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PPC Advertising 101: What is it, How Does it Work, And How Does it Benefit Your Business?

What is PPC Advertising?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of online advertising where businesses pay to display ads on the Google search engine results page (SERP). When someone searches for one of your chosen search terms, Google shows them your ad, and you pay every time a user clicks on it. It’s sometimes referred to as the CPC (cost-per-click) model.
When done properly, paid advertising can generate revenue very quickly because it puts your business directly in front of customers who are actively searching for products and services that you offer.
An example of PPC advertising is a tree removal service running ads in their local area any time someone searches for “tree removal service in (location)”. Here’s a good screenshot of PPC in action:

What is PPC Advertising?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of online advertising where businesses pay to display ads on the Google search engine results page (SERP). When someone searches for one of your chosen search terms, Google shows them your ad, and you pay every time a user clicks on it. It’s sometimes referred to as the CPC (cost-per-click) model. When done properly, paid advertising can generate revenue very quickly because it puts your business directly in front of customers who are actively searching for products and services that you offer. An example of PPC advertising is a tree removal service running ads in their local area any time someone searches for “tree removal service in (location)”. Here’s a good screenshot of PPC in action:

How Does PPC Advertising Work?

In pay-per-click advertising, you choose specific search terms (“keywords”) related to your business that you wish to display ads for. Then, you create a “display ad” related to that search term. When people Google one of your chosen keywords, your ad will display at the top of the SERP if you outbid your competitors. Let me explain why… Google PPC works via an auction system. Businesses “bid” against each other to determine which ad will be displayed to users. When someone searches for a key term, businesses “bid” and the winner gets placed as the first result on the SERP. Don’t worry, you can set a maximum daily budget. Once you set your budget, you’ll no longer enter your bid at the auction once you reach that limit. That’s pretty much it in terms of PPC ads. You choose your key terms, create your ads, then begin bidding to get your items displayed in the search results. How is PPC Beneficial to Your Business

Pay-per-click advertising is beneficial to your business in three key ways:

Immediate traffic Highly targeted traffic High-intent traffic It all boils down to this: PPC lets you reach high-quality leads that are ready to buy from you as quickly as the same day. With other forms of online advertising like search engine optimization (SEO) or social media marketing, it could take months of consistent effort to start seeing ROI. It would be worth it, but that’s a long time. With paid ads, your business can jump straight to the top of the search results in as little as 24 hours and place ads directly in front of customers who are actively searching for products and services. That, and you can specify the types of customers you wish to advertise to right down to their age, demographic information, and location. If you want to reach potential customers immediately, running Google ads is the best form of advertising there is. Let’s cover some more of the benefits of paid Google ads before moving on to my process for building a high-ROI PPC campaign:

PPC Can Generate Immediate Results

Pay-per-click is the fastest and simplest way to get more visitors to your website immediately. With PPC, you’re essentially paying Google to jump the line to the top of the results. All you need to do is select your keywords, determine negative keywords (more on this further down), and create your ad copy. Then, you just set a budget and you’re ready to go. This whole process can take as little as a week.

You Can Tailor PPC Ads to Your Perfect Customer

Paid advertising gives you the ability to target your ideal customer right down to their buying intent, location, age, gender, and household income. I think the benefit is clear here. With PPC, you aren’t just placing an ad to a cold audience of random people. You can target your ideal customer, which drastically increases your ROI and reduces ad spend (due to not wasting money on uninterested leads). Google shares an example on its Google Ads Help support forum that demonstrates this ability perfectly. “Alberta” is a businesswoman who runs a blog for working moms. She uses Google Ads to tailor her advertisements directly to her most valuable target audience, increasing her conversion rates and improving ROI. She shows her ads only to women with kids ages 25-54. But that’s not all, she also zeros in further and targets women in the top 30% of US household incomes who are in the market for baby products. See the power here? This type of targeting is what gives Google Ads an 8:1 return on investment ratio on average, according to research published by Google on their Economicimpact.google platform. With PPC ads, you can target: Age Gender Household income Parental status Location Language Interests In-market audiences (people actively searching for products in your niche) Life events Remarketing (people who’ve interacted with you before but didn’t purchase)

PPC Ads Target Buy-Ready Customers

Another significant benefit of paid ads is that they target “warm” leads, or people who are looking to buy your products or services immediately. Remember the example above about the tree removal service? Someone who Googles “tree removal near me” is obviously looking for someone to cut that annoying tree in the front yard down immediately. That’s why conversion rates for Google Ads are usually well above that of other advertising methods.

