Paul Dughi

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising has become a staple of retail and B2B marketing for nearly 20 years now, but there’s still a fair amount of confusion about PPC in 2018 and its role in advertising. In this article, we'll define the key differences between search marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and pay per click advertising. We'll tell you why it makes sense to use PPC in 2018, what's new in PPC in 2018, what to do before your first (or next) campaign, and answer some frequently asked questions. Definitions & Differences: SM, SEO, SEM, PPC Let’s first make sure we all have a clear definition of PPC and the key differences between PPC, SM, SEM, and SEO. • Search Marketing (SM) • Search Marketing (SM) is an umbrella that includes a variety of tactics to increase website visibility on search engines. It can include marketing techniques, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay Per Click (PPC), and others, including Reputation Management, Listing Optimization, Link Building, Content Marketing, and more. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the things you do to get web traffic through unpaid or free listings. It’s all the things you do on or off your website to make sure you’re sending the right signals to the search engines to attract organic traffic, such as Website Authority, Mobile Optimization, Speed Loads, Links, and Keywords. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) • Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is buying traffic through paid search listings. While it can include PPC in 2018, it’s not limited to PPC. It can also include other paid search tactics, including Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM). Pay Per Click (PPC) Pay Per Click (PPC) is pretty much what the name implies. You pay every time someone clicks on your paid ad. Paid ads will show up at top of search engine results and get premium placement for searchers if you choose the right key words. You bid what you’re willing to pay. While search engines typically take the highest bid, they also factor quality scores, landing pages, mobile load speed, and a variety of other factors. Google, for example, is looking for the ad that has the best chance to convert in order to get consistent business. Why PPC in 2018 Makes Sense For Your Business PPC puts your ads in front of customers that are searching for the products and services you deliver. Unlike traditional media where ads show up to a large audience that may or may not be in the market for what you are selling, PPC ads show up right when consumers want information. When customers initiate a search, it's no longer an advertisement, it's information they need to make a decision. That's a whole lot more effective than general market advertising. There are plenty of other reasons as well. PPC Can “Google-Proof” Your Marketing Everybody wants to be the #1 result on Google. While SEO strategies can help your rankings in search engines, it’s always a moving target. Google is constantly tweaking its search engine algorithms. In fact, every year it makes changes to the algorithm more than 500 times! Some are major changes and get noticed, and some are minor changes. Every one of them has an impact on your search engine rankings. What is not affected by an algorithm change to organic search listings? PPC. Pay Per Click is an effective safeguard in “Google-Proofing” your marketing. It also provides a lift by supplementing your SEO efforts. Highly Targeted Marketing “Half the money I spend in advertising is wasted,” said marketing pioneer John Wanamaker way back in the 1900’s. “The trouble is I don’t know which half.” That statement is even more true today – and you simply can’t afford to waste half your precious marketing dollars. PPC in 2018 allows you to target with a laser-like focus on your target customers. You can go way beyond demographic targeting by targeting specific categories, including lookalike audiences. Traditional advertising may target a wide range of individuals – Women age 25-54, for example. PPC allows to target to target niches making your ad spend more efficient: Moms with kids who are homeowners that go to church regularly. By understand your target customer and building a profile, you can better target your results to show ads to those most likely to buy. Through optimization techniques, you can serve the right ads to the right people at the right time – and that’s the key to effective advertising. Re-Marketing Your Visitors You can also remarket to people that have previously clicked through to your website. You can define which ads to show them based on what actions they’ve taken when they visited. For example, someone that spent time on your website looking at men’s shoes can see a different ad than someone was looking at women’s shoes. Reporting and Data Analysis: Immediate, Trackable Results Reporting on PPC is near real-time, which means you can go in at any point and see exactly how your campaigns are performing. By setting up the right parameters, you can measure how many times your ad has been seen, how many times someone has clicked on it, and how many time sit led to a successful result on your website. One important measurement is the Click Through Rate (CTR). This is calculated by taking the number of people that saw your advertisement versus the number of people that took action by clicking on your ad. Conversion Rates (CR) allows you to track what the visitor does once they click on your ad. Do they take the action you desire – calling, filling out a form, buying a product? Flexibility To Test And Pivot Since you can see the results immediately, it makes it easier to optimize your campaigns by analyzing what keywords and strategies lead to the biggest returns. You can test multiple versions of your ads and see which performs better. By constantly analyzing the results, you can eliminate spend on keywords and continue refining ad copy for the best results. This optimizes your campaign for the best results and most effective spend. