A Comprehensive Guide to Cost Per Click Advertising

Cost per click advertising can be a game-changer for businesses, but it's essential to understand the basics before diving in.

A well-structured ad campaign can drive targeted traffic and boost conversions, but a poorly managed one can lead to wasted budget and lost opportunities.

To get the most out of cost per click advertising, you need to set a budget that aligns with your business goals.

A typical budget for a cost per click advertising campaign is between $500 to $5,000 per month, depending on the industry and target audience.

PPC marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay for each ad click, bidding on the perceived value of a click.

Advertisers pay for each ad click, which can be a costly endeavor if not managed properly.

The cost of these clicks is determined by the CPC metric, which measures the cost of ads based on the number of clicks they receive.

CPC is a metric that determines the cost of ads, and advertisers can set a maximum CPC as an upper limit of what they're willing to spend on each click.

This cost-per-click approach can be effective for companies that implement the right strategies, leading to huge success in digital marketing.

Understanding CPC is crucial for efficient PPC management.

CPC stands for cost per click, and it's used to show the cost to the advertiser of each individual click.

PPC is a marketing campaign strategy where marketers pay a certain amount to the publisher whenever their ad is clicked on.

Having a clear understanding of CPC helps improve your campaign's efficiency by enabling you to see keywords and ads with high vs. low CPCs.

Knowing the formula for calculating CPC is essential to make sense of the CPC column in your ad report.

PPC optimization starts from CPC optimization, which means you need to deal with fraudulent clicks and prevent invalid clicks from consuming your ad budget.

By pausing ads and keywords that are eating your budget but not converting, you can optimize your PPC campaign and save money.

PPC Ad Types are divided into four main categories: Search Network, Display Network, Search Network with Display Opt-In, and Shopping: Product Listing Ads. The Search Network is the most common targeting option, primarily keyword based advertising.

The Display Network consists of millions of sites that show Google text, image, and video ads within their content. This network doesn't utilize traditional keyword based targeting, but rather audiences and demographics.

The Search Network with Display Opt-In is a combination of both networks, allowing you to create a regular Search Network campaign and opt-in to the Display Network. This option is worth testing, but it's recommended to break out campaigns by network.

Shopping: Product Listing Ads are shown on Google and Microsoft, and don't contain keywords. Advertisers create product groups to bid on various feed attributes, including brand, category, condition, item ID, product type, and custom attributes.

Image ads are the more traditional Display ads, since they are unique to this network. You can upload your own image ads through either the interface or Google Ads Editor.

There are a variety of image sizes that can be utilized across the Google Display Network. Confirm file size and image resolution prior to upload in order to ensure no errors exist.

For effective image ads, call-to-actions should be explicit. Including prices, promotions, and exclusives is effective as well.

Testing different engaging images and ad sizes will be important when using image ads. Advertisers can choose to create a responsive ad that will automatically adjust size depending on where it is shown or utilize the 19 standard image sizes below.

Here are the standard image sizes:

PPC copy is all about crafting compelling ads that drive conversions, and we've seen that Google Ads' text ads are a great place to start.

A good text ad typically includes a headline, two description lines, and a display URL.

In Google Ads, the ideal text ad length is 30 characters for the headline and 90 characters for the description lines.

By keeping your text ad concise, you can ensure it's easily readable on smaller screens.

Product Listing ads are a type of PPC ad that can significantly boost your eCommerce sales. They're square units that contain product titles, images, and prices.

To run Product Listing Ads, you'll need to connect your Google Merchant Center account, which is a requirement for this type of ad.

Extensions are a crucial part of PPC ads, and they can greatly improve your ad's performance. Ad extensions are additional links and details that show supplementary information about your business.

By adding ad extensions, you can make your ads larger in size, making them more prominent on search engine results pages (SERPs) and improving the click-thru-rate (CTR) of the ad headline. Certain ad extensions are manual choices, which you can control.

Location extensions are a type of ad extension that show the business address and are available in Google and Microsoft. Google requires that a Google My Business account is setup and connected to Google Ads.

Call extensions are another type of ad extension that give advertisers two possibilities. On mobile devices, call extensions allow users to click-to-call the business, giving mobile searchers an easy way to call the business.

Adding ad extensions can directly impact ad rank, and any ad extension that improves ad performance and is useful for the searcher will improve ad rank and lower your CPC. For example, adding your phone number during working hours will help mobile users call you directly.

