Paying only for the clicks your ads receive — Pay Per Click — is a way for companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) and Alphabet (owner of Google) to secure billions of dollars in revenue every year, while offering companies like yours the chance to grab a slice of that extremely profitable pie.
With the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of people in just a few hours, paid media is the best tool for selling on the Internet.
The almost unlimited power to get your products or services in front of the right audience — the ones that buy — would be restricted to multi-million dollar businesses if advertisements were charged only by the number of views instead of by another factor: clicks!
With such a democratic positioning regarding which companies (or individuals) can run advertisements on the Internet, what separates a successful campaign from a waste of resources is the Digital Marketing strategy!
And when I talk about strategy, I’m not just talking about ensuring that your campaigns achieve the highest possible return on advertising investment (ROAS).
I’m talking about understanding the different aspects of your audience ‘s behavior by interpreting the numbers that define the success of your ads — and how to use them to optimize your reach and conversion as a result!
That’s why here I will teach you everything about Pay Per Click:
- What is PPC;
- How to make an unbeatable Pay Per Click strategy;
- The relationship between PPC, SEO and SEM;
- And how to make Pay Per Click work for you!
No text on the Internet is as easy (or as effective) as this one — in which my more than 10 years as CEO of the largest Digital Marketing agency in Shahzadpur will guarantee your success with paid media on the Internet!
My name is Gaurav Rajput and, at Enjoy Minder, this is just your first step towards success — don’t step out of line!
What is PPC?
PPC is an abbreviation for Pay Per Click, and defines the advertising model based on the clicks that a paid media campaign receives when displayed on the Internet.
Since an advertisement can be seen by thousands of people in just a few seconds (and sometimes without discriminating against those who are not interested in your products or services), charging for viewing them — the “impressions” — could be too expensive for many companies to run advertising campaigns on the Internet!
Fewer advertisers would mean a much smaller potential for recurring revenue for brands like Google or Instagram, which profit from the consistency of paid media broadcast with the aim of popularizing:
- Products;
- Services;
- Platforms;
- Or the presence of a company.
By expanding the advertising potential for companies of all sizes to impact ideal audiences (and at surprisingly low prices), paid media becomes an accessible and indispensable tool for making the most varied objectives of Digital Marketing strategies a reality!
Among such objectives, the most common and effective involve:
- Enhance the reach of an offer with proven ROI (Return on Investment);
- Accelerated propagation of rich materials with the aim of strengthening organic traffic ;
- Familiarizing new audiences with the brand through persistent advertising;
- Capture of demographic and behavioral information about the ideal audience (with enormous purchasing potential) to run future advertising campaigns with higher conversion rates;
- And convincing new consumer profiles through a Remarketing strategy with the aim of affirming the business’s authority in the niche in which it operates.
Nothing stops your company from using paid media at different times than those listed above, but one way or another you will need to keep an eye on a fundamental rate for the success of this endeavor: Pay Per Click!
How does Pay Per Click work?
In addition to being a billing method for displaying ads on the Internet, PPC also works as a metric within the ads themselves to determine their effectiveness in convincing a person to click!
In the early stages of creating your campaign (which is your set of ads with a specific theme and audience), you’ll need to research keywords to ensure that only the right people will find them.
When you create your ad using these researched keywords, it will be part of an auction the moment someone in your audience searches for those keywords.
This auction is called “bidding”: how much you are willing to pay for someone to click on your ad for each keyword used!
If your bid is higher than the maximum bid set by your competitors, you will secure the click — and only then will you pay for it. Otherwise, your ad will be given way to one of your competitors (the one willing to pay more) who will be shown to receive the potential click.
But your maximum bid limit isn’t the only factor that determines whether algorithms show (or hide) your ads to your audience.
Among the other elements (many of them kept secret by the platforms) that consider one advertisement more relevant to be shown than another, the quality of your material counts much more!
Quality isn’t just about the sharpness of an image, the spelling of the Portuguese language, or whether your video was recorded in 1080p or 4K. Quality is about how much the information contained in the ad is:
Useful;
Persuasive;
And honest.
If the ad is unnecessarily controversial, if it is too banal or if it tries to deceive the public just to get a click, the algorithms that decide which bids will be the winners may decide to give priority to other companies that are better aligned with this quality policy!
Either way, if your goal is to create a Digital Marketing strategy aimed at optimizing your Pay Per Click — and actually selling —, you want each click to come as close as possible to converting a person into a lead or buyer.
Creating low-quality ads, even when they are capable of capturing an action from the audience (the click), ends up not being good for the health of your campaign — since your ROAS suffers significantly, making it obvious that your brand is moving backwards instead of forwards!
Below, you will understand in detail the elements of a truly effective PPC strategy!
How to make a Pay Per Click strategy
If it’s not clear yet, setting up a Pay Per Click strategy capable of convincing the public to click on your ad has much more to do with quality and precision than with generalization (or investing tons of money)!
