How Does Pay Per Click Advertising Work?

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) plays a very significant role when it comes to online and digital marketing. It’s one of the most popular marketing objectives today and it requires the advertiser to only pay once someone has clicked on his or her specific advert.

Before we dig deeper into PPC, know that this type of advertising is not limited to a single platform.

You can set a specific budget on any platform like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other popular search engine and social media networks and request that you are only charged once someone has clicked on your specific ad. The pay per impressions and pay per view options work in the same way as pay per click, however, you only pay when someone has seen your ad or viewed your video.

What Kind of PPC Ads Can You Run?

Google and Facebook are by far the two biggest digital marketing platforms around today. Google also owns YouTube and Facebook own Instagram which means out of the top five most popular online marketing platforms, Google and Facebook account for four.

Search Ads

As that Google and YouTube are mainly search engines, popular ads to run on these platforms are search ads. These are ads which are mainly displayed in a search engine at the top or at the bottom of a search result page.

These text-based ads usually have more “buyer intent”. What we mean by this is if someone actually types in the words “red Nike running shoes”, they are a lot more likely in market to buy these than someone on social media who just happened to like a picture of red Nike running shoes.

Search ads usually work through keywords. This means that you can specifically trigger your ad to display once a user has typed in a specific keyword or phrase you think would indicate that they might be in the market for your specific product or service.

Display Ads

Google and YouTube also allow room for display ads. This is when – instead of showing a text-based ad in a search results page – you show a picture or a video of your product or service on YouTube or another website that is connected to the Google Display Network.

On the flip side, as Facebook and Instagram are more socially orientated platforms, the most popular kind of ads would be display ads in the form of video and images:

• Because the user is not actively searching for your product or ads on these platforms they may have less “buyer intent” and interest might only be sparked once the user has seen your product or service.

Re-marketing Ads

One of the biggest assets of paid media today is something called re-marketing. This is when, instead of looking for new customers, you end up re-targeting prospects who have either visited your website or engaged with your brand in some way, shape or form.

The power behind re-marketing lies in the fact that someone who visited your website might not have always left their contact details and with re-marketing this means you have a second chance at convincing the prospect that your product or service is exactly what they are looking for.

Most paid advertising platforms allow re-marketing today and studies have shown that the biggest percentage of an advertiser’s return on ad spend comes from re-marketing ads.

If you want to start experimenting with PPC advertising, make sure to read up on the following 19 best practices for pay per click ads and Google AdWords.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about pay-per-click advertising and its benefits? Then make sure to have a look at our Digital Marketing Course which will give you a holistic view of what is needed to ensure digital marketing success!