Being found in search is possibly the most important thing you can do for a business after having a good website.
However, there is so much more to search than simply optimising your site and products to appear naturally in Google results. Sometimes, an injection of funded search can send your products and service skyrocketing into people’s awareness – and change your brand’s public perception in the process. This is known as Pay Per Click advertising – often commonly referred to as PPC.
Following on from our recent post detailing six top PPC tips and tricks, here we’ll go into more detail by looking at why and how you should run your PPC effectively, along with the times it’s most beneficial to do so.
Why should you use PPC?
For starters, Google gives you more data with a PPC campaign than it does when you’re doing ‘organic’ (i.e. not paid-for) search. So, in terms of data, it means you can see more metrics that you can then apply to your organic SEO results.
However, one thing that can be a misnomer is the idea that PPC is less involved or complex than organic SEO. The truth is that while there are lots of wizards that help you set up the campaigns, practically everything that Google recommends you do you should actually do the reverse of! As mentioned in our top PPC tips and tricks post, nearly everything that Google suggests isn’t going to help you out; it’s just going to help you spend more money with Google.
When to use PPC
First and foremost, you should use PPC over organic SEO when you need to get results quickly. Organic SEO takes between three and six months to get results whereas PPC is more instantaneous.
PPC is also handy if you want to switch the findability of your results on and off. With organic SEO you can’t just stop it. With PPC you can, which makes it great for timed campaigns with a definitive start and end date. For example, for a hotel offering Valentine’s Day discounts on their rooms, it would make more sense to run a PPC campaign than taking 3-6 months to get it ranking through organic SEO, then the same to stop it only to start again!
Another example of where PPC is really good is when you have physical products you can sell via ecommerce. With PPC you can produce shopping ads, where images of your products will appear in the shopping results at the top of search.
Lastly, you might also want to use PPC when you’re intending to subsidise your organic SEO results. For example, even if you rank number one for every keyword you want to, you may choose to still run PPC campaigns on those too. That’s effective because while 70% of people may click on organic results, the other 30% click on paid.
This can be an especially good approach if you have different areas of your business and a limited budget. For instance, if you offer several different services and one of them needs more exposure, you can flip to investing in your PPC for that area. It’s a little like advertising on TV even if you already have a well-known successful product, because TV gives credibility with the brand. PPC ads appearing at the top of a Google search can function in much the same way.
How to effectively run your PPC campaigns
For the reason mentioned directly, it really does make sense to work with an expert in for PPC campaigns. Naturally, you might think that being an agency offering a PPC service, we would say that! However, our PPC experts are constantly reading up on PPC and it’s constantly changing. PPC is never a case of ‘just set it up and leave it.’ If you’re looking at how to use your adwords effectively, working with a specialist PPC agency is one of the smartest things you can do.
But let’s say you chose to give PPC a go yourself. First of all, there are several different types of PPC ads for you to choose from:
- Google search ads are where you type in a keyword and you bid for those keywords. An agency will know how to use your adwords effectively and get the most from your money. However, there are also three others to consider
- Display advertising is image-based ads showing on websites that sell space. You can hone down the relevancy of those allowing you to specify where you want those ads to appear, which makes them more interruption based
- Shopping ads are where you appear in Google Shopping
- Remarketing ads meanwhile let you say ‘show my ads to anybody whose visited my website in the last 30 days’ or ‘show ads to a person whose dropped out of the checkout process.
Whichever of these you intended to go with, you’d then have to:
- Do a keyword analysis to work out the best keywords using the keyword planning tool in Google Ads
- Study those keywords and bundle them together into various campaigns. For example, you may have a campaign for different services your business offers
- Decide on the negative keywords which allow you to filter for what you don’t want to be found for – making your campaign even more likely to be found by the right people. (More on that in our PPC tips and tricks piece here).
- You’d then create your campaigns and your ad groups. For instance, an accountancy firm might have a campaign called tax returns, and within that campaign they might have ad groups like ‘tax return accountant,’ ‘tax return services’, ‘tax return agency,’ and ‘tax return company.’ Then within those ad groups they would have the physical ads that people will see when they search. The accountancy firm would set up those ads connected to their keywords, and decide a budget. (Head here for a deeper dive on setting up a Google Ads campaign).
Again – and we cannot stress this enough – we would suggest do not simply rely on Google. Using your ad spend wisely online means doing your own research. Ultimately Google is a business that wants you to spend money. It’s highly likely that if you don’t know how to use your adwords effectively, Google is going to suggest things that waste you money.
It’s also very important that once you’ve done the setup, you don’t need to continually monitor and optimise your campaigns based on the data you get back from how successful they’re being. After all, google Ads are meant to bring in business while you go about your day job.
At the same time, however, being too passive and failing to check on your campaigns at all can result in wasted ad spend. It’s a fine line to walk – and with so much to learn and keep on top of, it’s no wonder many businesses turn to SEO experts to launch their PPC in the right way, or take their paid search strategy to the next level.
PPC for businesses of all kinds
At One2create we work with businesses big and small to do PPC the right way. Whether you’re launching a brand new service or product, or simply need to get your brand seen in Google Ads for the right keywords, we have a long track record of doing just that.
Get in touch with us to talk through how we can make PPC work for you.
