If you’re just getting started with pay per click advertising maybe you’re just trying to learn a little bit more about it for your own business or maybe you just got a job in pay-per-click advertising and you need to know more.
What Is Pay Per Click Advertising?
Pay per click advertising is a form of advertising where if you’re an advertiser you pay for each click to your website or if you have a mobile app something like that so every single click that you’re driving, you’re paying for each click. You don’t pay for impressions, you don’t pay for anything like that you’re paying for click specifically now.
Google ads are the most well-known pay per click advertising network. Along with Bing ads I consider Facebook to be a pay-per-click advertising network even though technically it’s not, it’s really considered social advertising and you’re generally paying for impressions on Facebook ads but I still consider it to be a pay-per-click advertising network. But ultimately what it is is that advertisers are setting bids on keywords for clicks to their websites so you’re either bidding on keywords or you’re bidding on audiences and if you’re an advertiser you only pay when an advertisement is click.
How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Works?
So generally how it works is that you set a bid for clicks to your website. You’re either bidding on keywords or you’re bidding on audiences and you’re setting a bid for how much you’re willing to pay for each click to your website. Now bids can really vary. So for something like home decor you might be bidding one to two dollars, for something like real estate you might start bidding up to $5, $6 or $7 depending on the market you’re in some lawyers some insurance companies they probably bid upwards of twenty, thirty dollars per click. Some of the top bids go above fifty dollars for each click to your website. So how much you’re paying for click generally depends on how much revenue each clicked in can drive to your business. So for example if you’re a lawyer you’re willing to pay $50 per click because one client can equal thousands and thousands of dollars. Same with real estate agents, they’re generally going to pay more. Even though you’re selling high price items sometimes you’re still only making a certain amount for each sale. So it’s really depends on what keywords you’re targeting, what audiences you’re targeting and because you’re entering an auction against other advertisers so generally the amount you’re willing to pay for each click depends on the other advertisers as well how much they’re willing to pay for each click. If other advertisers are willing to pay much more than you for each click then you’re going to have trouble ever winning the auction. So the way it works is when you’re bidding for something let’s say you and five other advertisers are bidding for a specific keyword every time. Someone typed something into Google. You’re going to be entering an auction to try to get your advertisement out there. So this is the way it works.
If we come back over here it’s going to say the advertisements that show are based on a bid and an ads quality score or relevancy score. So basically the way it’s going to work is that Google is going to take into account how much the advertiser is bidding and they also use something called quality score which is going to look at their landing page. It’s going to look at the average click-through rate historically for this advertiser. So it uses another score along with the bid to basically come up with what’s called an ad rank and each ad will be ranked in the Google search results based on their ad rank. So that’s going to be a combination of Quality Score and bid. So that’s basically how the auction works is it’s going to take into account the bid and the Quality Score and whatever ad has the top ad rank is going to show at the top. Whatever, a second is going to show second and so on and so forth that’s basically how pay per click advertising works.
You’re bidding on a certain set of targeting and depending on advertisers other competitors and different factors is going to determine how much you’re paying, how often your ad shows up in the search results and how often your ad gets clicked.
So next is that how you can get started with pay-per-click ads. So you can start by using top popular pay-per-click advertising networks. Google Ads, Bing ads and Facebook Ads So all these are very popular. You need a website or an app to promote and then once you have your website and you’re ready to promote. You generally want to create different landing pages. Landing pages is where you’re going to be sending traffic to and then once you’re kind of ready to go, what you want to do is sign up with the pay-per-click networks, you enter your payment information and you can start by creating your first campaign and over time what you want to do is test and optimize.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to get traffic to your website just through organic search so that’s why a lot of companies are running pay-per-click ads so it’s definitely worth it.
