How to set up PPC

Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) will not only attract attention to your brand but can go a long way towards converting interest into sales. It’s unlikely that you will land yourself a £20M contract on day one, but the more you understand about PPC, the better you can make your PPC advertising experience.

If you can put your business in front of a potential customer at the very moment they want to buy, your chances of making a sale increase dramatically. With the right balance of planning and pay-per-click marketing, you can cost-effectively boost your turnover!

What Is PPC Advertising?

Unlike traditional advertising, (where you pay to have your ad displayed or broadcast, often in busy locations with the hope that someone will be interested in your services) PPC advertising is where you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad. This means your ad can reach 10,000 people without it costing you a penny. By only paying when someone shows interest in your ad, you’re likely to have more conversions at a much lower price, making PPC much more cost-effective

There are many different ways to do PPC advertising. Generally speaking, advertising on search engines like Google and Bing are the most common. However, there are other options such as social media platforms like Facebook, alongside many others.

Why Should You Use PPC Advertising?

You can use PPC advertising to build brand awareness, convert new and existing customers into sales and drive more traffic to your website or landing page. PPC advertising is particularly effective when you want to encourage customers to take immediate action (this is often because the advert is shown to an individual when they are searching for your product – in other words, they have shown interest in the product before your ad is shown to them, by typing keywords into their search bar).

The main advantages of using PPC are as follows:

• You can use keywords to target an audience that is interested in your brand, product or service.
• You only pay when someone is interested enough to click on the ad.
• You decide how much a click is worth to you, and set your advertising ‘bids’ accordingly.
• You can control your costs, by setting a limit for your total advertising spend.
• You can set up campaign experiments to see which adverts are more successful for your business.

How Much Does PPC Advertising Cost?

The PPC costs are likely to be driven by the competitiveness of your market. Often B2B is more competitive than B2C marketing, but if this is too expensive there are ways around this (contact us to find out more). PPC costs can also be determined by the value of your product or service and your regular marketing spend. In general, the more competitive the market and the more expensive your product or service is, the more you will have to pay to reach the top positions in your listings.

The amount you want to pay per click should be determined by your marketing budget and your online conversion rates. At the end of the day, you are using PPC ads to promote your business. The best part about PPC is you can set your limits on what you want to spend so you know roughly how many clicks you’ll be paying for.

How To Set Up A PPC Campaign

Before diving into the deep end, you need to work out what you want from your PPC advertising. Is it enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, website traffic etc. Take a look below to see WDL’s 6 key steps to starting PPC.

1. Work out your goals. Do you want to boost your sales, encourage sign-ups, increase enquiries? Once you have this in mind, you can set the correct “campaign goal” on your PPC ads.

2. Decide where to advertise, which platform do you want to advertise on, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, etc. Once this is decided it is time to sign up and create an account.

3. Work out which words best represent your business (these are called keywords). Once these are selected you need to choose how much each click is worth to you.

4. Set your total daily or monthly budget.

5. Put together the PPC advert (we recommend a combination of responsive search ads and expanded text ads) and link it to a relevant landing page on your website.

6. Sit back and watch the analytical data roll in. Tweaks will need to be made as and when you notice changes in the market or poorly performing ads.

Although it sounds simple, getting it right in practice isn’t always so easy. That’s where we come in. If you want to find out more about PPC, or want a Google qualified digital marketer to do the hard work for you, then why not take a look at some of our pricing option plans on The PPC People’s website (it’s our sister site to WDL).