Remember the days of billboards, pamphlets, newspapers, and radio and television advertisements? Well, they’re still surviving, but they aren’t nearly as effective as modern advertising methods. This guide will introduce you to one of those methods: PPC advertising.
Did you know that 50% of people who arrive at a retailer’s site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who come from an organic link?
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads have the ability to increase brand awareness by as much as 80%! In a competitive market like today’s, that number plays a huge role.
Google PPC ads are a revolutionary way to reach the entire world with highly specific targeting abilities.
Imagine being able to reach a very niche market, precisely measure your campaign’s performance, and even do split tests to objectively understand what works and what doesn’t. The possibilities are endless.
Why Google PPC Advertising?
“I get it. It’s new. It’s convenient. But what really sets it apart from other modes of advertising?” Well, to answer that question, here are a few features that you exclusively find with PPC advertising:
Progress Tracking Abilities
In order to track how your campaign is performing, you get multiple relevant metrics that help you speculate the future of the current campaign and know more about more related campaigns that have the potential to be successful.
You get these metrics with Google ads:
- Impressions – The number of times your campaign showed up in the search results.
- Clicks – The number of times someone clicked on your campaign from the search results.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – The percentage of times someone clicked on your campaign out of the total number of times it popped up in the search results. It is calculated as Clicks / Impressions * 100.
- Average CPC (Cost Per Click) – The average cost paid for every time someone clicked on your campaign.
- Average Position – This is the average position at which your campaign ranks as opposed to other ads in the search results.
- Conversions – Total number of conversions your ad has fetched for you.
- Conversion Rate – The percentage of people who clicked on your ad campaign and actually ended up converting.
Make Your Brand Popular
There’s an inverse relationship between the competition in the industry and the ability to stand out. Simply put, if your business has high competition, you’ll have to invest more money into Google PPC ads in order to make a name for yourself.
The old adage of “you can be whoever you want to be if you work hard enough” is obsolete. It would be better for you to tap into understanding what’s going to work and take calculative decisions, instead of stomping your feet in every direction.
Capitalism breeds innovation. Innovation calls for creativity. Creativity is important if you want to stand out. How do you do that? By creating high-quality graphic banners using softwares like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
Based on the above metrics, Google Ads allow you to make well-thought-out decisions that will have a high probability of success in the long run.
The more people see your brand, the more likely they are to develop familiarity with it. This is what causes people to believe that it’s the brand they’re seeing everywhere, which is why it must be popular. The next thing you know, you’ll be making a name for yourself.
Complete Control Over Everything
The problem with traditional advertising was the lack of ability to track the reach of their ad campaigns. They just had to invest and hoped it would work.
The big corporations could afford to go all-in on investing in advertising. So they did, even though all they knew was that advertising was working and had to rely on the tools of that time that were not very reliable, to say the least.
Fast forward to the present and hope is the last thing we rely on. With Google ads, you have control over what demographic your campaign will reach and for how much budget for PPC will be the estimated reach with that investment.
You control how much you want to spend and can start with a budget of as low as $5 every day to get into PPC advertising.
Obviously, I don’t recommend that, but that’s how much you’re able to control the ability to allocate your money among various keywords for a particular demographic. Besides, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Immune from SEO
It wouldn’t be fair if your advertisements fall below your competitor’s page just because they’re in business way longer than you have and have invested an ample amount of time to get that organic reach.
Therefore, no matter how high-ranking a page may be, it’ll always be under the ads. This gives you an edge over your competitors despite their years of investment.
Besides, you can spend enough time working on growing your own organic reach (it’s a hassle in itself and you’ll have to consistently spend months to accomplish that), which is a good strategy in the long run. Until then, Google ads are unaffected from rankings.
Outsource Your PPC Advertising
If you don’t have the time or resources to do this sort of work yourself, you can always find a B2B PPC agency online. This is a specialized marketing firm that helps business-to-business (B2B) companies create and manage paid advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn. They focus on driving qualified leads, conversions, and revenue for their B2B clients by strategically optimizing ad spend, targeting, and ad copy to reach the right professional audience. Their services often include keyword research, ad creation, landing page optimization, and ongoing performance analysis to maximize ROI for businesses selling to other businesses.
How to Start PPC Advertising on Google?
Initially, you need not stress about creating a perfect campaign right from the get-go because most likely you aren’t going to make any money. Why? Because the initial phase is for split testing.
Your Google ad campaign may not be optimized in the beginning, but as time goes on, and the analytics speak for themselves, you will start to tweak them and gradually engineer a profitable campaign by incorporating the exact keywords people are looking for.
Starting an advertising campaign on Google is really simple. As soon as you have a Google account you want to start advertising from, go to ads.google.com and click on the icon in the top right corner that says “Get Started”.
These are the steps you need to follow to set up your Google ads account:
Switch to Expert Mode
The first thing you do when you visit the website is switch to Expert Mode. You’ll find the mode below the three default goal options, as shown in the image below:
The normal or express version of Google ads is a stripped-down version. It doesn’t offer you enough parameters to have enough control over your account.
Determine Your Goal
Before you start, you should determine what your business goals are. Different goals will require different planning processes.
For example, if you’re a plumber in New York, then you’ll probably want to get more leads for your business. An eCommerce business selling men’s watches will want to choose the “sales” option.
Select Campaign Type
As soon as you decide your business goal, you can choose what’s going to be your campaign type. Now how do you make that decision?
Let’s say you want to sell men’s watches. In the above image, you can see that you have a few options to choose from.
Based on the nature of your business, the appropriate option for you would be the “shopping” or “search” campaign type.
You may choose to go with any other option based on what your business goal is. If your goal is to get people on your website, you can go for “Search” as well as “Display” ads.