It’s Easy to Improve Google Ad Performance

Google Ads allow you track a bunch of helpful metrics that you can analyze and optimize. This eventually leads to higher conversion rates and lower costs as time goes on. Google allows you to track metrics like ad performance, cost per click, conversion rate, and performance over time. My team and I are regularly analyzing our client’s data, running tests, and optimizing ad performance to improve conversions. This isn’t possible with most other forms of advertising.

PPC Ads Are Extremely Stable

Google Ads are a stable form of advertising that consistently generates income over time. And, if done properly, ad performance should only increase rather than decrease. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram are constantly changing their “organic” (unpaid) ranking algorithms, which means that websites or accounts are constantly gaining or decreasing visibility depending on dozens of different ranking factors. But Google loves nothing more than when you pay them to rank in their results. As long as you keep paying to stay at the top of the rankings, Google has no reason NOT to show you. In fact, they encourage it.

PPC is Very Predictable And Cost-Effective

With PPC, you can control how much you spend per day, per month, or per year. You don’t have to spend more than you’re comfortable with. Once you set a budget, the algorithm will cease displaying your ads after that budget is reached. This gives you maximum cost control in your advertising. With other forms of advertising like SEO, you need to keep investing with no guarantee of results. With PPC, you can start small, earn some money (assuming you do it right), and wait until you have the budget to scale up. Some companies start with $50 per day or less and only scale up their ads once they’ve actually made some profit. With other forms of advertising, you need to invest large amounts of money up front before you can hope to earn anything back.

PPC Lets You Skip a Lot of the Hard Work

I hate to sound like I’m overselling it to you, but PPC takes a lot less UPFRONT work than other “long-play” forms of online marketing like SEO. Most of the work in PPC comes after your ads are live. With search engine optimization, you need to optimize your site, build a content strategy, publish a lot of content, and perform intensive link-building campaigns to even hope of ranking on Page 1. With paid ads, you just pay to be placed at the top spot. Now, there are drawbacks, of course. Nothing is ever guaranteed. Some keywords can be quite expensive and competitive keywords can eat up a budget very quickly, so you need to be careful.

PPC Ads Can Improve Your SEO

PPC Ads Can Improve Your SEO One major benefit of PPC ads that’s often overlooked is that they improve “organic” – or unpaid – SEO rankings. These are the “natural” rankings your business has in the Google search engine. Most business owners think they should invest in either PPC or search engine optimization, but in reality, you should be doing both. They naturally compliment each other. Here are a few ways that running paid ads can boost your natural rankings: Occupy More Real Estate: Taking the top spot means you’re taking away from competitors. According to WebFX, 65% of users click on ads while looking to purchase something. Those clicks go to your site instead of a competitor’s site, which sends positive signals to Google that could help rank you over competitors naturally. Better User Behavior Signals: Google uses user behavior signals like bounce rate, click-through-rate, and time-on-site to judge whether or not your site is a good result for a search query. If users click your ads, stay on your page, and take action, this sends more positive signals to Google that you’re a good business that should be ranked above others. Also, Google measures return visitors, almost like a form of brand awareness. If users continue to recognize you and come back to your site, this tells Google that you should be ranked higher for more keywords. Discover Better Organic Keyword Opportunities: PPC ads bring in fast traffic, so you get immediate feedback on what’s actually working for your business. With paid ads, you can quickly see if a keyword is bringing in high-quality traffic or if it’s not working out. You can then use this data to find different groups of organic keywords to attack in your SEO strategy. If you were just doing organic SEO, it would take months to get enough traffic to make this type of testing. Paid ads? Days at most.