PPC (pay-per-click) marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay a fee every time their ad is clicked. We come across this type of advertising every day.
Search ads are the most common ad format in PPC marketing:
Display advertising also falls under the umbrella of PPC marketing (although there are other ways to buy ads besides PPC):
The same applies to social media ads, such as ads on Facebook:
For us marketers, PPC advertising is a great way to drive traffic and conversions. The good news is that once you learn how to run PPC ads on a platform like Google Ads, it becomes very easy to run PPC ads on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Bing.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What are the benefits of PPC marketing
- What is the role of PPC in marketing?
- How to Succeed on Google Ads (and Other Platforms)
What are the benefits of PPC marketing?
There are four main reasons why PPC is such a useful marketing channel:
1. You can drive traffic to your website instantly
It only takes a few hours from the time you start learning about PPC marketing to the time your first PPC campaign starts driving traffic to your website.
In contrast, any “free” alternative, such as SEO, social media, or email marketing, will typically take months or even years to bring in significant traffic. By paying per visit, you can save a ton of time.
2. You can target potential customers well
You generally only want to pay for clicks from people who are likely to buy from you, and all PPC platforms allow you to do this.
Just take a look at our five most promoted pages in paid search:
As you’ll see later, you can choose when, where, and to whom you want your ads to appear. PPC is the only marketing channel that offers such precise targeting options.
3. You can easily measure
Google Ads and all other PPC platforms offer tracking pixels – a piece of code that ties ad clicks to user actions on your website and gives you insights into things like ad engagement and cost.
Here’s what’s happening at the ad level:
All in all, you won’t find a more accurate marketing channel than PPC conversion attribution. It will give you the clearest understanding of the cost of each conversion.
4. You can easily scale it
If you want more traffic from your PPC campaigns, you can just invest more money in them. But the same cannot be said for content marketing, SEO, or other marketing channels, which require more time and effort.
However, before you decide to make a significant investment in PPC marketing, you should have a clear understanding of its role in your marketing strategy. This includes developing a plan that clearly defines what you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there.
What role does PPC play in marketing?
PPC marketing gives you greater visibility during the most critical part of the customer journey. In other words, when people are ready (or almost ready) to buy.
This is crucial to understand because it means that PPC advertising is most effective when the following conditions are met:
- Potential customers already know your brand.
- Your products are of high quality and very competitively priced.
- Your website has a good UX (user experience).
The further you are from meeting these standards, the less effective your PPC ads will be.
Let me explain.
Imagine you’re in the market for a new coffee machine. You start by reading a bunch of articles about it — what makes a good coffee machine, what to look out for, which brands people recommend, etc. You continue reading product reviews and pick out a few that you like best. Then, when it’s time to buy, you start looking up specific products.
The closer you get to a purchase decision, the more search ads appear in the search results page (SERP). When you start searching for how to choose a good coffee machine, you may not be ready to buy. But once you start searching for keywords like “best espresso machine under $1000,” “Jura WE6 piano review,” or “buy Gaggia Classic Pro,” that changes.
When you click on an ad and make a purchase, you gravitate toward brands and websites that meet these criteria. Familiarity and brand recognition are key.
It’s important to remember that PPC marketing is not a magic bullet that will suddenly make your business boom, but it is a wheel that executes your overall marketing strategy.
Google Advertising Basics
Enough theory, let’s jump right into Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), the largest advertising platform and, for many, synonymous with PPC marketing.
Campaign types in Google Ads
Here are the six most common campaign types you’ll encounter in your Google Ads account:
The ad formats, ad placements, and targeting options are different for each campaign type. Let’s take a quick look at what they are.
1. Search campaigns
This is the most common format, and the one that Google users probably associate with ads. If the keywords a user enters match the advertiser's settings (more on this later), the search ad is triggered.
Ads can even occupy the first four search results:
2. Display campaigns
Google's display ads appear as banner ads across the Google Display Network (GDN). Many websites monetize their traffic by offering this type of ad space:
3. Shopping campaigns
If you're a retailer, you can use Shopping campaigns to promote your products with images directly on search engine results pages (SERPs). These campaigns are also called Product Listing Ads (PLAs).