Fill Out Necessary Details
Now all you need to do is full out the name of your website and give a name to your campaign. Afterward, you will come across the following tabs that need to be filled out:-
- Start and End Date – Google will keep running ads within this timeframe, so it’s important to have a start and end date. Otherwise, you’ll be kept on being charged on your credit card consistently.
- Location – Choose the location where you want to target your ads. As a tip, the more specific you get about targeting, like choosing a particular zip code or a city, you’ll be charged more. You may want to keep that in mind as you start out.
- Language – It’s set to English by default, but you can choose a different language if your target location requires it.
- Budget – This obviously depends on how much money you have to spend on your business, but keep in mind that you don’t set it too low (eg. $1 per day) or you won’t accurately be able to measure its reach.
- Bidding – You’ll be asked what you want to focus on. If you’re focusing on “clicks”, you may keep it at that. You can also set a maximum CPC bid limit, which will help you get the most clicks at a CPC at or lower than your bid limit.
After filling up all these, you can just click on “save and continue” to move to the next page.
Set Up Ad Groups
There are three different layers to set up Google Ads. After you’ve set up your campaign settings, it’s time to set up ad groups, after which you’ll be able to create ads.
In this process, it’s time to key in all the relevant keywords with which you want to target your ads for your business.
If you don’t have enough budget, you can rely on Keyword Planner (you need a Google ads account first) Keywords Everywhere, or SEMrush (this one’s costly) to get suggested keywords, instead of doing the guesswork.
You can even see the costing analytics of the “Ad group 1” in the above image, where you’ll see how many clicks you’re going to get every day, the total cost/day, and the average cost/click.
Create Ads
This is the phase where you give the final touch to your ads. Here, you decide how it’s going to look on Google when it shows in the search results.
In the above image, you can see the options for you to input your headings and description in the left side of the screen. On the right, it shows the demo of how the ad looks in the search results.
Headline 1 represents the first sentence of the heading and Headline 2 reflects the latter half of that headline, separated by a vertical bar “|”. Similarly, you have descriptions 1 and 2, which are two parts of the same description that’ll be displayed under the headline.
Set Up Billing
Voila! You’ve created a PPC advertising campaign. All you need to do now is confirm your payment information and you’re good to go.
Here’s a quick takeaway though – here you’ll find an option to apply for a promo code. If you can find a promo code, it will be really useful because you could apply and get $100 in your account.
Key Takeaways for Creating a PPC advertisingCampaign
Even though we talked about the step-by-step procedure to build the Google PPC ads campaign, we never got around to talking about the strategies that make a successful PPC ad.
The fact that 64.6% of consumers click on Google ads when they’re shopping online is enough proof that ads do have great potential, but not all ads are successful.
Let’s talk about how you can make sure that your ad campaign is successful.
Brainstorm
Remember when I said you don’t need to stress about anything because you won’t be making any money? Well, even though that is true, if you initially take enough time out to research more responsive keywords, you could be in luck.
Brainstorming works every step of the way. Even after you’ve created your campaign, you’re going to have to look at the analytics and see what keywords are getting more clicks and conversions.
Gradually, as you get rid of less responsive keywords and find new more responsive keywords, you’ll be able to manage the campaign efficiently and effectively.
Keyword Research
Like we discussed above, use tools like the Keyword Planner by Google ads or Keywords Everywhere to find out what keywords are most relevant to your services. If you can afford a good tool, then SEMrush or Ahrefs would be really useful as well.
Initially, all you would need is to find the search volume, keyword competition and the Cost-Per-Click, which Keyword Planner should easily be able to do for you.
Reverse Engineer Your Budget
Your PPC advertising budget is limited. You don’t want to choose 10 keywords and realize that the total cost/day will exceed your budget.
When you’re creating ad groups, you’ll be picking keywords that will simultaneously reflect the estimated cost you’ll incur every day. You may want to understand how to manage your marketing costs because that’s what matters at the end of the day.
Have a look at the keyword planner below.
You might want to calibrate within three areas – relevance, competition, and budget. As soon as you have your budget planned, look at the most relevant keywords for your business.
In the above image, I’ve used “mens watches”, the search volume of which is 100k – 1m, and the competition is high as well. I’d still use it, but ideally, if the search volume is high and competition is low and is highly relevant (which to be honest is as rare as a blue moon), that’s the sweet spot for you.
Analyze Your Competitors
One of the greatest advantages you can have over your PPC advertising competitors is by analyzing their strategies.
You can use tools like SpyFu or SimilarWeb to analyze what keywords they’re investing in, how much organic traffic are they able to raise compared to their advertisements, and so much more.
If you see a lot of irrelevant businesses (that aren’t your competition) investing in your preferred keywords, that should make you question whether the keywords you’re investing in are even relevant for your business.
Get Creative With Your PPC Advertising Copies
Enough about keywords; we all understand how important they are. Creativity is a space you should now plan on investing your time in. Copywriting skills are of utmost importance if you want your audience to be invested in what you’re selling.
Forty-three percent of marketers believe that personalization is highly responsible for increasing conversions. When you communicate with somebody by adding a personal touch, addressing their exact pain points, and that resonates with them, then you’ll have come up with a creative ad.
Personalization has to be really nuanced, and this is where you’ll need split testing. Create two separate creative ads and see which one receives better responses. You can evolve that and test it against the former, and that’s how you’ll gradually create the most creative ad.
Guide to PPC Advertising: Over to You
Hopefully, this will not only help you understand how to advertise on Google but also assist you with how you can make the most out of your advertisements by optimizing them properly. So what are you waiting for? Go out and get started with your own ad campaign.
