How PPC Advertising Works

There are seven crucial steps to executing a successful PPC campaign wherever your business is located:

• Keyword Research
• Geo-Targeting (Localizing Keyword with a Geographic Modifier)
• Budgeting and Bid Selection
• Creating Text Ads/Marketing Copy
• Creating a Landing Page (Design, Layout and Marketing Copy)
• Performance Tracking and Measurement (or Web Analytics)
• Campaign Optimization for Conversion (Customer Contact or Sale)

Simply Put...

The simplified explanation of how PPC advertising really works is by using a process of Keyword Research and Geo-Targeting, employing a daily marketing budget, determining, selecting and bidding on targeted keyword phrases in your campaign.

Next, use text ads served up within targeted guidelines and parameters available on the search engines, and using best practices that are tied to a particular set of keywords. Select and design your landing page(s), the initial page that appears after someone clicks on your ad, using criteria designed for an important conversion-related goal, and then begin your campaign.

As with any marketing campaign, determine way(s) to track ads, conversion from those ads, and determine overall cost-effectiveness and ROI. Almost immediately, you may have your business presented to searchers using the exact or similar keyword phrases included in your campaign. Page 1 search engine positions are highly coveted, valuable online advertising real estate since more users are likely to notice the first page search engine results.

Why Consider PPC Advertising?

Compared to many other forms of traditional marketing and advertising, PPC offers businesses several key advantages that should result in higher quality traffic and business leads for St. Louis area business. A few of the benefits include:

1. Better Targeting and Message Delivery

Whether you employ geo-targeting for your ad, or set the time of day you want an advertisement to appear, or by indicating to the search engines the exact keyword phrases that you want to use for when the ad appears, you can take control of ad targeting and message delivery. PPC offers ad targeting and control that other advertising platforms cannot deliver. Any marketing expert will tell you that the better that you can control and target campaigns, the more likely the results will be a positive ROI.

2. Improved Measurability

Ad tracking and measurability are inherent challenges to most forms of traditional and offline advertising. Unlike offline advertising media, PPC offers total number of impressions (page views or ad vies), actual click-through rates, phone calls, online sales, and better ways to track conversion goals relative to your investment. This data allows you to more accurately calculate expense, ROI, and provides you with a measurable advertising platform for business as you work through a complete website (and/or e-commerce) optimization process. Additionally, with website traffic analytics, you can track time on-site and on pages for further refinement of your marketing message.

3. Better Testing

Testing is crucial to any marketing and advertising campaigns, regardless of the platform. Testing an ad helps you maximize your website conversion architecture and your marketing copy for conversions, returns and/or sales compared to specific copy. The ability to test possible marketing copy variables online far exceeds the capacity of ad testing in traditional print, radio or TV advertising environments. From both a time and cost perspective, this time of ad testing and marketing allows you to quickly adjust campaigns with little extra cost in order to maximize ROI.

4. Pay-Per-Click Is Controlled Marketing

The fact that you only pay Google for AdWords click-throughs, or pay other search engines for sponsored links with click-throughs on your ad, maximizes brand exposure (impressions or views) as the ad will be served to searchers, but you only pay for actual prospects who click on your ad—you do not pay for the ad impression. This offers businesses prospects who should actually be interested in your service or product. This option alone makes PPC advertising one of the only true forms of pay-for-performance marketing and it is an advertising option that no St. Louis, MO, business owner should ignore.

For more information on how pay-per-click advertising services can impact your online marketing, contact 4 Site Digital today. Or, you can get in touch with one of our PPC or Internet marketing consultants in the St. Louis metropolitan market for assistance.