Digital marketing has made available to companies various ways to make themselves known through the internet. Within the outbound methodology, there are several ways to publicize your offer of products and services, one of them being paid advertising on the Internet through the Pay Per Click or PPC scheme.
If you are starting to get into online marketing, you have surely come across the term PPC, which is an online advertising collection scheme through the internet supported by a large platform, such as Facebook or Google.
On the surface, a sponsored link on Google or promoted content on Facebook might seem like a simple task. “You just put a budget on your posts and that’s it”, “The advertiser pays and the ad works automatically”: these were some of the ideas I had before I fully immersed myself in creating PPC ads.
Now that landscape has changed, as creating PPC campaigns goes beyond creating a PPC post or ad and putting it out there on Facebook, Google or any other online platform; It is an advertising model that requires certain knowledge in order to obtain excellent results for your business.
Next, we will explain a little about what PPC is and how you can adopt it in order to boost your brand recognition, obtain new clients and even improve the sales of your products or services.
PPC: what is it and how does it work?
If you are familiar with the internet, then you have already seen countless PPC ads within web pages, search engines, social media platforms, entertainment services, among other sites.
It is obvious that the companies that promote themselves make an investment to show themselves, but did you know that, within their budget, the advertiser contemplates the money they pay when the user clicks?
This is where Pay Per Click or PPC comes in, it is a collection scheme that alludes to digital marketing, in which the advertiser makes a payment to advertise within a website, search engines, social networks or any digital platform through PPC ads. , always with the goal that the investment made grants the highest number of conversions and Return on Investment (ROI) possible.
To measure the success of our PPC campaign, there are various metrics that will show us if we are having positive results or if we have to optimize it to obtain the desired results, however, experts agree that the most important are:
- Cost Per Click
- Average Click Rate
- Acquisition Cost
The Cost per Click (CPC): The basis of the PPC strategy
The Cost Per Click or CPC is one of the main concepts that we have to address when explaining what PPC is. As its name says, it will be the amount that will be paid for each time the user clicks on our ad.
The CPC will depend both on the budget that you are willing to pay for each of the PPC campaigns that we will carry out to launch them, as well as on the segmentation of the public that we have defined through the buyer personas.
All platforms allow us to establish the Cost Per Click in two ways:
• The platform is automatically in charge of defining the CPC.
• Manually, where you can choose the maximum cost you are willing to pay for each click received.
An optimal Cost Per Click or CPC is important in every PPC campaign and ad, since the goal is for the Return on Investment (ROI) to be as high as possible.
The budget, and especially the CPC, are very important when creating a campaign under the PPC model, since the display of ads is done through an auction model. The amount set for CPC is called a bid.
This works in the following way: the platform reviews the ads that could be of interest to its users, compares the current bids of other ads aimed at those same users, and finally the one with the highest bid is the one that is displayed.
Experts mention that when your PPC strategy is working correctly, CPC takes a backseat, since the visit to your website is more valuable than the budget you assign to it. The above is clearer when, for example, the CPC of your ad was 2 dollars, and this action managed to make a sale of 400 dollars.
However, the bid can be a determining factor in winning auctions using the PPC model, along with the quality of the ad that is part of our campaign and that we are running.
Average Click Through Rate (CTR): the percentage of users you have attracted with your PPC campaign
The Average Click Through Rate, also known as Click Through Rate or CTR is the second most important metric for PPC campaigns.
This percentage allows us to know the rate of users who click on your ad. The higher the CTR means that your Pay Per Click campaign is working according to the hypothesis that you have raised.
How to calculate the CTR of your PPC campaign?: simply divide the number of clicks obtained through your PPC ads by the number of impressions, that is, the times your ad has been shown, and then multiply the result by 100.
For example: (350 clicks / 4500 impressions) x 100 = CTR of 7.7%.
Although there is no average CTR for all platforms, experts agree that your Pay Per Click strategy is successful if:
• It has a CTR of 0.90% on Facebook.
• Has achieved a 2% CTR on Google Adwords Search Network campaigns.
• Reach a CTR of 0.35% in PPC campaigns on the Google Ads Display Network.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA): the core metric of Pay Per Click
The Cost Per Acquisition, the famous CPA, is the most important metric when launching a Pay Per Click strategy. The CPA is the total cost invested for a user to become a customer when making a purchase through our PPC campaign.
As we mentioned at the beginning, one of the goals when carrying out a PPC strategy for our company is to obtain the highest number of conversions and ROI possible with the budget that we are willing to invest in our PPC campaign.
