Paid Search

What is PPC?

PPC, or Pay Per Click, is a type of paid online advertising where businesses create an advert and pay for every click they receive. Perhaps the most notable example revolves around Google Ads. When you search for something, assuming you're not using an ad blocker, you'll see sponsored posts first and often several more down the side.

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Those ads are there because someone has bid on either the keyword you searched for or something similar. You see those ads because they're relevant. However, if you decide to click on one of them, Google bills the advertiser for it.

Much goes into ad placement, but the bid price is one of the most crucial factors for anyone considering PPC advertising. The more someone is willing to pay for a click, the more prominently they're featured in results. Competitive industries with high margins, like finance and legal services, require big budgets to make a dent.

Conversely, businesses selling niche or unique products and services can attract more traffic for pennies.

The most critical aspect of PPC advertising is making more from each click than you spend. This covers both macro and micro conversions. The former supports the primary function of your site. This could be selling a product or booking a call.

The latter involves encouraging someone to take an action that may not impact your bottom line immediately but gets them into the sales funnel. This might include signing up for your mailing list or reading a whitepaper covered in your company's branding.

Pay per click advertising, when done well, can take a business to the next level. Crucially, it can do it within hours. For a modest initial outlay to suit businesses of any size, a product, message or brand can get in front of its target audience and only pay when someone expresses genuine interest.

It's almost as easy as it sounds to an extent, but it's vital not to overlook the part about doing it well.

PPC can be an integral part of the marketing mix and responsible for an incredible return on investment, but it takes time and expertise to get it right.

The Role of PPC in the Marketing Mix

Relatively few businesses use PPC advertising alone. Some have perfected automated processes that guarantee more revenue each day than they spend on ads. That often suits specific business models, such as information products. However, most businesses require a more strategic approach.

PPC is flexible and, when done well, highly affordable and cost-effective even for small businesses. Popular applications include:

• Driving traffic to a new or growing website while waiting for SEO to take effect

• Gaining more eyes on a product or service during a launch or special event

• Collecting information for use in other marketing efforts, such as high-converting keywords and audience profiles

• Supporting offline campaigns when someone searches for a business after seeing the name elsewhere

How Can PPC Help Your Business?

Most businesses have a website. Almost as many have an idea of what search engine optimisation is and what it can do for them. However, PPC sits at another level of complexity, not least because it requires a separate daily budget to work.

However, as a PPC agency in London, we know what it takes to earn a substantial return on investment.

Cost per click ads have plenty going for them – let's say the pros outweigh the cons. One of the best things about PPC is that it's instant. As soon as your ad goes live, you'll start to see clicks and traffic. Of course, that's not the end of the story, as there's always room for refinement and expansion. Nevertheless, for business owners that are short on time and patience, it's always reassuring to see something working right away.

They're supremely targetable too. It's perfectly normal to wonder if it's worth the risk of paying for clicks when there might be no chance of a conversion. Whether you decide to advertise on Google, Facebook or any other provider, you have access to the vast swathes of information they have on their users. When creating campaigns, you can use that data to ensure the right people see the right ads.

Remember, if nobody clicks ads, the middle man doesn't get paid, so it's in their best interests to help make your ads as attractive and successful as possible.

Why Use Inflorescence Media as Your PPC Agency?

PPC advertising is by no means a dark art. However, like most business functions, doing it well requires a combination of time and expertise.

Here at Inflorescence Media, our business model revolves around transparency. We're delighted to involve clients at every stage, sharing as much or as little as they want to know about ongoing projects. Crucially, we're also PPC specialists.

We freely admit that anyone can create a PPC ad. It's as simple as logging into your Google account, setting up Google Ads if you haven't done so already, choosing some keywords, a headline and some body text and deciding on a budget. You could be appearing prominently alongside results for your desired target words within the hour.

We can do that for you, and so much more besides. We're not exaggerating when we say that PPC management could be someone's full-time job, even for just a single campaign. No campaign is genuinely finished – until you switch it off.

The 'doing' is just part of what we do for our clients. We bring our expertise to the fore and do the thinking too.

We'll conduct split testing to see which ads perform best and refine your campaign accordingly. We'll experiment regardless of the size of your budget to find the sweet spot between cost per click and cost per conversion. We'll deploy an authentic marketing strategy that works in tandem with your other marketing efforts and then provide regular reports on how everything's going.