PPC targeting is a powerful tool in cost per click advertising. You can show ads across all devices, including desktops/laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Desktops/laptops and tablets are considered similar enough by search engines that the same bid is applied to these platforms. Mobile devices can have a bid modifier, which can adjust the bid on mobile devices. For example, a bid modifier of -50% would set the bid on mobile devices to 50% of the original bid.

A bid modifier of 150% would set the bid on mobile devices to 1.5 times the original bid. This means that advertisers can adjust their bids to target specific devices and reach their desired audience.

You can target specific locations with PPC targeting, down to the zip code level. This allows advertisers to ensure that their ads show only in desired locations. For example, a campaign targeting all 50 states can set separate bid modifiers by location.

Here are some key benefits of using location targeting:

By targeting specific locations and devices, advertisers can reach a highly desired audience and drive a high volume of targeted customer traffic to their website or landing page.

Device targeting is a crucial aspect of PPC targeting. You can show your ads across all devices, including desktops/laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Desktops/laptops and tablets are considered similar enough by the search engines that the same bid is applied to these platforms. Mobile devices can have a bid modifier, which can significantly impact your cost-per-click.

For example, if your bid is $1.00 and you set a mobile bid modifier of -50%, the bid on mobile devices becomes $0.50. A bid modifier of 150% would set the mobile bid at $1.50.

Here's a breakdown of the devices you can target:

Organizing your PPC campaigns and ad groups is crucial for effective targeting. Advertisers start by choosing keyword themes and creating individual campaigns.

A campaign with a theme like "Coffee Tables" can be a great way to target customers interested in that product. Within this campaign, you'll have themed subcategories, called ad groups, which can be further divided into specific keywords.

For example, the "Oval Coffee Tables" ad group can contain keywords like "Oval coffee tables" and "Coffee tables oval". This helps you target customers searching for specific types of coffee tables.

Each ad group contains themed keyword variations that are relevant to the campaign theme. By organizing your campaigns and ad groups in this way, you can create targeted ads that reach the right audience.

In Google Ads, each individual campaign has a daily budget that should be created in accordance with account goals.

Having a clear understanding of your daily budget is crucial to avoid overspending and optimize your campaigns. You can set a daily budget for each campaign, but if you want to save time managing and monitoring individual campaign budgets, you can use the shared budget feature.

This feature allows Google Ads to adjust the budget, setting one daily amount for the entire account or a group of campaigns within the account. With a shared budget, you can focus on what's working and adjust your campaigns accordingly.

When it comes to ad delivery, Google Ads offers two options: standard and accelerated. The standard delivery method shows ads evenly throughout the day, which is good for advertisers with budget restrictions. Ads will not show at all times, depending on the budget concerns.

The accelerated delivery method, on the other hand, shows ads until the budget is depleted, making it best for advertisers with no budget restrictions. This way, you can ensure your ads show for every query.

Google Ads also offers two ad delivery options: Optimize and Rotate indefinitely. Optimize delivery is based on ads expected to produce higher click volume, while Rotate indefinitely delivers ads more evenly into the ad auction, but doesn't optimize toward any goal like clicks or conversions.

Understanding how to calculate CPC (Cost Per Click) is essential to optimize your PPC campaign. Knowing the formula will help you see keywords and ads with high vs. low CPCs, allowing you to pause ads and keywords that are eating your budget but aren't converting.

PPC tracking and measurement are crucial for advertisers to gauge account performance and optimize their campaigns. Advertisers can create conversion goals to determine whether ad clicks are turning into conversions.

Conversion tracking is available on both platforms, and Google Ads allows many types of conversion tracking, including webpage, mobile or tablet app, calls from ads, and imported goals from third-party platforms.

Advertisers can track campaign performance on the backend, including conversions, email sign-ups, and downloads. This helps identify which ads and keywords are performing well and which ones need improvement.

To get a more complete picture of the conversion funnel, it's highly recommended to link Google Ads accounts to Google Analytics accounts. This can be done by entering the Google Ads ID number in the "Admin" section of Google Analytics.

Here are some types of conversion tracking available in Google Ads:

Conversion tracking is a crucial aspect of PPC tracking and measurement. It helps advertisers gauge account performance by determining whether ad clicks are turning into conversions.

Both Google Ads and other platforms provide code snippets that can be placed on key pages, such as order confirmation or thank you pages. This allows advertisers to track conversions accurately.