Especially when compared to more traditional advertising methods, PPC is a super effective form of Internet Marketing precisely because it allows you to:
- Target your campaigns to perfect audiences;
- Control all your advertising expenses;
- And easily measure the return on your investments.
All of this is done in just a few clicks, under a controlled budget, and using practical data about your audience instead of guesswork — which can be costly!
I’ll go into detail about each of these ingredients below, but keep one thing in mind: it all starts with choosing your keywords!
Search and select keywords
I often emphasize something here on the Enjoy Minder blog — and it is: know your audience!
If your business already has a website with accumulated metrics, social media profiles, or if your company already has at least a small group of customers, you can start gathering the most important data about these people to identify your ideal audience in the infinite ocean of the Internet!
By identifying your audience’s tastes and behaviors, you can expand your reach by thinking about potential customer profiles that are similar to your current buyers or followers.
This projection will give you clues on which keywords to use to build your PPC strategies!
Keywords are single words or a set of terms (a short phrase) that your audience types into social media or search engines to find:
- Answers to questions;
- Solutions to problems;
- And facilitators to make wishes a reality.
Because they play such a fundamental role in the awareness journey of anyone browsing the Internet, keywords play a fundamental role in PPC as well: the platforms that serve ads use keywords to identify the relevance of your ad to your ideal audience!
When people type in the terms you prioritize to have your ads displayed, that auction process will kick in to show (or not show) your content to those you’d like to impact!
It is worth noting that, in addition to knowing the keywords that are most appropriate for your ideal audience (those that your audience probably uses to find the solutions that your company offers on the Internet), it would also be important to know the “negative” terms.
Negative keywords are those you choose to prevent your ads from being shown in searches on search engines or social networks that involve such terms.
Let’s say you created an ad set using the keyword “dog breeds.” I would recommend that you use any phrases that use the word “breed” outside of a canine context as negative keywords, such as “people breeds” or “canary breeds.”
In addition to saving your campaign from unnecessary clicks (generated by people who are curious about your ads but have zero interest in buying your dog products), it would also save your brand from getting involved in sensitive or politically charged research (in discussions about inequality, for example).
It’s just another way to ensure that you only show your ads to people who are most likely to click on them and convert, ignoring everyone else!
Choose the platforms
Knowing your audience is extremely important because the keywords they use can vary depending on the platform they are on.
Since auto-suggestions appeared on websites like Google or apps like Instagram, the platforms themselves have started to complete or even reformulate the terms that their audience tries to write in the search bar!
Context is one of the biggest components in the success of a Pay Per Click strategy — or any quality Digital Marketing campaign — and the platform on which your ads will be displayed makes all the difference in the results you hope to achieve.
Are you going to display a lot of images or videos in your ads to reach an audience that relies more on visuals to get answers from the Internet? Instagram and Pinterest could be good solutions for you.
Is your audience more literal and prefers long-form text results and product reviews? Perhaps displaying your ads in Google results or on a highly opinionated platform like X (formerly Twitter) would be more worthwhile.
So make sure you choose the platforms that best suit the profile you would like to reach, adapt your keywords to them and go for it!
Some of the most popular platforms you already know:
- Google Ads;
- Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads);
- Instagram Ads (which belongs to Meta);
- Twitter Ads;
- Pinterest Ads;
- And many others!
The more generalized you are, the less likely you are to extract from your Pay Per Click the conversions your brand needs to grow and profit — so create different strategies for different types of audiences and apply one plan at a time!
Configure the campaign
Once you have defined the “theme” (keywords) and “location” (platforms) on which you will display your ads on the Internet, it will be time to put together the “set of contents” for your campaign:
- The texts of the advertisements;
- The images or videos that will be used;
- The broadcast schedule;
- And, most special of all, the budget.
Only with this information defined and ready will you move on to configuring the ads themselves!
In Digital Marketing vocabulary, an ad (a segmented display model of your offer to an audience, in a specific format and media type) is part of a campaign (a set of ads).
Keywords can be applied to an entire campaign or to specific ads, and results will vary depending on your Pay per Click strategy!
Just as powerful as choosing your keywords at campaign or ad level is audience targeting : one or more highly segregated groups within your general audience (grouped by common tastes, behaviors and keywords) to whom you will (or will not) display specific ads or campaigns!
Targeting the right audience is what will ensure that every click you pay for in your PPC strategy actually comes close to a real profit: a conversion! Otherwise, you will be paying for clicks from uninterested people who will not do business with your brand, resulting in a loss!
The budget is set at the campaign level (for an ad group) and can be limited to a total or daily amount during the advertising activity schedule:
- If daily, the platforms will optimize spending so that it impacts your targeted audience at the best times for conversions, but automatically pausing after reaching the spending limit for the day;
- If total, the platforms will try to reach the highest number of quality people, but running all day, stopping only when the campaign reaches the full limit set by you.
