponding ad group.
Google looks into relevance: the more relevant the keyword to the advertiser or ad copy, the lower the cost per click.
By focusing on relevancy, the ad auction is fair and then all 3 sides of the auction benefit: The Advertiser, the Customer and Google.
If it wasn’t like this and who would appear well-positioned would always be the one who even without quality on the ad would be the best place on the search, the user wouldn’t be satisfied because he wouldn’t always find what he wants.
The way it currently works, pay per click is more balanced and allows everyone to be satisfied.
In practice, what is PPC in marketing?
In this example, we have three advertisers willing to pay different amounts per click for the same keyword in this auction. And all of them have different quality indexes: the prince has a score of 1, which is the worst. Shrek has a quality index of 6, medium, and the donkey, 2.
When the consumer searches for the word that the three are announcing, Google will multiply the maximum CPC of each one by the quality index, generating the ad rank that we see on the table. So, the announcement to be in the first place will be the one of Shrek – greater ad rank -, of the prince in second and of the donkey in third.
How does Google calculate the quality score for each word?
Every word has a CTR (Click Through Rate), which in Portuguese means Click Rate. If in an example my rate is 4%, that means that for every 100 times my ad appears, 4 people click on it. Therefore, most of your Quality Score will come from your CTR. If you have a high clickthrough rate on your ads, your quality score will be good.
For Google, a high clickthrough rate indicates that your ad is relevant. The company also says that if you have a CTR rate of 2% on the search network, you have a reasonable rate. This percentage can vary widely depending on how your campaign is structured and accounted for.
After CTR, secondly, what will most influence your quality score will be the relevance of the ad. Supposing you announced the word “Nike running shoes”. However, the ad does not appear “Nike running shoes”. This makes the ad’s relevance low.
Display Network
Google has millions of partner sites that allow anyone to show ads within them using its interface. We can quickly advertise on several sites that deal with the themes that relate to the ad, all through Adwords.
There are several types of segmentation within the display network, they are:
Content
According to the keywords you chose, Google will search for sites that talk about the topic.
Public
When you choose the characteristics of the people you want to advertise.
Managed placements
Here you manually choose the channels where you want to appear. It can be from mass channels, niche, and other specific websites. It is also possible to merge the characteristics.
THE NEXT STEP…
Now that you have a better understanding of PPC, you need to start to understand how its practice is. An important step is to better understand the role of Google Ads in this environment.