CPA could be considered as “The Holy Grail” of the PPC strategy, this because each conversion must be as profitable as possible. Let me explain: if a conversion costs $4 and generates sales of $650, then we can say that your campaign is exceeding your expectations of ROI.
Be careful, it should be noted that the real Customer Value obtained through a PPC ad is different from the CPA, since to know this figure it is necessary to subtract the amount of the purchase minus the CPA. For example $650 Purchase – $4 CPA = Actual Customer Value of $646.
The formula to obtain the CPA is super simple: Budget / Total Conversions = CPA.
Example: $5,000 / 84 conversions = $62.5 CPA
I want to do a PPC campaign for my business, where can I advertise?
Currently, there are several platforms on which to carry out the PPC model. These platforms cover both social networks and search engines.
The choice of one of them depends both on the characteristics of your buyer person and on how much you are willing to pay to advertise on the internet, since each one has different payment schemes or only accept certain currencies.
However, when doing PPC and outbound marketing in general, some of the most common platforms are part of two major internet services: Google and Facebook, although there are others such as Twitter Ads, Linkedin Ads or Tumblr Ads.
For now we will focus on Google Ads vs Facebook Ads. We have previously compared both platforms and how they can help you achieve your business marketing goals.
In Aloha! We recommend them because they are the favorites of our clients since the various PPC campaigns they have carried out allowed them to achieve their marketing objectives.
We will explain how you can use both online advertising platforms to your advantage when adopting the PPC model to promote your business, products or services on the internet.
Facebook Ads: take your first steps in PPC
Facebook Ads is one of the main tools that we have at our disposal to be able to carry out a successful PPC campaign for our business — and our outbound marketing strategy in general.
We have already explained its advantages and how you can use them to take your business to the next level, but now we will focus on explaining how you can use this online advertising platform to carry out a PPC ad strategy.
Practically, by running Facebook Ads campaigns you are automatically adopting PPC as a digital marketing model. It really is not very difficult to use this platform for this purpose, since its algorithms are powerful enough to reach a strategic audience willing to click on our content.
Due to its ease of use, in Aloha! We highly recommend that you use Facebook Ads as one of the first platforms on which to take your first steps in the PPC model for your company.
Among some advantages is automation, since its algorithms adjust the way in which your campaign will perform.
For this, it is necessary to define your target audience well, in order to choose the demographic characteristics that will allow your ad to reach the right people.
It is important to define a specific location, age, gender, as well as interests, tastes, and even specific behaviors of the users you want to reach, which will also generate CPC optimization.
It’s worth noting that it’s possible to manually adjust these parameters, including the CPC you’re willing to spend to encourage Facebook users to click on your ad, but unless you have specific PPC marketing goals, We recommend keeping it in automatic mode to get better performance in your campaigns.
Without a doubt, one of the main suggestions that Aloha! we can offer you when doing PPC on Facebook Ads is to use this service is to carry out a traffic campaign to the website to be able to publicize your brand, this is because both the investment and the CPC are much cheaper compared to other types of campaigns.
Google Ads: take your PPC strategy to the next level
Although Facebook Ads can be an important tool to carry out online advertising campaigns, without a doubt Google Ads becomes the most powerful online advertising platform to adopt the PPC model, and in this way promote our brand, product or service within Internet.
Why? As we have explained in our article dedicated to Google Ads, one of its main advantages is its reach, since Google remains the main search service on the internet, which allows it to reach millions of potential customers month after month.
In addition, the various Google services become attractive places in which our ads can be displayed.
It should be noted that Google Ads is a platform completely oriented to PPC. Consequently, Google Ads users get much more powerful tools with which they can optimize the budget of their campaigns, and thus adopt the PPC principles when advertising on the network.
Among these options is to configure the bid according to your objectives for your campaign, either automatically or manually for greater control of your budget. If there is one thing we can highlight about Google Ads, it is the flexibility when setting a target CPC.
We have already explained why Google Ads is one of the best platforms to perform PPC for your company. Now is the time to let you know what you need to improve your campaigns and achieve the marketing objectives that you have established for your company.
How to do PPC successfully?
PPC may seem difficult at first, but thanks to the various online advertising tools, this model has become easier for companies to adopt and understand.
However, doing PPC goes beyond simply defining budgets, expenses and creating ads. It is a process that takes time, but it is necessary to carry out so that our campaigns are successful and offer real benefits to our businesses, products or services.
Next, we will tell you what are the recommendations that the experts share to be able to adopt the PPC in your business.
Define a target audience and know what they are looking for
The first step for any PPC campaign is to establish what the type of user will be, that is, the public we want to reach and encourage to consume our products or services, or simply make our brand known.
