Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a way of “buying” the top spot in a search engine. You agree to pay a set amount for every click your ad gets. If it pays for itself then you are in profit because a click in your favor usually turns into a sale or a lead.
For a small business owner, the appeal of PPC is clear: it is fast. Results from SEO can take many months. PPC campaigns can be live and driving traffic to your site in the matter of a day. As with most things in life, you get what you paid for. If you stop paying, the campaign stops too.
What PPC Is And When It Makes Sense
PPC offers a variety of ad formats, but for most small businesses, search advertising is the most useful. This is advertising space at the top of Google’s search results. As the name implies, pay-per-click advertising means you only pay when somebody clicks the ad to take them to your website. This is why search advertising is a low-risk way for small businesses to grow their online presence.
PPC tends to make the most sense in a few situations:
- You need results quickly, for example a new business or a seasonal offer with a deadline
- It will take some time to rank organically in this competitive market.
- You can measure the outcome of your advertising spend with a clear, measurable goal, such as an online sale or booking.
- You want to test which messages or offers convert best before investing further in organic content
SEO and PPC are not rivals, and combining the two is the preferred option for most small businesses. Use PPC to generate inquiries while waiting for your organic content to improve your ranks. In time, decrease your reliance on PPC as your ranks organically improve.
Google Ads Basics
Google Ads is the platform most small businesses start with, since it lets you show adverts to people actively searching for what you sell. A few basics are worth understanding before you spend anything:
Campaign types
- Search campaigns – advertisements that appear when a certain keyword is searched.
- Display campaigns – image ads across sites within Google’s ad network that can help to create brand recognition as opposed to driving immediate sales.
- Shopping ads display product listings with images and prices. Online retailers implement these ads to sell their products on search engines.
- Local campaigns – designed to drive footfall and calls to a physical premises
Most small, service or locally-focused businesses see quick, early success with search campaigns because they are targeting users who are searching for a solution as opposed to just browsing.
How bidding works
Google Ads work on an auction system. You set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click. Then Google Ads decides where to place your ad based on your maximum bid amount and how relevant and how optimised your ad and landing page are. A well-optimised and well-written ad can outperform a larger budget with a poorly optimised ad. This is beneficial to small businesses when competing against large businesses.
Setting a budget
To start, think of your first few weeks as an experiment. Using a more conservative budget on a few matched search terms will teach you the most, as opposed to using a larger budget on a great deal of terms that often don’t match your service. Once you are able to pinpoint the search terms that yield calls, you can begin to shift your budget to those search terms.
Paid Social Basics
To create paid social advertising, one must incur costs to promote specific social media posts or advertisements to targeted audiences on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. This is different from organic or free advertising, whereby one is simply dependent on their regular social media followers.
Each individual advertising platform has added advertising creation functionalities to their product. One can now set up advertising campaigns by selecting campaign goals, audiences, and budgets, directly in each advertising platform, without the use of additional tools and software. The appropriate platform depends on the needs of your business.
- Works well for small businesses such as local service and consumer products due to their targeting options by location, interest, and age for Facebook and Instagram.
- LinkedIn works best for business to business services and higher-order professional services.
- TikTok favours businesses that can produce short, engaging video content and want to reach a younger audience
Start small. Beginning your first display advertising campaign with Google Ads is like everything else; start your first ad group with a little budget and small audience. It’s easier to learn strategies that work better with a test aimed at a small group than spreading your campaigns and stretching yourself too thin to target as many audiences as you can.
How To Measure ROI On Paid Spend
The beauty of paid advertising is that its results are quantifiable. Determine what you consider to be a successful outcome (example: phone call, online contact form submission, purchase) and be sure to implement tracking measures to account for it prior to spending a dime.
A few figures worth keeping an eye on:
- Those looking to start a pay-per-click advertising campaign should put special consideration into choosing the right keywords. Keywords are what make or break a pay-per-click ad campaign.
- Cost per conversion – the price charged per each advertising generated enquiry or sale.
- Return on ad spend is how much revenue you brought in compared to how much you spent to generate that revenue.
Campaigns with cheap clicks that result in zero enquiries are unwanted, regardless of how cheap the clicks are. It is best to judge if your marketing campaigns cover their cost by calculating what you stand to gain from selling to a new customer, and comparing that to your marketing campaigns’ cost.
As your account grows and becomes more mature, you start to gain insight into which ad campaigns and audiences are worth the spend. Track your account data often. The lack of results for a campaign/ad is a clear indicator to pause it.