Q1. what is PPC marketing?
PPC stands for pay-per-click which is a way of internet marketing where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad gets clicked on. You can often find a PPC advert in search engines but you can also get PPC ads on popular social media platforms.
Q2. what is the hardest thing about starting PPC?
There are a handful of difficulties in starting PPC and a dozen handfuls of difficulties in being good at PPC marketing. Firstly, a lot of work goes into creating a winning PPC campaign. Researching and picking the best keywords to target. Then you have to organise the keywords into campaigns and ad groups. You need to set up landing pages that are optimised for conversions and do your best to dodge click fraud. This is when someone, sometimes a bot, clicks your ad with no intention of converting just to drain your advertising budget. On top of all of that, there’s a lot to learn if you want to achieve PPC success and it can be tricky but once you get it right it’s worth it and can deliver the success you’re looking for.
Q3. is PPC right for our business?
When done well PPC is a powerful marketing tool but if it’s executed badly you’re effectively just throwing money away. Whether it is the right option for your company is hugely down to your business objectives.
Brand Awareness: PPC has many advantages. Regardless of whether your ad performs from an ROI point of view if it has impressions people have become aware of your brand.
Increase Revenue: PPC can be effective, you need a good quality website optimised for sales/conversions alongside a good PPC campaign set up.
There are separate avenues that each advertiser can go down depending on the nature of the business. For example, the Google Shopping Network is best for retail companies because you can include images with ad text. If you offer services over products then an Expanded Text Ad will work.
Q4. how do you adapt to changes in PPC?
Working in any aspect of a digital industry comes with changes. Updates to systems, algorithms, formats, constant updates in every field. All you can do to adapt to it is to stay on top of the changes in your field and do your best.
Q5. what is a quality score?
A quality score is the way that Google judges the quality of your ads in correlation to your keywords and landing pages. You need a higher quality score (marked out of ten) because it will lead to lower cost per clicks and better ad positioning.
Q6. how can i improve my quality score?
There are three factors that determine your Quality Score which are the expected click-through-rate, the relevance of your ad & the landing page experience. There are a few initial steps you can take to improve your Quality Score. Make sure your ad text is more relevant in regards to your keywords and landing page. You can also improve the quality of the landing page & the user experience on the page. You could also try adding negative keywords so you aren’t showing for search terms that are irrelevant to both you and the user.
Q7. what are match types?
The match types available to use on your ads are; broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match and exact match. All coming with their own advantages and disadvantages. They‘re effectively the way Google determines who the ads should show to based on which keyword was triggered.
Broad Match - this is the standard keyword match type and doesn’t need a symbol to signify its match type. A broad match keyword will show for misspellings, synonyms, related searches and relevant variations.
Broad Match Modifier - this is signified with a plus in front of each keyword +like +this. This will show the keywords in any order and closer variations of the keyword.
Phrase Match - this is signified in quotation marks “like this”. Shows for phrases and close variations of that phrase.
Exact Match - signified with square brackets [like this]. Shows for an exact term and close variations of that exact term.
You can also add keywords as negatives. This sets it so your ad doesn’t trigger on certain undesirable words. Often if you’re running broad match and exact match alongside each other you’d make the exact match keywords negative in the broad match campaign so you aren’t bidding against yourself.
Q8. what is a Google auction?
This is the process of each Google search which determines which ads will appear for that specific search and which order the ads will show, or if any will show at all. The auction decides if the ad is eligible to show for the search and then it will determine what position of the results page it will appear.
Q9. how can you improve conversion rates?
Before you start with this, it’s best to make sure your conversion tracking is properly set up. It can be difficult to perform well in terms of conversions, especially when you’re just starting, however, what you need to do is test endlessly. Make sure your ads are relevant to your keywords and landing pages. Use negative keywords to make sure you aren’t showing up where you don’t need to.
Competitor analysis is important for your PPC activity and there are so many tools available to help you do a good job at it. In the Google Ads interface, you can review the Auction Insights to determine what competitors are competing against you for the same keywords.
This just gives you an idea of if your competition is more aggressive in their bids or budgets. In Auction Insights, you see the overlap rate between you and your competitor, and then if you should improve your budget, Quality Score, or bids. The overlap rate shows how often you ad the competitor show in the same auction search results. There’s also a bunch of third-party tools that you can look at using once you get going.