For this, it will be necessary to establish data as basic as age, gender, place where they live, language, even more complex data such as employment status, marital status, religion, among other characteristics that allow us to create a Buyer Persona, that is, the target customer to visit our website or consume our product or service.
Defining a Buyer Persona is essential in any PPC campaign, since in this way we direct our strategy towards a clearly defined goal, which also affects budget spending, avoiding generating clicks from internet users who are not at all interested in our brand, product or service.
Now, it is important to know what our Buyer Persona is looking for on the internet. To do this, we can start from two points: put ourselves in the place of the Buyer Persona in question, or we can use tools, such as Google Trends and Facebook Audience Insights.
These tools will allow you to know data about the target audience you want to reach, such as age, gender, among many other data.
In the specific case of Google, once you have clearly defined the Buyer Persona that we want to reach, the next thing is to define a keyword, that is, the keywords that will serve to show the ad to target users.
The keyword, key when performing PPC in Google Ads
Once your Buyer Persona has been defined, now it’s time to choose the keywords for your Google Adwords campaign, which will allow you to activate your PPC ad when users do a search engine search.
Previously we have explained what keywords are, and how they are used. However, it is important to remember at this point that this is a key element for our PPC campaigns in Google Adwords.
Keywords are the concepts and series of words that users use to locate content on the network.
That is, the key keywords are the indications that a user gives to the search engine so that it can locate the best possible result that aligns with what is indicated.
To choose the right keywords for your PPC campaign, it is necessary to carry out keyword research, a process that previously in Aloha! We have explained in detail.
We must remember that keyword research is the research we do to know what words we are going to use to position our content or PPC ad in search engines and, incidentally, to know the type of content that is being generated from these words and the demand that exists.
This way you will be able to know whether or not it is convenient for you to invest in content based on a specific word or topic or if you should focus your efforts on words or topics that are not being exploited or explored as much.
That is why we are not exaggerating when we say that keywords can make the difference between a successful PPC campaign in Google Adwords, in which we can get as close as possible to the results that we have stipulated, or simply wasting the budget with traffic from people who will not be interested. in our brand, product or service.
So, if the choice of keywords for our campaign is an important step, how can we choose the ideal keywords? And above all, how can we know the estimated CPC to know how much budget we will allocate to our PPC campaign?
This is where keyword planners come in, tools that will not only allow us to know if the keywords we have chosen are ideal to reach our target Buyer Persona, but also to know the estimated CPC for each of those words.
There are free keyword planners, such as the one offered by Google itself, as well as Neil Pattel, which has free and paid functions, which can improve your keyword research.
Similarly, there are paid keyword planners. One of them, and the one we use in Aloha! is SEMRush, which offers new features to do your keyword research more efficiently.
In short, PPC can further boost the growth of your business
We have already told you what PPC is. As you have read, this model, which is part of outbound marketing, is a powerful way that will allow us to reach new audiences and thus achieve our sales goals through PPC ads.
At first, PPC may seem difficult, but thanks to local online advertising platforms, all those who wish to carry out a Pay Per Click campaign can execute it with just a few steps.
Of course, it is important to know the metrics of our PPC campaigns: when carrying them out, it is essential to monitor the results of CPC, CTR and CPA since the goal of any PPC strategy is to achieve the highest ROI with the lowest possible budget.
Although there are various platforms, in Aloha! We recommend you start with Facebook Ads, since its platform is quite easy to understand; However, to take your business to the next level, it is important to use Google Ads, since its online advertising service has become a powerful tool, since it is the most used search engine in the world.
Similarly, we explain that the budget is an important factor when carrying out PPC campaigns. As we mentioned, the goal is to achieve more with the lowest possible cost. More budget does not always mean more and better results, but we can optimize the cost of it by knowing in depth the results we are obtaining.
In order to establish an adequate budget, we suggest you use various tools that will allow you to know your target audience, such as Facebook Audience Insights and Google Trends; If your goal is to advertise on Google or other search engines, we recommend keyword planners, which will allow us to know the relevance of our keywords, the Cost Per Click, better known as CPC, average for each one, and from there start to generate an amount right to launch our campaign.
In the end, it is up to you how you will carry out the PPC campaign to achieve your sales goals. As you can see, getting into this new way of doing marketing does not have to be a headache.
Remember, in digital marketing there are no mistakes, since, through the data, we can always know which users have felt attachment to our brand, product or service.
You always learn something new! So it is possible that along the way you will discover, through PPC, users who are willing to live with your brand and consume it.