Oh, and we're also a full-service digital media agency, so we can build a selection of outstanding landing pages on your site that take visitors from interested to paid-up customers.

If that sounds good to you, reach out for a chat about how we can turn PPC into potentially the most cost-effective part of your marketing strategy.

Finding the Right Keywords for PPC

Keyword research for PPC shares many similarities with standard SEO, but there are some significant differences.

Finding source keywords isn't the most challenging task. If you're an accountant, you'd start with 'accounting services' and go from there. If you install kitchens, you might start with 'kitchen fitter'. Just as you might write blog posts based on these terms for your site, you'd probably also run ads around them too.

Perhaps the most crucial difference between PPC keywords and their traditional counterparts involves upper and lower funnel terms.

The funnel in online marketing is the customer journey. Just like the funnel you might have in your kitchen, it's wider at the top and narrows on the way down, and the idea is for people to progress through until they drop out of the bottom.

Lower funnel keywords will always be the most attractive. They involve directly targeting people that are ready to buy. Common keywords at the bottom of the funnel include 'buy', 'cheap', 'sale' and 'price'. These searchers are already near the bottom of the funnel, and they're ready to commit.

They're the people you want to click your ads for an instant return. Unfortunately, they're also the people your competitors want to attract. They're a funnel shortcut, but paying for the privilege can get expensive quickly.

If you're a small business and there are larger companies in the same sector with marketing budgets to match, you don't want to go toe to toe with them on keywords. Instead, you want to work smarter.

One of the best ways to do so is to target keywords further up the funnel – appropriately entitled upper funnel keywords. These people aren't necessarily ready to buy, but they might be curious. So they're ripe for an email list signup and other micro conversions.

Crucially, when they do their early research, they'll see your brand alongside results. They might not click, but that's not a problem as you don't pay! As they keep on searching, they'll keep seeing your company. When the time comes to buy, it will be like they've known you all their lives.

Your PPC Glossary

As noted already, PPC isn't a dark art. However, you wouldn't necessarily believe that with the sheer number of terms and acronyms involved. So, if you adopt a DIY approach, here are a few final things to keep in mind.

Terms You'll Need to Understand

• CPC – Cost Per Click: The amount you spend each time someone clicks on one of your ads.

• CPA – Cost Per Acquisition: How much it costs for a successful conversion. In the most basic terms, if you make a sale from every five paid clicks on average, your CPA is five times the value of your CPC. However, CPA is an advertising model in its own right and one we'd be happy to discuss!

• ROAS – Return on Ad Spend: The profit you make from your ads. If you spend £2,000 on an advertising campaign and can directly trace a £10,000 increase in sales back to the campaign, your ROAS is £5 as you've made £5 for every £1 spent.

Types of Paid Ads

• Search Ads: The most common type of PPC ads. These are the types of ads you see alongside search results.

• Display Ads: Google Ads and other networks also support visual ads in the same way, where clients only pay for clicks. They're ubiquitous on AdSense, where Google places ads on other sites and splits click revenue with publishers.

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• Video Ads: Some big websites display video ads in their content, although the most common use is on YouTube. PPC isn't always the optimal metric, but it's always a possibility.

• Shopping Ads: It won't have escaped your attention when searching for products on Google that you don't even need to visit a website anymore – they're right there at the top of the results. What decides who appears where? The amount the retailer is willing to pay for a click, of course!

• App Ads: Have you noticed that many apps advertise other apps? YouTube does a lot of it too. While Pay Per Install (PPI) is perhaps more common, there can be an element of PPC too.

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We've focused on Google here, but they're just one component of a comprehensive PPC marketing strategy. Depending on your business, there might be other networks that can complement or even replace Google as your PPC partner of choice.

If you want to target people based on their likes and dislikes, Facebook ads could be a great option. Alternatively, if your business model thrives on getting your products and services in front of corporate clients, LinkedIn ads could be the way to go. Most search engines also offer comparable services, with Bing and Yahoo just two examples.

Poor PPC advertising can be an expensive mistake. On the other hand, a great campaign can be ludicrously profitable. We're here to make sure you end up in the latter category – get in touch now to boost your traffic and make a genuine impact on your bottom line.

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