Companies around the United States spent $197 billion on digital ads in 2021.
Digital marketing is all around us. From website ads to sponsored social media posts, digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and engagement online. However, PPC marketing is the best option if you’re looking to drive traffic directly to your site.
Ever wondered what PPC stands for? PPC, aka pay-per-click marketing, is a dynamic type of digital marketing that helps drive traffic to specific actions. This makes it one of the most effective types of marketing.
Interested in learning more about PPC marketing? You’re in the right place. Here’s everything you need to know about pay-per-click marketing.
Online Marketing
Marketing has evolved over the last few decades. While traditional forms of advertising centered around print and television ads, online marketing has slowly become the new standard. This kind of advertising relies on the internet to reach people all around the world.
Online marketing can come in various forms, allowing you to create diverse campaigns to reach the most people. Since this kind of advertising is based on digital platforms, you can create and push images, videos, banners, and various other kinds of ads online.
This kind of marketing is also heavily reliant on data. This data includes things such as the device you’re using along with your location. These data points allow advertisers to target ads with much more precision than they could with the more traditional forms of advertising.
Different Types of Online Marketing
Online marketing is a broad term to describe a diverse group of marketing efforts. While all of these marketing efforts rely on electronic devices and the internet, there are various digital marketing strategies you can use. This includes different kinds of ads and different advertising methods.
Different Kinds of Ads
As mentioned above, digital marketing opened the door to a range of new ads. This included moving pictures, graphics, animations, videos, and dynamic banners. Digital ads can also be distributed throughout various platforms on the internet, such as search engines (think Google!), websites, and social media platforms.
The variety of ads and the platforms you can share them on allowing you to target and reach as many people as possible. This versatility also allows you to create a single marketing campaign that includes a wide variety of different marketing material.
One campaign can include video ads for YouTube, banner ads for websites, SEO ads for search engines, and even animated graphics for social media platforms.
Different Advertising Models
While there are a wide variety of different kinds of ads, there are also different advertising models. These models allow you to choose the most effective form of advertising for you to reach your specific audience. They include social media advertising, video advertising on platforms like YouTube, and dynamic options such as PPC marketing.
What Is PPC?
PPC marketing is an internet-based advertising model. This advertising model can be used with different types of online ads and is based on the fact that the advertiser is paying the publisher for every successful click. This differs from other kinds of online marketing ads that charge for every impression.
What Is an Impression?
Marketing is all about bringing attention to your brand or business. Online marketing builds on the latest technology to help make this process as effective and efficient as possible. However, impression-based marketing models work in the exact same way as traditional forms of media.
In the past, people had to market their products or services on the radio, television, or in newspapers and magazines. These ads were designed and published in these forms to help leave an impression on everyone that sees or hears the ad.
In this way, the advertiser is trying to reach the most people possible, hoping that a large percentage of them will eventually become customers.
This model is great for publishers since they don’t need the ad to be successful in order to get paid. In the past, newspapers and magazines would sell space on their latest publication to advertisers. These advertisers would be completely responsible for coming up with the ad so that the publisher could simply include it.
Whether the ad was successful or not has no impact on the price advertisers would pay to publishers. The responsibility for creating a good ad or choosing the right publisher for your ad was completely left to the advertiser.
What Does PPC Stand For?
PPC stands for pay per click. This model differs from the impression model of advertising as advertisers are required to pay for every successful click. This differs from the impression models of the past and creates something more effective for you to build on.
The traditional impression model has transferred to digital marketing with websites and platforms offering advertising real estate to various advertisers. However, modern data tools have enabled platforms and publishers to ensure that your ads are more successful than before.
This data is what enables publishers to offer PPC marketing solutions for advertisers. This means that advertisers do not need to pay a flat rate for publishing but rather pay a fee for every click that they get from the ad. This makes the entire process more efficient for advertisers, who only need to pay for successful clicks.
Why Clicks Are Better Than Impressions?
The impression model is basically casting an incredibly wide net in the hopes that you can get a high conversion rate at the end of the day. The conversion rate you get is the number of people that end up clicking on your ad instead of just skipping it. While this model has been effective in the past, it’s not as cost-efficient as paying directly for clicks.