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) allows for similar strategies. By tracking which campaigns have the best conversion rate (CR), you can optimize the ad serving to show the ads that lead to conversions. PPC Automation While you can take the “set it and forget it” approach to your PPC in 2018, you’ll still want to monitor the results. Automation allows you to test all sorts of variables and let the software automatically optimize the campaign – serving the best performing ads. Setting down automated rules at the beginning of the campaign allows you to focus on the important aspects and avoid drowning in the deluge of data from Google AdWords. Still, you’ll want someone who knows what they are doing to regularly analyze the data and manually attack the optimization strategies… for now. PPC expert Melissa Mackey predicts that when it comes to PPC in 2017, the utilization of Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will skyrocket, leading to even better results through automation – if you have experts who know how to maximize it. Complete Budget Control PPC campaigns give you complete control over the budgeting process. You can set your maximum bids and let the auction process take care of bidding for you. You can set maximum spend limits, setting daily or monthly budgets, and even choose how to distribute the spend: Do you want it as fast as possible, or do you want it spread evenly throughout the period? The best part is that you make changes to your budget at virtually anytime, or even pause your campaign. Mobile Ad Features There’s no question that mobile is driving web traffic these days. 80% of internet users own a smartphone, according to Smart Insights. More than half of all search engine traffic comes from a mobile device (57% according to RetailDive). PPC allows for mobile optimization through responsive design ads that recognize the device searchers are using and adjusting ad sizes and content to provide the maximum experience based on the specific device. You can also adjust your bidding to adjust for mobile. One of the most significant advances in PPC in 2018 includes Call to Click. Searchers will be able to click on your phone number in your search ad and, since they’ve likely already got a mobile phone in their hands, dial the number without having to type it in. Achieve Brand Recognition An important part of any successful marketing campaign is brand recognition. Often people don’t know the name of a business until they are in the market for their services. Ideally, you want to be a name they know and trust before they start searching. In the days of the yellow pages, the branding game was to make sure your name had Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) so that when they opened the book to look for a service provider, they recognized your name. I’ll bet you never thought about foundation repair, for example, until you needed one. If you looked at the list and recognized any name, you’re more likely to pick up the phone and call. PPC can help establish brand awareness. Instead of paying for impression-based advertising (the more people that view your ad, the more it costs you), you can advertise using PPC or CPC (cost-per-click). Your ads will be served to more people, and get greater visibility, but you’ll only by charged when someone that clicks on your ad – someone interested in your product or service. Before You Start Your First (Or Next) PPC Campaign Before you dive into PPC for the first time, or the next time, you will want to take a moment and make sure you have done the research you need to launch an effective campaign. Define Your Results The first step is to make sure you know what results you want from your PPC campaign. Is it to generate phone calls, fill out a information form, convert to an online sale, or something else? Once you’ve defined the result, you need to make sure all the elements you need are in order. If you want someone to fill out a contact form, you need to make sure you have designed a landing page with a great Call to Action that will get them to fill out the form. If you are looking to sell a specific product, you want to make sure when they click they will go right to the product page and have an easy way to complete the sales. Competitive Analysis There’s a pretty good chance your competitors are using PPC advertising in your marketplace. The easiest way to tell is to search for keywords you think someone in the need for your goods or services would use and see who pops up. Try various keywords and phrases and take notes. While this will give you a quick idea of who is using PPC, you’ll want to do a deep dive into this area by conducting a gap analysis, which involved comparing your company’s digital assets along with the competitive landscape of your competitors. Ignoring PPC is, in effect, conceding important advertising and marketing space to your competitors. Think about this: when people go on-line to search for goods and services in your industry, they are likely great prospects for you or your competitors. If