Paid Advertising Services

How Does PPC Marketing Work?

The pay-per-click ad campaign is a payment model for digital marketing when the advertiser pays for a click, that is, for the user’s transition to the promoted website. Marketers offer PPC management services to increase traffic, enhance online business awareness, and boost sales through search engines.

The key goal of the PPC solution is to save the budget on irrelevant traffic and attract the maximum number of leads. The advertiser pays not for ad impressions and not for random users but to attract targeted leads who saw ads, became interested in the product, clicked on the link, and went to the landing page.

So, how does it work? PPC specialists design and run ads placed on a good platform—for example, in Google search. PPC ad is displayed by keywords—the user enters a query, and the search engine generates advertising and organic results.

As for the costs, the PPC management price range depends on various parameters. There are low-competitive requests (advertising is inexpensive, but it brings little traffic) and highly competitive queries (they bring more leads, but the cost of advertising is higher). The platform holds a bidding auction to determine which ads to place higher on the SERP. The auction is held automatically before the results page is generated and takes place in a split second. The ads with the highest bid get the highest placement. Therefore, optimizing your PPC ads for each platform is crucial so that your digital promotion strategy is as effective and profitable as possible.

Types of PPC Ads

There are several types of PPC advertising services. The most optimal and effective are search, thematic, media, and shopping contextual ads, a model with personal targeting, and a remarketing strategy. Let’s look at these types of pay-per-click campaigns, their key features, and their main principles of use.

Search contextual advertising. Such ads are placed on the search engine results page, and they appear when users enter keywords in a query. They are usually placed on the SERP, right next to organically generated results. These ads can take up to four first places in the search results.

To set up search contextual advertising, you must add the keywords your target audience uses. The main advantage of such a PPC strategy is that the ads target users interested in the product or service, ensuring a large reach of the target audience.

To effectively customize this advertising, you need to study the selected search engine’s features, capabilities, requirements, rules, and restrictions. You should also consider the competitive environment in your market segment, the quality of your competitors’ pages, and the frequency of chosen search queries.

Thematic contextual advertising. These paid advertising services are aimed at displaying ads on websites that are most relevant to the topic and industry of the promoted business. However, compared to search advertising, contextual advertising is less targeted at specific groups of audiences.

Such ads are placed on websites’ main and internal pages with high attendance rates of the potential target users. For a thematic paid advertising service to be as effective as possible, ads must be bright and attract the attention of users interested in the promoted goods and services.

Media contextual advertising. These ads are displayed in banner format throughout Google—media ads are most often placed on Google SERPs and partner sites.

These PPC marketing services are best suited for long-term campaigns with a large budget, as ads make up only 10% of the total contextual content. To develop an effective media strategy, you must carefully analyze the existing advertising platforms on the search engine pages to choose the best option for your niche and create a high-quality ad design.

Shopping contextual advertising. A trade marketing campaign is designed to promote goods and services on online stores’ pages. Ads of this type contain an image and a price, allowing you to promote products directly in the search results and attract the attention of potential buyers.

Ads from the Google Shopping Results section appear just below the search bar and on the Shopping and Images tabs.

Another type of contextual advertising is a campaign aimed at a specific target audience segment. Groups are combined according to their location or goals. Targeting allows you to select from the entire audience for your product or service.

Such a PPC campaign launch is great for both the B2B and B2C industries and for promoting various categories of services and goods. This solution is especially beneficial when there is a clear audience reference to any geographic, personal (age, occupation, etc.), or behavioral indicators.

A remarketing strategy. Remarketing allows you to interact with the audience that has already visited your website. It increases the effectiveness of adopting a PPC campaign, when the target audience sees the ad again, the probability of clicking on it and going to the site is quite high. Remarketing aims to boost the demand for the offered goods or services.

You should test several tools to determine the most appropriate type of PPC solution for your digital business. You can also seek help from a professional PPC campaign management agency, and experienced specialists will set up and launch contextual advertising for your website.