The cost savings are incredibly clear with this model. This is because if you were to pay for a massive ad that did not result in anyone coming to your website, all that money would be lost. By switching to the PPC marketing model, you can still have that same massive ad, but you only pay the publisher if it’s successfully brought people to your site.
This makes it more sustainable, especially for small businesses that can’t afford to take risks. This is the most important benefit of PPC marketing that differs from impression-based marketing. While there have been studies done to prove the effectiveness of online impressions, there is still a level of risk that comes with it.
If the ad is not targeted properly, or the publisher did not manage to reach as many people as you may have thought, these could all impact your conversion rate. In contrast, PPC marketing is a much better investment as you only need to pay for the successful clicks.
How Pay Per Click Works
PPC marketing is incredibly simple, and it’s even in the name. This model is based on the fact that you advertise with a publisher but pay a small fee for every click. This means that it’s the publisher’s job to take your ad and use all their resources to help get you as many clicks as possible.
The more clicks they get you, the more money they can make. In the same way, the more clicks they get you, the more money you can make. This reduces the risk of the marketing investment and can help you make the most of your designated ad budget.
PPC marketing is based entirely on data. This is because the online space is filled with consumer data that publishers can leverage to make your ad as successful as possible. This data allows you to directly target your ad like never before.
As mentioned earlier, traditional forms of advertising were impression-based. This meant that general ads used to come on TV for everyone to see in the hopes that some would visit your store. However, consumer data and the versatility of the internet can allow publishers to show different ads to different people based on who they are.
This data can be generic such as a location or age group, but it can also be incredibly detailed based on that user’s specific likes and dislikes. All this data can help ensure publishers that they can get you the conversion rate that you’re looking for. This helps give them the confidence they need to charge you only for the clicks you get from the ad.
Impression vs. PPC Costs
While this is a great solution, it’s important to remember that an impression is cheaper than a click. Since a click is much more valuable to a business, publishers charge a higher rate for them than general impressions.
The Benefits of PPC Marketing
Are you considering switching from traditional marketing to the more advanced PPC marketing model? Here are a few of the clear benefits of PPC marketing.
1. Simple Setup
PPC campaigns are incredibly simple to set up. Even though this model is based on massive amounts of data, tons of tools are available to make the entire process quick and easy. These tools make it easy to both create and target the ad to the specific audience you want.
During the setup process, you can also set your objectives. These objectives are taken into consideration to help make your marketing campaign as successful as possible. This is because your targeting settings and objectives will help direct your ads to the right people.
2. Flexibility
PPC marketing is a dynamic model that can quickly be changed if a different need arises. If you are running a PPC campaign to get clicks for a certain product, you can quickly change the ad to boost another product’s sales.
In this way, a PPC campaign is one of the most effective marketing strategies you can implement for your business. This is both an effective and cost-effective marketing tool to bring attention to your brand online.
3. Targeted Advertising
PPC marketing is based on tons of data. This means that PPC marketing allows you to target your ads in ways that other options may not allow. The ability to target your ads means that your ad will only show up for people that may already be interested in you, leading to higher conversion rates and more sales.
4. Completely Measurable
PPC marketing is an advertiser model that requires you to pay for the clicks you get from an ad. This means that the entire marketing campaign can be tracked and measured every step of the way. This level of tracking can help you keep a close eye on the entire campaign.
5. Incredibly Cost-Effective
Impressions have their benefits, but clicks are more valuable. Impressions hope to eventually get people onto your website, while PPC marketing focuses entirely on successful clicks. This means that you don’t have to take the risk of buying massive ads but can rather focus and spend only on the clicks you get.
Finding the Right PPC Marketing Company
If you’ve ever wondered, what does PPC stand for? Hopefully, now you know.
This form of marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising as it allows you to easily measure and track how well your ads are doing online.
Whether you’re looking for a marketing company to help you develop a mobile app or a full PPC agency, Connect is here to help you every step.
Want to learn more? Feel free to contact us today.