4. Video campaigns
We all know the feeling of looking forward to watching a YouTube video only to be hindered by a video ad.
They are arguably one of the most annoying forms of advertising and the main reason people install ad blockers or pay for YouTube Premium. However, they can be surprisingly powerful if used correctly. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of video ads where not only did you not immediately click “skip ad” but you actually enjoyed watching it overall.
5. Smart campaigns
This campaign type isn’t a new ad format, but a different way to manage your campaigns, with a lot of the work being done by Google’s algorithms. Essentially, you provide some data inputs, and Google uses that data to determine who to target, who to bid on, and so on.
Here’s what Google says about Smart Campaigns :
Smart campaigns is Google's fast and simple solution for small businesses to help your business get exposure on Google, especially at the moments that matter. Smart campaigns use Google's cutting-edge advertising technology to deliver results based on your campaign goals, whether that's customers calling, visiting your business location, or taking actions on your website.
6. Discover Activities
This is the newest campaign type in Google Ads. Discovery campaigns focus on advertising in Google Discover. Google Discover is an automatically generated and highly personalized mobile news feed based on your online activity. It displays information and news on topics that interest you, such as SEO or golf.
How PPC campaigns work in Google Ads
The basics of PPC are simple to understand. I’ll focus on search ads and give some information on display ads, as these two campaign types are relevant to anyone interested in PPC. We’ll cover the following concepts here:
- Auction system
- Campaigns - Ad Groups - Ad Hierarchy
- Search keyword matching types
- Targeting on the Google Display Network
- Exclude specific keywords and sites
Needless to say…
Auction system
Once your ad qualifies to appear in front of your target audience, you enter an auction. Your competitors and other businesses also want to get that ad space. So how does Google decide which advertisers get that ad space?
Here are the criteria Google uses to determine the auction winner:
- Bid – The maximum amount each qualified advertiser is willing to pay for a click (or other action).
- Ad quality – determined by the Quality Score (QS) metric. Google considers expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience.
- The expected impact of your ad extensions and other ad formats – things you can add on top of the basic ad format.
From this we can conclude that the more relevant and better written your ad is, the less it will cost to win the auction. This system is designed to promote high-quality ads and websites, but of course, it doesn't always work. Remember, money is not everything here.
Speaking of money, remember when I mentioned there are other ways to buy ads besides pay-per-click? In fact, there are a lot of bidding options besides cost-per-click (CPC) .
Another common bidding option is CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. You’ll most likely use it in your display campaign auctions.
Campaigns - Ad Groups - Ad Hierarchy
Every advertising platform should have an administration system that allows users to quickly and easily create, change, or update ads. While this isn’t always the case, Google Ads sets the bar really high, and understandably so.
Whenever you want to create an ad, it can’t be done instantly. Each ad needs to be organized into its own ad group, which in turn is part of a campaign. This hierarchical structure allows advertisers to efficiently manage their entire ad account.
The range of settings and options varies by platform.
Here’s what and where you can set it in Google Ads:
- Campaign level – campaign objective, campaign type, ad network, audience, budget and bid, language, ad extensions
- Ad group level - Keywords (or other targeting options)
- Ad level - ad title, description, URL, extension
Best practice is to have a plan for your campaign structure and stick to it. For example, some PPC experts will insist on one keyword per ad group and make that clear in their naming conventions. So if you sell coffee machines internationally, you might create a campaign called *"Search - [espresso machines] - United States" with an ad group called "[espresso machines]" that targets that keyword as an exact match in the United States.
I jumped right to exact matching, so we'll focus on that next.
Search keyword matching types
When a user's search query matches the keywords that the advertiser bids on, the search ad will be displayed. The order in which the ads are displayed depends on who won the auction, who ranked second, and so on.
You can do keyword targeting by selecting keywords and their match types.
Here is a list of match types and how they work:
- Broad match – matches anything it deems relevant, regardless of word order or spelling errors
- Broad Match Modifier (BMM) – works similar to broad match, but requires the search query to contain +keyword
- Phrase match - exact match, but can contain anything before or after the keyword
- Exact match - self-explanatory, matches singular/plural forms as well as close variants and synonyms
For example, if we take the keyword “espresso machine,” the keyword match type might make it work (you can never be 100% sure).
