How to Use Google's AdWords: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

If you have ever noticed the advertisements that appear alongside search results on Google and other search engines, you are already familiar with pay-per-click, or PPC advertising. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website quickly, but small businesses too often make mistakes that undermine their campaigns.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising seems pretty straightforward. For example, when a user searches for "Web Design Houston",  ads from web design companies can be seen by customers at the very moment that the user is searching on Google. 

You should target wisely, select tempting keywords, to create an irresistible ad. Hot prospects then click on your ad, (you only pay for the ones that “click through”) and hopefully you convert some to buyers. But then there’s this auction “thing”.

Unlike traditional advertising, with pay-per-click you have to bid on placements. It’s like an auction, and competitors might outbid you. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser, however. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. That seems risky but many thousands of businesses use PPC advertising every day (and Google makes billions of dollars off of PPC), so obviously it works.

The idea behind PPC, as with any form of online advertising, is that the amount you spend on clicks is far outweighed by the revenue you'll gain once visitors arrive at your website. As such, pay-per-click advertising is an investment. Bid cost is determined by how competitive a keyword is, so you want to find the sweet spot of less competitive (thereby less expensive) and yet highly relevant keywords.

Google AdWords is Google's advertising system. It is by far the most predominant platform and search engine used for paid ads. Advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google's search results. With every search, AdWords considers thousands adds and will only show those that are most likely to provide what the person was looking for. After all, Google aims to always provide only the most relevant ads when someone searches on google.

The auction gets run billions of times each month. Once a query is made on Google, the search engine processes the request and runs the auction which will then determine the ad's position, where it will appear, and the CPC. Once advertisers identity keywords they want to bid on, Google then enters the keyword from your account that it deems most relevant into the auction with the maximum bid you've specified as well as the associated ad.

So how do you know if your ad is relevant and useful to someone looking at it? This is reflected in Quality Score. In AdWords, Quality Score is the alpha and omega. If you don’t know what it is, you’re doing it all wrong. AdWords calculates Quality Score on the fly for each of your key words by looking at a variety of factors including relevance to the words people searched for, whether or not people found your ad relevant and clicked on it, the quality of your landing page and many more.

Increasing your click-through rate is the most important thing you can do in your AdWords campaign. Not only does it get you more traffic, it actually makes that traffic cheaper. So, the ad’s click-through rate (CTR) is the single biggest factor in determining Quality Score because Google allows users to practically vote with their clicks.

Relevancy is the second largest determining factor of Quality Score. Google determines relevancy by analyzing the language in context in an ad or query, and determining how well it relates to a keyword. Google then uses relevance to make sure that only useful ads are displayed to users and prevents advertisers from paying their way onto a search that is unrelated to their product or service.

The third component of Quality Score is landing page quality. An ad is only useful to users if the landing page it leads to helps them find the information they are looking for. A high quality landing page should have revenant, original content, be easily navigable with quick load times, a minimum of pop-up (or pop-unders), and be transparent about the nature of the business.

Based on these insights, AdWords assigns every keyword a quality score of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Each keyword’s Quality Score is updated regularly, taking into account any changes you made and the number of clicks you received.

Your ad’s Quality Score plays a key role in determining your ad’s position, and how much you will pay for a click. In general, the more relevant your ad is the higher your Quality Score, the better your position and the less you will have to pay for a click. In other words, Google rewards you for providing an ad that provides a positive experience to people who search for your products.

Signing up for Google AdWords is free, and setting how much you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks your ad is easy. You can always change it later at any time. You only pay when someone clicks your ad and visits your website. In other words, when your advertising is working. However, it takes time and skill to do it effectively since pay-per-click marketing is no trivial matter. 

Save time, hassles, and money when fighting for better search engine rankings by hiring Create the Bridge to lower your pay-per-click costs, and getting exposure on social media. Give us a call today to help your business get found by people on Google precisely when they're searching for the things that you offer.