you’re in the HVAC heating and cooling business and someone searches for air conditioner repair in your area, it’s a safe bet they have a problem and need a solution. Ignoring PPC means your competitor may get the first call instead of you. Keyword Research Choosing the right keywords is one of the most critical decisions you will make in crafting an effective campaign for PPC in 2018. It can be time consuming, but choosing the wrong keywords can lead to an expensive mistake. Get started by thinking about the reasons people come to your business. List the specific goods and services that you provide. Pay attention to the Return on Investment (ROI) of the products or services and decide which things you want to highlight. After all, you can’t afford to spend money advertising everything you have. It’s not always obvious. It’s important to think about what leads to your most profitable sales. For example, if you’re a plumber, you know that most people don’t often call up and ask for a replacement water heater. They say their hot water isn’t working. That is more likely the gateway for you to get in the door with a potential customer. Once you’re there, you have the opportunity to make a repair and gain a customer, sell maintenance agreements, or upsell to a replacement system. You’ll also likely get the first call when they realize they do want an upgrade. If you had chosen keywords revolving only around replacement water heaters, you would have missed the biggest source of leads for your business. Think about how people search for these items and what they typically look for. You can get a good idea by using the free Google Adwords Keyword Planner. Let’s say you’re a dentist. Type Dentist into the search bar and Google will generate more than 575 keywords. It will show you how many searches each keyword gets and give you an idea of how much it costs to bid for each keyword along with what it typically takes to rank at the top. In our dentist example, “find dentist office near me” could cost between $7.59 and $14.14. “Dentistry for kids” shows a range between $4.03 and $12. “Tootache” comes in between 11 cents and $6 bucks. As you can see, each keyword might attract a different type of customer. Negative Keywords It’s also important to know what keywords you don’t want to buy. Traffic to your website or business for products you don’t sell is a waste of your time and the customers, not to mention costing you money for the click you don’t want. If you are a tax preparer that works with high wage earners, you probably don’t want to serve an ad for “Free Online Tax Service,” but you might if you bought the keyword “Tax Service” and did not add in negative keywords. Negative keywords are one of the most underutilized strategies when it comes to PPC in 2018, but one of the most important in avoiding wasted spending. FAQ My competitors are not doing any PPC advertising. Does that mean I don’t need to do it? That’s great news your competitors aren’t being aggressive in PPC! The fewer competitors in the space means you can bid less and still get great placement. It sounds like a great opportunity to get top of page results at a lower cost point. What about Voice Search? Voice search is broken down into two categories right now and they depend on how voice search is used. Using Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant via your smartphone will still lead you to PPC and search results on your screen. A more recent development is voice search through devices like Amazon Echo (69% market share), Google Home (25% market share), and Apple’s entry into the field. You may need to adjust your keywords to think about how people naturally phrase things as opposed to type them in. When it comes to PPC in 2018, what else impacts my PPC campaign rankings besides my bid? When it comes to PPC in 2018, it’s not just about how much you’re willing to pay. Google, for example, will penalize sites that aren’t mobile-optimized. Slow load speeds for your website will hurt both your ranking for organic and paid search campaigns. Google wants the searcher to have the best possible experience and get the best search result to keep them coming back for more. Anytime you do anything that provides a less-than-optimal performance will negatively impact your business. Quality Scores, derived from your website, will impact your organic and paid search. That’s why the best solution is to have SEO and PPC work together. Is PPC just Google? While Google dominates the marketplace, there are other competitors. Google accounts for 87% of all searches, according to Statistica. Microsoft’s Bing has a 5.8% share of the search market and Yahoo has about 3%. Nobody else rises to the 3 percent threshold. The trend for PPC in 2018 will include increased competition for search engines from Amazon and Facebook. What about Amazon, Facebook Marketplace, and Google Shopping? Great question! PPC is not just Google. A study by Kenshoo showed that 85% of searchers started their product search on Google. However, it's not just Google where people turn for product information. 72% visitAmazon and 27% visit Facebook to do product research. A growing number of people are now starting their searches for products directly on Amazon. When someone’s checking the price of a product on Amazon, would you want your ad to show up? Can I do it PPC in 2018 myself? You can, but it’s hard to do well. Doing poorly wastes money and opportunity. One recent study put the wasted PPC ad spend at 25%. It may really be a lot more than that. That doesn't include all the sales you miss.