It goes without saying that match types are just as important as the keywords themselves. Only a combination of good target keywords and the right match types can bring you relevant traffic.
Unless you’re a business like Amazon that bids on millions of search queries, broad match will almost never work. Exact match gives you the most control over who you bid on, but it also limits your exposure and requires you to consider targeting a variety of related exact match keyword variations, such as [espresso machine] and [espresso coffee machine].
Basic targeting in the Google Display Network (GDN)
Google collects a ton of data on its users and turns it into targeting options for advertisers. This is no secret to anyone, nor is it new. Browsing and search history can be turned into so-called “affinity audiences” that you can target with display ads.
Here are some affinity categories:
Sounds good, right? Not really. Unless you’re targeting a very broad market, this will likely be a waste of your advertising budget — kind of like targeting keywords with broad match.
Why? Google associates some of my interests with:
You can find your ads by logging into your Google Account -> Data & Privacy -> Ads Settings.
I haven’t been to half of the places and I’m not interested in most of the interests listed. I probably just searched or clicked something at some point that caused Google to put me in a relevant affinity audience. Now it’s showing me display ads that aren’t what I’m interested in at all.
A better targeting option is to create a list of specific websites where you want to run Google AdSense ads. This way, you can filter out only highly relevant websites. This is called placement targeting.
Exclude specific keywords and placements
One of the keys to optimizing a PPC campaign is to narrow the scope of bidding keywords and websites. Once the campaign is running, you should regularly check the actual bidding situation of the bidding system and optimize accordingly.
You will often find yourself bidding on keywords that are less relevant or irrelevant, unless you are strictly following exact match (which in itself is not a good idea). Keywords that you exclude from your campaign are called negative keywords.
As you can see in the ad account example below, you’ve also included match types for negative keywords:
The same applies to your display campaigns. If you don't target specific placements, your ads will appear on placements that are irrelevant to your business. Eliminating those high-impression placements as quickly as possible can save you a lot of money.
How to Succeed in Google Ads
I still remember the first time I logged into a PPC platform to manage my campaigns. Although I’m not a PPC expert, I’ve quickly learned how to effectively manage PPC campaigns across platforms. Here are some tips I’ve learned based on my own PPC experience.
Learning by doing
The best advice I can give you is to put what you learn into practice right away. Don’t endlessly study information on various PPC topics unless you really need to. There will always be things you know nothing about, and that’s okay.
Take some Google Ads courses
The best way to get familiar with a PPC platform is to have someone take you on a demo tour – what to set up first, where everything is, how it works, what to watch out for, and so on.
Luckily, there are countless great learning resources and courses on Google Ads. I recommend starting with the short Google Ads tour video and the Google Ads Learning Center .
Please note that you may be contacted by a Google sales representative or support agent to assist you. While this is great and I encourage you to take advantage of it, remember that their primary goal is to get you to spend more money.
The good thing about PPC is that there are a lot of official documentation and guides. Advertising is the main source of revenue for Google and other tech giants, so they need to provide strong support.
Not only can you get tips and tooltips throughout the Google Ads interface, you'll also find that the Google Ads knowledge base and guides contain most everything you need.
Start small and rely on yourself
If you don’t have a Google Ads account yet, Google might try to push you into creating a Smart campaign right away, handing over most of the control and settings to the Google algorithm. Resist this urge, as it’s better to take everything into your own hands when you start using PPC, and then slowly integrate “smarter” features once you really understand what you’re doing.
Just ignore the reminders from Smart Activities and use Expert Mode to set everything up yourself.
I recommend creating your first campaign around keywords that are relatively inexpensive and relevant to your product. Decide on a daily budget that won’t put too much of a dent in your overall marketing budget, and start from there.
Monitor and optimize your campaigns regularly. Once you start getting consistent results, you can increase your budget and add more keywords, including those with high CPCs.
Set up conversions and tracking correctly
Your main PPC metrics are all about money. The goal is to get the most out of your ad spend, so cost per conversion should be one of your key performance indicators (KPIs).
