Do you remember how two decades ago a business could purchase a yellow page ad and pray to reach its target audiences? Just like the old times, paid advertising today is necessary and unavoidable. But, the platform and a few rules have changed. Now, you just cannot sit and pray for your target audiences to see your ad. You have to rather work your way strategically toward your audiences.

So this means that as much as you cannot avoid the digital marketing for your business, specifically the paid advertising; you cannot avoid the best practices for a successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

What is PPC?

Organic search results are sorted by Google through the secret algorithms, based on various factors like engagement, content quality and traffic on the website. PPC, however, gives a chance to websites to skip the queue and get placed right at the top when a relevant search query is raised.

PPC model is also known as pay-per-click model as you have to pay only when someone clicks on your ad. Among all the PPC platforms, Google Adwords is the most famous one as it rules the search-engine market with 67% of share.

How PPC works?

Whenever a person searches something on Google using the keywords, Google will pick rightly targeted ads with matching keywords and show them on top. Google does this by forming the combination score of ad’s quality and keyword’s cost-per-click bid amount. So, the best combined maximum bid with quality score gets the best position in search results. Your ad’s quality is determined by the relevancy and usefulness of your ad to the user. Of course, Google would only like to showcase good quality ad to ensure the user enjoys a good user experience.

“#PPC can be daunting but don’t fear – start small”https://t.co/p9rB7B8NnP @eventbrite pic.twitter.com/Z4a6rileQa

— Ed Leake (@EdLeake) March 8, 2017

Benefits of PPC        

Not only does PPC paid digital advertising help your ad to be showcased on top in search results, it helps your business in numerous ways, only if done well, of course.

• Stronger marketing: Google knows a lot about your users and can present that data to you so that you can analyze your users by age, gender, and interest categories. You also get to know how many impressions your ad got, how many actual clicks your ad got, and what and for how long was interaction within the website was done by the user. All this information and more can be an instrumental tool to understand your target audience better and strengthen your other marketing efforts, as well.

• Relevant keyword means more targeted audience: Keyword is probably the greatest targeting tool in the hand of a marketer. No wonder, then, the keyword bidding is a tough task for the marketers in the industries with the fiercest competition. One of such industries is law. With ‘lawyer’ and ‘attorney’ being among Adwords’s top 10 most expensive list of keywords, getting qualified searchers might be quite challenging for the marketers.

• Better control on budget allocation: In PPC model, you pay only for what you get. With the pay-per-click model, you know you have to pay only when a user clicks and actually interacts with your ad. Also, you can adjust your budget allocation on PPC every day, depending on the returns you are getting. With real-time analytics to measure user interaction and your ad position, you can tweak your ad and/ or keyword bidding to ensure better results out of your marketing efforts.

Rock Solid #PPC Tactics For Higher Performing Campaigns via @KlientBoost https://t.co/teC3YxfetT #marketing

— Todd Davis (@GoldStarClubs) March 8, 2017

Challenges of PPC

PPC seems to be a necessary marketing tool today in your collaborative marketing strategy to put your brand right in front of your target audiences’ eyes. With its innumerable, real benefits, you might be tempted to give it a try. But let us tell you that PPC marketing is not without risks. You would surely want to have better returns than what you invest into PPC marketing. That can be tricky, especially if your business has tough competition and your industry is fierce.

If you need a head start with your PPC advertising strategy or are lost along your way of digital marketing, this guide is for you.

Through the subsequent Emails, we will run you through handy tips and tricks to ace the most powerful yet tricky tool of digital advertising in order to grow your business with PPC.

Ash Ganda