The Ultimate Guide to PPC Marketing

How does PPC advertising work?

PPC advertising looks different from platform to platform, but in general, the process is as follows:

Choose your campaign type based on your objective.

. Refine your settings and targeting (audiences, devices, locations, schedule, etc.).

Provide your budget and bidding strategy.

Input your destination URL (landing page).

Build your ad.

How PPC works in Google Ads

When advertisers create an ad, they choose a set of keywords to target with that ad and place a bid on each keyword. So if you bid on the keyword “pet adoption,” you are telling Google you want your ad to appear for searches that match or are related to pet adoption (more on keyword match types here).

Google uses a set of formulas and an auction-style process to decide which ads get to appear for any one search. If your ad is entered into the auction, it will first give you a Quality Score from one to 10 based on your ad’s relevance to the keyword, your expected click-through rate, and landing page quality.

It will then multiply your Quality Score by your maximum bid (the most you’re willing to pay for a click on that ad) to determine your Ad Rank. The ads with the highest Ad Rank scores are the ones that show.

How to do effective PPC keyword research

Keyword research for PPC can be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also incredibly important. Your entire PPC campaign is built around keywords, and the most successful Google Ads advertisers continuously grow and refine their PPC keyword list. If you only do keyword research once, when you create your first campaign, you are probably missing out on hundreds of thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost, and highly relevant keywords that could be driving traffic to your site.

Managing your PPC campaigns

Once you’ve created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the best predictors of account success. You should be continuously analyzing the performance of your account and making the following adjustments to optimize your campaigns:

1. Continuously add PPC keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
2. Add negative keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
3. Review costly PPC keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
4. Refine landing pages: Modify the content and CTAs of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Don’t send all your traffic to the same page.
5. Split ad groups: Improve click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller, more relevant ad groups, which help you create more targeted ad text and landing pages. More on account structure here.

Get started with PPC

Ready to get started with PPC? Learn how to set up a Google Ads account here.

If you’ve already got a Google Ads account, we suggest you use our Free Google Ads Performance Grader to help you zero in on areas of improvement. In 60 seconds or less, you’ll receive a customized report grading your account performance in 9 key areas, including click-through rate, Quality Score and account activity.

Example:

Search engine advertising, also known as search engine marketing (SEM), allows you to show ads to users based on the keywords entered in the search bar (for example, "car-sharing in London"). The main search engines, such as Google and Bing, use a model based on PPC through auction.