Google Ads allows many types of conversion tracking, including webpage, mobile or tablet app, and calls from ads using call extensions. Other types include calls to a Google forwarding number on your website, clicks on a number on your mobile website, and imported goals from third party platforms like Salesforce.

Here are some examples of conversion tracking types allowed by Google Ads:

By linking your Google Ads account to Google Analytics, you can get a more complete picture of the conversion funnel. This is highly recommended to track post-click behavior accurately.

Search Query Reports are extremely useful and one of the top optimization techniques, allowing you to find irrelevant search queries to be added as negative keywords.

Running Search Query Reports can also help you unearth new ideas for keyword expansion, which can be a game-changer for your PPC campaigns.

SQRs can be run in both Google and Microsoft, making them a versatile tool for any advertiser.

It's suggested that SQRs be run at least twice a month to get the most out of them and stay on top of your PPC game.

The Auction Insights Report is a game-changer for PPC tracking and measurement. It's found in Google Ads and helps you determine what companies are competing against your business in the search auctions.

This report shows you your impression share relative to the competition, which is essential for making informed decisions about your bids and budget. You can use this information to decide if you should increase bids and budget to become more competitive in the auction.

Another useful feature of this report is determining if you're competing against businesses in other industries. This could mean you need to add negative keywords to your campaigns or reconsider some of the keywords on which you are bidding.

Running the Auction Insights Report regularly can help you stay ahead of the competition and optimize your PPC campaigns for better results. It's a must-have for any serious PPC marketer.

PPC optimization starts from CPC optimization and ends with dealing with fraudulent clicks and preventing invalid clicks from consuming your ad budget. This is crucial for improving your campaign's efficiency.

Having a clear understanding of what is CPC and how to calculate it helps improve your campaign's efficiency. You can see keywords and ads with high vs. low CPCs, which allows you to pause ads and keywords that are eating your budget but aren't converting.

Optimizing your CPC involves increasing or decreasing bids per click to improve the overall return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS). You can also use other techniques and tactics to optimize your CPC, such as improving the landing page design and copy to lower bounce rates.

To optimize your CPC, you can use the following tips:

A high-quality score reduces CPC and helps you achieve a better ad position. Maintaining a quality score of 6 or higher can unlock discounts of 15 to 50%.

PPC reporting and analysis is crucial for optimizing your cost per click advertising campaigns.

Search query reports, or SQRs, are extremely useful and can be run in both Google and Microsoft to find irrelevant search queries to be added as negative keywords.

Running SQRs at least twice a month is suggested to unearth new ideas for keyword expansion.

Having a clear understanding of what is CPC and how to calculate it helps improve your campaign's efficiency.

PPC optimization starts from CPC optimization and ends with dealing with fraudulent clicks and preventing invalid clicks from consuming your ad budget.

Knowing the formula for calculating CPC is essential to make sense of the CPC column in your ad report.

The Display Network is a great way to drive a larger volume of traffic than Search. Average cost per clicks tend to be less expensive on the Display Network.

You can use the Display Planner tool to find websites, keywords, topics, and interests that your target audience is likely to utilize. This tool recommends thousands of fresh websites, apps, and video channels.

Contextual targeting on the Display Network uses keywords, which match your ads to websites with the same themes. For instance, the Display keyword “shoes” will match to any website that Google deems is related to shoes.

The Display Network is a pay per click (PPC) strategy, where you agree to pay a certain amount to the publisher whenever your ad is clicked on. This is similar to cost per click (CPC), which is used on the campaign measurement side to show the cost to the advertiser of each individual click.

You can opt to let Google Ads choose placements based on your targeting methods, or you can choose to manually select placements for your ads to appear.

PPC remarketing is a game-changer for businesses looking to target users who have already interacted with their site.

You can create remarketing lists based on what pages users did or didn't visit, or based on the dates they did or didn't visit a page or set of pages. This allows you to target users who are more likely to convert upon visiting again.

The remarketing code lives under the "Shared Library" and should be placed across all pages of a site. This makes it easy to set up remarketing lists and target users based on their behavior.

Dynamic remarketing requires a Google Merchant Center and links this feature with your Merchant Center data feed. This allows you to customize ads with products users have viewed.

You can customize dynamic ads with the style elements of your brand, or simply upload your logo and auto-optimize layouts through Google Ads.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) work like Display remarketing, targeting previous site visitors based on one or more pages they did or didn't visit. You can create custom combinations here as well.

