PPC is the quickest and easy way to generate some income in any business fastly. The best PPC platforms an advertiser should be familiar with are discussed in this article.
What is the best way to run PPC for local businesses?
Pay-per-click, PPC, is a paid advertising model, which allows the advertiser to only pay when people interact with their ad through impressions or clicks.
Pay Per Click advertising can do a lot for your business, but only when it is used strategically and smartly. You should be well aware and be specific about your objectives before making an ads account and starting with the process of PPC advertising. Your objectives can be:
- Increasing site traffic
- Improving brand awareness and reach
- Generating more sales or leads
It is perfectly fine if you have more than one objective, as you’ll have to run different campaigns for different objectives.
Promoting products and services while trying to compete with mega-giants like Amazon and Walmart often seems an unachievable task for small business owners. But with many changes in the industry and dynamics of PPC platforms, now they have many opportunities to advertise. Bigger brands still have advantages when it comes to PPC, but even with a small budget, small businesses can get impressions and clicks on search engines with a planned account structure and the right targeting options.
If we talk about the most popular advertising platforms, they are effective because of the high traffic and easy-to-use interface. But if you have a very small budget you can also consider a not-so-popular advertising platform. You should also check the target audience and the availability of keyword search terms that are important for you.
Target the right audience: You need to show your ads to the specific group of people who have the demographics, interests, and buying patron you may want to target. Google and other search engines compile the audiences based on their search history data, interest groups they are part of, and demographics. So if you want your ads to be clicked by the right person, you’ll have to optimize the bidding and targeting of your audience for different campaigns based on the data you have of your customers.
Always have this checklist ready before choosing the target audience:
-Analyze the data of your customers, you can check your website analytics or any other forms/platform you use to keep a record.
-Create a summary of the demographics from the data available to you.
-Implement and optimize your campaigns according to the data you extracted.
Choose the right keywords: Keywords are the most important part of any PPC campaign. If anybody is looking for something online, they use a term and if you are using that term as a keyword, your ad will appear in the top search results.
Following are the different ways you can follow for proper keyword research:
-Brainstorm a list of topics related to your business
-Use any of these free tools to find keywords relevant to your product/services
Or you can get started with free trials of these amazing paid tools
PPC PLATFORMS
Google Ads
Google AdWords which is now known as Google ads, provide you with opportunities to aim your ads toward your target audience for your online advertising campaign. Google ads can help you in making a huge difference in how you are ranking on specific keywords in relevant search results. When it comes to web searches most of the small businesses fight to be noticed. Keyword ranking is a huge battle and because of its unpredictable nature, analytics fluctuate daily. Google processes over 40,000 search query every second and it gives you a lot of opportunities to target keywords most intended to bring you traffic.
Follow this quick guide to set up your first google ads account. After setting up the account you’ll have to set up your first campaign, billing and you’re ready to advertise.
Bing Ads
As Google ads are being used by many market giants, it is hard to compete if you have a very low budget. One of the main reasons for using Bing ads over Google ads is low CPC for larger audiences compared to Google ads. As Bing is owned by Microsoft, it offers three search engines: Bing, AOL, and Yahoo. If we look at the statistics of late 2020 for U.S. traffic: Among the monthly Bing searches, 71% of users are 35 or older and 55% of users make more than $75,000 annually.
So if you run a small business that markets to an older, more wealthy audience Bing is a very important space to the market. Bing also offers businesses a few more advantages:
- Less Competition
- It’s Cheaper
- More Demographic options
- It’s Growing
Follow this tutorial to create your bing ads account today and secure your place in the 13.7 billion searches bings gets each month.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are also a very popular platform for paid ads. It has slightly different targeting options that’s why it is more commonly used as CPM than CPC. Facebook has different options to target users based on their location, behaviors, demographics, and interests. You can also use Facebook ads to advertise on Instagram.
How to Get Started with PPC Advertising
As you are well aware of the importance of PPC advertising and different platforms now. Let’s have a snapshot of the different steps required to start the process.
- Set the parameters around clicks, cost per click, conversion rate, etc.
- Define goals as discussed above.
- Choose the campaign type between search ads, social, shopping, remarketing, and display ads. Search ads are the most common type. You’ll have to think about your requirement and choose which campaign type you want to start with. Get ready with the ad copy and targeting data you require to set up the first campaign.
- Perform Keyword research. There are many free tools available like Google Keyword Planner. ( Discussed in detail above)
- Set up your google analytics account and tracking of different parameters.
