Last Updated on October 20, 2021 by Rovamedia
Every business and marker wants to really make their product and service gain financial traction. Honestly, there are no two ways about, business is meant to solve a problem people really need to be solved, in turn, the people using the service or product return the favor by paying for the service. It’s not actually rocket science when you think about it.
In the grand scheme of things, paid advertising is crucial to the success of most businesses. And to be frank, there is no business that doesn’t spend money on customer acquisitions. The fact is, there are numerous businesses who are offering the same service your business also offers, but it’s a big world and not every one of their customers will vibe with your product/service and vice versa.
Most small businesses never even consider paid ads because they aren’t “free.” But remember, nothing is truly free because everything takes time. And time is money.
For that reason, as Ahrefs puts it; there’s no need to shy away from paid advertising. What you do want to avoid, however, is throwing money blindly into an ad network because somebody somewhere said it was good.
Understanding Pay-per-click Advertising
Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines.
Paid advertising is any kind of advertising that you have to pay for, versus owned or earned advertising.
As opined by Skyworld; with paid advertising, marketers pay the owner of ad space in exchange for use of that space. The price paid for the ad space is often settled through a bidding process between marketers and the ad space owner.
There are several categories, including pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-impression (PPI), and display ads. There are different types of PPC ads, but one of the most common types is the paid search ad.
These ads appear when people search for things online using a search engine like Google — especially when they are performing commercial searches, meaning that they’re looking for something to buy.
This could be anything from a mobile search (someone looking for “pizza near me” on their phone) to a local service search (someone looking for a dentist or a plumber in their area) to someone shopping for a gift (“Mother’s Day flowers”) or a high-end item like enterprise software. All of these searches trigger pay-per-click ads.
In pay-per-click advertising, businesses running ads are only charged when a user actually clicks on their ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.”
Other forms of PPC advertising include display advertising (typically, serving banner ads) and remarketing.
Although paid advertising costs more than owned or earned advertising, paid forms are an effective way to expose your company’s name to a large audience.
Paid ads are usually displayed to users on the sides, tops, or bottoms of web pages. Marketers can pay more to have their ads featured on more popular websites to increase traffic.
The different categories of paid ads — PPC, PPI, and display ads — allow marketers to further customize their campaigns. The growing popularity of social media has recently turned sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn into effective platforms for paid ads.
Most small businesses never even consider paid ads because they aren’t “free.” But remember, nothing is truly free because everything takes time. And time is money.
Ahrefs
The ABCs of Paid Advertising Success
As opined, there’s no need to shy away from paid advertising. What you do want to avoid, however, is throwing money blindly into an ad network because somebody somewhere said it was good.
Remember, what works for one person may not work for the next.
So before you start pumping money into paid ads, consider the ABCs of paid advertising success:
- A is for Audience,
- B is for Budget,
- C is for Commerciality.
Let’s start at the top.
Audience
So the first step is to figure out which platform your target audience uses. Audience match is also excellent for creating cross-sell opportunities by marketing accessories or complementary products to those the consumer recently purchased.
Plus, there are a lot of pros to customer matches for seasonal businesses. No worries if you don’t have a big audience pool of recent visitors — you can leverage customer matches to target last year’s clientele.
If you have access to an email database, you can use data points you have within your customer relationship management (CRM) that aren’t otherwise accessible in the search engines or Google Analytics to create segmented lists. These, too, can be used to parallel the sales funnel.
Advertising anywhere else will be money down the drain.
Budget
Most PPC ads work on an auction basis, meaning that the more advertisers there are, the more expensive it gets for you and me.
Figuring out how much to spend on advertising should begin with your sales revenues. The cost of advertising will be paid for by sales and increasing sales is your goal of an ad campaign. Therefore, there are two formulas that the SBA recommends small businesses use when deciding how much to spend on advertising:
- How much money do you need to promote the sale of a certain product at a given price? The SBA uses the example that if you spend $10 of the selling price of an item that costs $300 on advertising, then you should be willing to spend $3,000 in advertising to sell 300 units and generate $90,000 in sales.
- The other way is to set aside a flat percentage of your total projected sales revenues for advertising. So if you plan to dedicate five percent of your revenues and you expect to bring in $100,000 in sales that year, you would spend $5,000 on advertising.
Once you have a handle on how much money you plan to budget for advertising, you need to figure out when you should spend that money during the next 12 months. The SBA has free sample worksheets and templates that help you budget for advertising.
While the plotting of this data may be time-consuming, it can help you compare your actual sales against the goals you set in crafting your advertising strategy. This way, you can decide whether to make changes.
Ahrefs puts it this way; but don’t forget, PPC is bigger than just Google. You can also advertise on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. — which are often cheaper.
Just make sure your target audience actually hangs out there.
Commerciality
If you’re bidding on a keyword like “digital marketing company” in Google, then it may make perfect sense to send visitors to an informative landing page.
But that won’t work on platforms like Facebook or Pinterest.
Nobody there is in Reading mode.
So you need to bridge the gap between the intent of the platform and how you monetize your products. And the way you do that is with content.
Say that you sell food and want to advertise on Instagram. You wouldn’t want to send people to information landing pages for menu and ordering because people on Instagram aren’t looking for that. They’re looking for clout and entertainment.
So it would make more sense to send them to a relevant sales page like “Order Spicy Chicken.”
You can then show relevant products naturally throughout the content, much like Foodhive does.
Conclusion
Whether you’ve heard a little about PPC marketing and are curious to learn more, or you already know that you want to use PPC to market your business, but aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place.
Visit our Pay-per-click services webpage to understand how we turn marketing campaigns from $0 to over $1,000,000 in revenue traction for our clients using extreme technical conversion setups.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
Remember, what works for one person may not work for the next.
So before you start pumping money into paid ads, consider the ABCs of paid advertising success:
- A is for Audience,
- B is for Budget,
- C is for Commerciality.
This will help your business gain more leads and conversions before you cry over split milk. Lastly, it’s imperative to understand that a high budget doesn’t equate to higher conversions.