This is one of the biggest benefits of a well-executed Pay Per Click strategy compared to traditional advertising methods: the charges are 100% transparent and the budget for your ads always fits your budget!
This is why monitoring campaigns is so important.
Analyze and monitor!
You need to keep an eye on the results of whatever your Digital Marketing strategy is — and Pay Per Click is no different!
Analyzing and monitoring the metrics that indicate your campaign’s performance is essential to keeping your ads healthy (and your returns high), because identifying low numbers allows you to cut or optimize your offers before they consume your budget.
The opposite is also true because, by knowing which campaigns are getting the best results, it becomes possible to inject even more resources into them to expand the reach and running time to achieve all of your brand’s financial goals!
The metrics that tend to make the biggest difference in the performance of your PPC strategies are:
- CTR , which stands for Click-Through Rate, indicates the average number of people who click on your ads after seeing them (a great indicator of relevance and persuasiveness in the quality of your content — and how much you will pay for it);
- And the aforementioned ROAS, which indicates whether your campaign spending can be justified by the amount of profit generated by it.
Depending on the results of these metrics, you can modify elements of your ads and campaigns, such as:
- Keywords, to ensure that your advertisements are being displayed to the most relevant audience for your Pay Per Click strategy;
- Maximum bid limits, to test optimized ads, prevent unnecessary spending and lower priority keywords, or even to expand the reach of better performing campaigns;
- The ads themselves, which may need A/B testing to find out which text, image or video is capable of improving performance in capturing the audience’s attention (and action);
- And segment audiences even further, trying to make each advertisement increasingly assertive and segregated (even if you need to create several campaigns for different groups of people within your general audience).
Remember that context is very important for Pay Per Click strategies — and interpreting metrics taking this detail into consideration can turn the game of paid media in favor of your business!
A low CTR, for example, could mean that your ads are not very relevant to the audience you’ve targeted or the keywords you’ve used, or it could mean that your audience and keywords are correct, but your copy isn’t very persuasive enough to make someone click on your offer.
Your interpretation of what CTR means in a case like this will determine your success in increasing this metric — and, when in doubt, test your beliefs in smaller campaigns with the intention of collecting reliable data about your audience’s behavior!
Paying only for the click makes this mission much easier!
The relationship between PPC, SEO and SEM
Did you see that planning is essential to make your investments in time, productivity and money worthwhile?
But more than just boosting the performance of your paid media ads, Pay Per Click optimization is essential for a truly functional SEM strategy!
I have already published a very complete text about this here on the Enjoy Minder blog, but, to quickly recap, SEM is the acronym in English for Search Engine Marketing or Marketing for Search Engines:
A plan specifically designed to promote a business, service or product (and make even more profit) through search engines — and which, with the help of PPC, gives you much more control over:
- Segmenting your ideal audience (which is the one that buys);
- Measuring your initiatives against your results;
- The flexibility to invest, pause, modify and optimize the means to increase your conversions;
- And its ability to extract immediate results from ads on search engines and social networks.
Because the objective of Pay Per Click is exactly that: to generate immediate traffic!
Even when your goals involve generating organic traffic (the flow of people who come to your website without you having to pay for advertising), implementing an SEM strategy to increase your business’s conversion rate will always involve:
- SEO, to optimize your content and ensure that your website is found in the first results of organic searches;
- And PPC, to boost your visibility and expand your brand’s presence on other websites, platforms, and even in search engine results.
When SEO and PPC techniques come together under an SEM plan, together they can bring fantastic, effective and indisputably comprehensive results to meet your Digital Marketing goals!
After all, what Marketing does is help your business sell more (and consistently) while building the prestige that fuels the public’s desire for your brand and the products, services or ideas it offers!
When it comes to the Internet, everything is connected — and more than just literally so!
Make PPC work for you!
In this Pay Per Click text, I have gathered everything you need to learn to increase your conversions on the Internet by understanding:
- What PPC is the acronym for Pay Per Click;
- That “Pay Per Click” is a type of paid media;
- That Pay Per Click has huge advantages;
- And that PPC and SEO need to be part of an exemplary SEM strategy.
More importantly, it is important to understand that any investment in this technique will always pay off with increasingly greater financial returns and a unique understanding of your audience through data extracted from people in the real world!
Follow the recommendations and make PPC work for you by expanding your ROI instead of wasting your resources!
Advertising has never been so democratic and your chances of success are here: on the other side of the screen!
Especially if you decide to count on Enjoy Minder as your PPC partner!
To find out where to start with your strategy, complete our free Digital Marketing diagnosis and discover the full potential that your business can achieve on the Internet!
It’s a one-way street to the top!
Are you going to stay down there or are you going to come up with us?
