What is paid advertising?
How does paid advertising work?
And most importantly, how can SEO MCR (a PPC Agency Manchester) make paid advertising work for you?
In this article we are going to go back to basics on PPC, including budgets, bids, targeting and conversions.
What is paid advertising?
Paid advertising, or PPC, or pay per click – whatever you want to call it – is an advertising model that allows businesses to place adverts on an advert platform and pay the host of that advert platform whenever their advert is clicked.
The goal behind placing a paid advert on a platform like this is to lead the person who clicks on it to your website, where they will complete an action that is valuable to you – such as purchasing your product.
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, are popular paid advert platforms as they offer you the opportunity to display an ad that is relevant to what people are searching for. After all, Google currently deals with 3.5 billion searches a day (on average) so that is a lot of people you can potentially get your business in front of.
How does paid advertising work?
Every time there is an advert spot on a search engine results page (SERP) then an auction takes place for the keyword involved instantly.
Our job as a PPC manchester agency is to help your advert to appear in the top position through a combination of the quality of the advert and the bid amount.
These advert auctions are what keeps paid advertising going, and they begin whenever someone searches for something on a search engine.
If there are advertisers, like yourself, who are interested in showing adverts that are relevant to what a user is searching for, then an auction is triggered based on keywords that you have bid on.
If your ad “wins” the auction then you will appear first on the search engine results page.
At SEO MCR, if we are running a PPC campaign for you, we set up an account in Google Ads and then use this to tell Google where and when we would like these ads to appear.
Why are keywords important?
Keywords lie at the heart of paid advertising, as they help to connect us with the users who are searching for your products or services.
“Queries” are the words that people type into the search engine to find results, whereas “keywords” are the words that SEO MCR use to target those people by matching their search query as closely as we can.
We can use various types of keyword match types in Google Ads which allow us to match users search queries with more or less precision. So, for example, we can choose to match queries exactly, or to allow for variations such as spelling mistakes and different word order and so on.
We can also use so called “negative keywords” to help us to avoid irrelevant traffic being sent to your website.
What are paid search adverts
Along with considering the keywords we are targeting very carefully we also need to think about the actual adverts themselves.
Paid search adverts typically contain a headline, a descriptive line or two, and a URL. They are usually grouped together by the set of keywords they are targeting and so are organised by common themes.
The paid search advert is what the user will see if we win the auction, so it is essential that we get this right. This is why we typically try to test different versions of advert copy to see which one we think is going to perform best.
The other option that we have is to use ad extensions, such as call extensions or sitelink extensions to help us to increase the visibility of adverts by communicating more information to searchers and therefore making the advert more engaging.
What are bids and budgets
One of the most important parts of a paid search campaign is making a decision on how much you are willing to spend on a specific keyword.
Your budget will be set at a campaign level, and bids are usually set at the keyword or ad group level.
Budgets can be exceeded on a daily basis, but will be capped so that you do not overspend per month. Budgets, should therefore be set according to our overall account strategy, whereas we will use bids to help us to more precisely control spend.
How do search engines determine ad rank?
Ad rank is determined by more than just having the highest bid in the auction. Each search engine has their own individual set of factors that they take into account to determine which ad they think should be in the most valuable spot at the top of the SERPs.
If we look at Google, for example, they have said in the past that they look at:
- Ad relevance and quality
- Bid amount
- Context of the search – such as time of day and the device the searcher is searching on
This is just a brief introduction to paid advertising, and we will cover it in more detail over the coming months. However, if you want the best pay-per-click manchester agency to run your paid advertising campaigns for you, then please contact the team at SEO MCR.