I highly recommend setting up conversion tracking properly before you start running ads . Counting a conversion every time a customer buys your product is the foundation, but it would be even better if you could add the value of that conversion to the value. It’s still pretty simple, but you might need some help from a developer. Just follow these instructions to set up your conversions:
Setting up conversions also allows you to take advantage of Google’s machine learning algorithms, which can optimize your ad performance to increase conversion volume and conversion value. Enhanced CPC (eCPC) is a great example of one you should consider first.
Do proper research on your goals
Whether it’s keywords, websites, or audiences, you should always have some data to support your targeting choices. Or better yet, create your campaigns based on that data in the first place.
For search advertising, you have to do keyword research. Most people associate this with search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s just as important for pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising. You first need to understand what people are searching for, and then understand how much you’ll have to pay on average for each click.
You can get this data in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Simply enter a few (seed) keywords that capture the nature of your business and products and start searching.
Another tool often used for PPC keyword research is Google’s Keyword Planner . It doesn’t provide as much data as paid SEO or PPC tools, but it naturally provides the most accurate cost-per-click (CPC) numbers:
As for Google Ads, it can provide some keyword suggestions when you create an ad group. Just paste in your landing page and Google will give you some keywords for that landing page:
As you can see, the keyword suggestions aren't the best, but you can find some relevant ones. This is basically the mechanics behind the slightly more advanced Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) format, which selects the keywords to bid on on its own.
Start exploring more advanced formats, features, and options
If I could explain all of PPC marketing here, it would be easy. But it isn’t. So, here are some ad formats, features, and targeting options to consider reviewing and using once you’re familiar with the basics.
1. Manual and automatic ad extensions
Ad extensions are additional text added to your ad above and beyond the standard headline, description, and URL.
They can be set at both the ad and account level, and are one of the first features I encourage you to use once you’ve mastered the basics. If you need to use automated extensions (typically for local businesses), you may need to link your Google Ads account with your Google My Business account.
2. Remarketing ad formats
In addition to conversion tracking, you can also set up tracking codes to collect data on your website visitors. You can then use this data to re-engage these visitors through a variety of Google Ads formats.
For example, if previous visitors continue to look for relevant keywords through remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), you can adjust your bids and show them customized search ads. These ads provide a great opportunity to convert those undecided visitors into customers.
But remarketing goes beyond RLSA. You can remarket on the Display Network, YouTube, and even Gmail.
3. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)
The mechanism by which Google Ads provides you with keyword suggestions based on the landing page URLs you provide is a core part of DSA . Instead of targeting keywords, you can set up a search campaign where you provide a list of URLs and let Google determine when a search query is relevant to your landing page and bid for you.
The broader your target market, the more useful DSA will be for you. If you’re only targeting a bunch of keywords for a niche product and audience, DSA will likely not help you and will instead target less relevant keywords.
4. Custom Intent Audiences (CIA)
Another great display targeting option is to target audiences based on their search history and behavior across the GDN.
Custom intent audiences are audiences created based on a set of keywords searched, websites visited, or apps used. Basically, you tell Google to show your ads to people who have searched for something specific or visited a website related to your business.
I’ve heard many PPC experts praise this targeting option as the best choice for display campaigns, so give it a try.
Move to Google Ads Editor
Many PPC professionals rarely even use the web interface. Google offers a desktop application called Google Ads Editor that makes it easy to manage your campaigns and saves you a lot of clicks and time.
The user interface is different, but it’s designed to make your PPC work easier. Once you’re familiar with the web platform, or you find setting up campaigns time-consuming, learn to use Google Ads Editor. In the long run, this is your best option for managing your campaigns.
Final Thoughts
PPC marketing is (or at least should be) only a small part of your overall marketing efforts, but there’s a lot to learn and apply. This guide should provide some basics to get you started in the right direction on your new PPC marketing journey.
While this article focuses on Google Ads, you can easily apply this knowledge to learn and master any other PPC platform. The next more complex platform is definitely Facebook Ads, but you can also benefit from paying attention to platforms such as Twitter, Quora, or LinkedIn.
Do you have any thoughts or questions? Share your ideas below.
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