Benefits of PPC Advertising for your Ecommerce Business

There are many benefits of PPC advertising, for any business, but especially for e-commerce. 

However, let’s start with the most important thing: What exactly is PPC? 

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. This means exactly what it says – you pay for each click on your advertisement. You don’t pay for website traffic that you don’t get! 

This facilitates customers to your website in a way that you control, rather than relying on customers happening upon your store organically. 

If you need any reason to learn more about PPC, here are a few of the benefits it offers: 

  1. Quick entry to your website 
  2. Results are extremely easy to measure (hello Google Ads!) 
  3. Provides a collection of useful data 

Ignoring PPC advertising could cause you to miss out on potential customers, so let’s dive into some major benefits of paid search advertising, and why you may want to invest.

PPC keeps you from overpaying for advertising 

With Pay-Per-Click, you have total control over your advertising budget. You can a maximum dollar amount you want to pay for a click, and Google (or another webpage) won’t charge you a cent over that. 

Considering you don’t have to pay for impressions, this is a pretty sweet deal. You only pay for the traffic you get. 

In traditional advertising (think television ads or billboards), you have to pay for that space whether you get someone to your website (or your location) or not. 

Even if your PPC ads don’t get much traction with users, you won’t be paying for them, so it’s not a huge loss! No more paying for ads that don’t work. 

PPC advertising enhances your Google Analytics data 

In the current version of Google Analytics, you don’t get any significant keyword data. Google used to provide websites with the keywords that got users to their site, but that was removed in the early 2010s. 

When you start using Google Ads (Google’s PPC platform), you can pair it with your Google Analytics data to see the keywords that are getting users to click on your paid ads! 

This gives you information such as the keywords with the highest conversion rates, the advertisements that have better click-through rates (how many users click on an ad vs how many see the ad) and much more! 

Not only does this data affect your future PPC methods, but it can give you insight into what people who buy your product are searching for, which can, in turn, affect your search engine optimization efforts. 

PPC allows you to target a specific audience with advertising 

When someone sees an advertisement in a magazine, on the television or on a billboard, they may not be in your target audience. You can do your best to select the right TV channels or the right magazine, but it’s difficult to ensure that your ad is reaching the people you want it to reach. 

With PPC, you are enabled to select specific searches that your advertisement will appear for! You can make the ad appear for one specific search, or you can have your ad appear for any search that’s similar to your keyword. 

Either way, you can ensure that the people seeing your ad are the people you want to see it. 

Paid advertising provides fast results 

PPC advertising can be helpful for any company, but it is especially useful for startups and smaller businesses that are new to e-commerce. 

When you sign up for Google Ads and input your keywords and the ads, your website will instantly begin to appear in search results. 

You can start with low budgets, and as you begin to grow customers for your business, you can increase your budget to bring in even more customers and, therefore, more revenue. 

The basics of using PPC for e-commerce 

When beginning with PPC for your e-commerce business, you have a few things to consider: 

  1. What is your goal? 
  2. What landing pages do you want to use? 
  3. What keywords does our audience search for? 

Once you have answers to these questions, you’re ready to dig into your PPC campaign! 

Step 1: Decide which network you will use to run your PPC campaign

The most obvious platform for paid search advertising is Google Ads, but there are others, including Microsoft Advertising, AdRoll, Revcontent, and more. Research the networks that your potential customers utilize. Your best luck with PPC will be where your customers are! 

You can test multiple options if you’re unsure right away which will fit your company the best. Experiment a little! 

The best tools to use in conjunction with your PPC campaign are: 

Step 2: Determine the goals of your ads and create them 

Everything with PPC is determined by what your end goal is – every paid ad should have one audience and one goal. 

You can do this by creating a landing page specifically for that paid advertisement! 

The most important thing for every landing page to include is a Call-To-Action. 

The Call-To-Action should grab the user’s attention and entice them to … take action! CTAs can also be included in the ad itself to improve the percentage of clicks your ads get per view. 

Some examples of good CTAs include: 

And many others! Get creative! 

Step 3: Do your keyword research! 

 Identify keywords/search queries that are relevant to your audience. 

These keywords should match user intent, and shouldn’t have super high competition, especially if you’re working with a smaller budget. The more difficult the keyword, the more it’s going to cost. 

Step 4: Link your newly created ad to your landing page 

Make sure your ad, specifically, what the user sees on the search engine results page, matches the keyword or search query. Double-check to ensure that your landing page is optimized for your campaign! 

Google doesn’t allow just any website to appear in the first advertisement rank – your page has to provide what the user is looking for. 

So… how does Google decide ad placement then? 

Google’s ad placement is decided based on two factors: the company’s bid amount and the relevance of the page. 

Step 5: Double check everything and launch your campaign

Review all the information you’ve put into Google Ads and get ready to see some new revenue start rolling in. 

Step 6: Continue to monitor your PPC data 

Once you roll out your campaign, data will start appearing in Google Analytics. Use this data to draw useful conclusions and insights, and optimize your pages and advertisements with that newfound information. 

Useful PPC vocabulary To know before you start 

Click – a visit to your page when a user “clicks” on your ad 

Impression – how many times users have viewed your ad, whether they clicked on it or not 

CTR – click-through rate – how many users click on your ad compared with how many saw it

Bid – how much you are willing to pay for a click

Conversion – a user completing the call-to-action you want them to complete (most likely a purchase in this case!) 

CPA – cost per acquisition – the amount you spend on PPC for each conversion (how much it costs you for a user to purchase something) 

Quality score – used by Google Ads to determine the position of the ad (1st, 2nd, 3rd) 

Ad rank – what place your ad shows up on the search engine results page 

Invalid click – unintentional clicks or clicks generated from software rather than the users you want 

Increase conversions with PPC 

If PPC sounds like a journey you would like to embark upon, we would love to help! 

Contact WebFX today for more information on the PPC Services we provide!