With ‘PPC strategy’ we normally define a model of advertising that allows marketers to pay only when their ad is clicked by an online user. What happens from an accounting perspective is that, when an end-user clicks on a link, the click gets registered in a system and a pre-determined charge is assessed.
Since with pay-per-click search engine advertising opportunities are used to generate clicks towards a specific website or eCommerce, the traffic that will result as a consequence would be labelled as paid when working on that website’s analytics, and would be compared against the organic traffic, generated through non-paid marketing strategies (such as SEO).
PPC vs. CPM vs. CPA
PPC: with PPC campaigns, payment depends on the number of clicks solely and each click made on a banner is attached to a cost for the advertiser. The click-through-rate (CTR) is helpful to measure the success of this kind of digital advertising campaign, as it would identify the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. PPC is also known as cost per click (CPC).
CPM: the price of mille (1 thousand) banners impressions is known as CPM (cost per mille) and is generally expressed in dollar currency. Payment in this case depends solely on the number of impressions that a content item gathers.
CPA: with CPA (cost per action or cost per acquisition), the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement they are running. Payment is variable and can depend on the cost of lead, percentage of the sale’s revenue, cost of sale. CPA is also known as cost per lead, cost per conversion, or cost per sale.
At netamorphosis, the delicate and crucial art of optimizing a website for conversions relies heavily on the tight collaboration between us and our clients/partners in order to enhance design, UX and content creation, as well as on the high adaptability of our multi-disciplinary team.
In fact, building an efficient PPC strategy requires a lot of prep work: researching and selecting the right keywords, then organizing the keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups is what allows our team of analysts and SEO + SEM experts to work with our designers and content experts, so that they can set up PPC landing pages that are relevant, smartly targeted, efficiently built and ultimately interesting for people.
Further to that, search engines like Google tend to reward advertisers that manage to create pages that are satisfying and useful for their end-users, charging them less per click. This maximizes the ad-to-sales ratio of pay per click ads, and ultimately allows to reach projected KPIs for less.
What are pay-per-click ads?
Pay per click ads are the sponsored ads that appear at the top of Google’s search results page, marked with a yellow label. They appear top of the page within other search engines as well, such as Bing or Yahoo. PPC is part of SEM and is keywords-based: the way PPC ads work is on an auction basis where the highest bidder for a word or cluster of words, typically earns the most prominent placement. By paying a fee based on the digital market value of each word (which varies depending on the word itself), marketers can have their content featured within the first page of a Google or any other search engine’s results. When running PPC campaigns, marketers invest to tie their content to a number of relevant keywords, leveraging searches to their advantage, and understanding bids, bid modifiers and other nuances within the marketplace to truly leverage this powerful traffic channel.
Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords) is by far the most popular PPC advertising system and operates on a pay-per-click model, allowing users to bid on keywords and then pay per each click that their ads receive. Google Ads appear not just on Google’s search engine but also across other Google properties. Google is constantly enhancing and bettering the advertising opportunities, introducing innovations such as responsive display ads, account-level sitelinks, or AdWords message extensions. On top of this, searches are expanding outside of desktops & keyboard as well: according to Google, 20% of mobile queries are already voice searches, done via Siri, Google Now or Windows Cortana.
Through the years, we have gained outstanding experience in leveraging PPC strategy to balance paid and organic traffic efforts for our neta clients, as well as, in building for them a digital growth path that optimizes efforts and generates quick yet long-lasting ROI at the same time.
The results we have driven prove that it is through an analytics + content creation driven SEO vs. SEM approach that we can ultimately enhance performance, unlocking the full growth potential of our clients and ensuring they achieve SERP excellence–which to us means ‘owning the first page of Google’.