Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and marketing can be an effective way to promote your business. Considering how important it is, it’s crucial that you have a good understanding of how it all works. When something isn’t going according to plan or you want to expand on things that are exceeding expectations, there are some common questions that we hear time and time again. This is why we thought it would be useful to put together an article compiling these questions. Hopefully, this helps clear things up when it comes to PPC marketing. If you want to learn more about this, read on as we tackle four common questions about PPC marketing.
Should You Advertise on Bing or Yahoo?
While Bing is the second biggest search engine behind Google, this doesn’t automatically mean that you should advertise on it (or Yahoo) as well. If Google fits your budget better, we recommend advertising on Google’s search network; we typically see similar performance at lower volumes (~75% lower) and frequently see more cost-effective traffic on Google than on Bing.
Should You Bid On Your Brand Name?
You’ll want to bid on your brand name, as it will likely get more clicks than other terms. The issue arises when many competitors bid on that same brand name. If this is the case, you may want to bid on search terms that are similar to the brand name in order to prevent competitors from stealing traffic from you.
Why Is Your Cost-Per-Click Increasing?
There are two main reasons why your cost-per-click would (CPC) would increase. The first reason is that your competition has decided to take a more aggressive approach when it comes to PPC marketing and advertising. Just as you and your team are optimizing your keywords, so too are your competitors. If one of your competitors spends more money on their keywords, your CPCs could increase as a result. A drop in Quality Score can also lead to substantially higher click prices. When determining the quality score, many factors are taken into account, including click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page relevance. So make sure to put effort into improving all of those things.
Why Are Your Ads Not On Top?
The short answer is that your ad position is too low. The 2 main drivers of ad position are Max CPC and Quality Score, though ad extensions are a factor as well. Either one could be causing your low ad position, so the first solution is to increase your keyword bids until your ad shows on the top of the page. If your Quality Scores are low, improving the click-through rate via ad copy testing is the best way to fix the issue, but you may need to go through several iterations before you see results.
For search ads, make sure you pay attention to the ad position, but keep in mind that ad position does not equal click-through rate. If the top ad position is set to $10 per click, and you’re getting 5% CTR, that’s $0.50 per click. If you can get the same click for $0.05 per click, that means you can get 10x more clicks at 10x less cost, which can greatly increase your return on investment.
Conclusion
We hope this article proves to be useful when it comes to furthering your understanding of PPC marketing. While it may seem overwhelming at first, the information that we’ve laid out here should give you good foundational knowledge on this subject. Be sure to keep everything you’ve learned here in mind so that you can make the most informed decisions possible.
If you are looking to team up with a digital marketing agency to help you improve your business, come to Akby! Let us help you improve your internal strategies today!