To set-up RLSAs, you simply need to navigate to the "audiences" tab in your Search campaigns. This makes it easy to manage remarketing audiences, both positive and negative, and their bids.

PPC bidding is a way to automate your bidding process, allowing you to set goals and let the search engine adjust bids based on algorithms.

There are several automated bidding strategies, including Enhanced CPC, Target Search Page Location, Target CPA, Maximize Clicks, and Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). These strategies can help you achieve your campaign goals, such as maximizing conversions or clicks.

To lower your CPC, you can improve your quality score, refine your audience and keywords, expand your reach, and adjust bids based on key criteria. You can also experiment with bidding strategies, such as lowering your manual CPC bid to see if it will still deliver in full.

Here are some automated bidding options:

PPC campaigns can be optimized by adjusting bids based on key criteria, such as location, time period, and device. This helps increase quality score and decrease CPC.

Experimenting with bidding strategies can also be effective. Lowering the manual CPC bid can help deliver results, and broadening the target audience can surprisingly lower the CPC.

You can pause campaigns or ad formats that don’t have a high click-through rate. This can help improve campaign efficiency and prevent overspending.

A good CPC rate is not always the lowest one. It depends on individual campaign goals and target customer access.

Here are some common bidding strategies:

These strategies can help you optimize your PPC campaigns and improve your return on investment.

Microsoft is a significant player in the PPC bidding and cost landscape. Microsoft Advertising is a pay-per-click platform showing ads on the Microsoft and Yahoo networks.

Microsoft Advertising is primarily keyword-based advertising, similar to Google PPC Ads. It utilizes Search Partners to expand its reach.

As of 2017, Microsoft Advertising has 137 million unique desktop searchers on the Bing Network. This user base is substantial and shouldn't be ignored.

CPM is a pricing model that charges advertisers for the number of times their ads were displayed to a consumer, specifically for every 1,000 impressions.

Advertisers who use CPM are focused on increasing awareness and engagement, rather than specific actions like clicks, which carry a higher cost.

CPM is often used when a brand wants to increase visibility, and the focus is on serving a large number of impressions to reach the desired audience.

Businesses that use CPM may have to serve far more than 1,000 impressions to reach the desired number of clicks, making it a more expensive option in the long run.

Here are some key differences between CPM and CPC:

The choice between CPM and CPC depends on the ad campaign objective, and most publishers offer both ad-buying opportunities.

CPM relies on the number of times a user might see an ad or impression, rather than paying per click, a marketer would pay a flat fee for every thousand ad impressions viewed by a target audience.

A flat fee for CPM can be a fixed amount, such as $10, for every thousand ad impressions viewed by a target audience.

Understanding PPC metrics is crucial to maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

A high CPC can lead to a reduced ROAS, as it increases your ad cost.

To get a solid return on your marketing investment, you need to understand what each click costs you.

CPC directly impacts your ad cost, which in turn affects your ROAS.

The formula for calculating ROAS is: (Revenue / Cost) x 100.

High CPC leads to increased ad costs, which can significantly reduce your ROAS.

Targeting keywords with high CPC can increase your ad cost and negatively impact your ROAS.

Reducing CPC is essential to increasing your ROAS.

You should look for ways to minimize CPC to maximize your ROI.

Improving PPC campaign efficiency is crucial for getting the most out of your ad spend. This starts with understanding what is CPC and how to calculate it, which enables you to see keywords and ads with high vs. low CPCs.

Knowing how to calculate CPC is essential for making informed decisions about your ad budget. If you don't know the formula, the CPC column in your report will be meaningless, and you won't be able to optimize your PPC campaign effectively.

PPC optimization starts from CPC optimization and ends with dealing with fraudulent clicks and preventing invalid clicks from consuming your ad budget. By understanding how to calculate CPC and using it to inform your ad spend decisions, you can significantly improve the efficiency of your PPC campaigns.

To optimize your CPC, consider increasing your ad budget, but also use other techniques and tactics, such as:

By applying these strategies, you can improve your CPC and, as a result, your return on ad spend (ROAS).

CPC can be a costly campaign if it has a high click-through rate.

High costs can be a major challenge for advertisers who want to stay within their budget.

Not all clicks are equal, and you risk paying for unwanted or fraudulent clicks.

This can lead to wasted ad spend and a poor return on investment.

Effective cost per click advertising requires careful targeting and ad optimization to minimize waste and maximize conversions.