The Best Pay-Per-Click Strategies For Small Businesses (PPC Ads)

If you're new to online advertising, all the options available to you can quickly become super overwhelming. But if you're a small business or a digital marketer looking to quickly impact your leads and sales, there's no better method than pay per click ads, otherwise known as ppc. Part of what makes PPC ads so appealing is that you only have to pay for an ad when the user clicks on the ad. The amount you pay for those clicks is referred to as CPC or cost per click. The goal of any PPC ad is to get the most clicks for the lowest cpc. Try saying that five times fast, you know what I'm saying. To help you keep those CPCs low, we recruited one of HubSpot's in house pay per click experts, Dominic Tagonod. First we asked him to explain why PPC ads are great for first time online advertisers. He said PPC campaigns allow you to precisely target your audience and place a message in front of them. It's one of the easiest ways to get your brand in front of the right people as long as you do it correctly. So if your PPC ads run correctly, HubSpot has a free, free PPC kit that you can download from the link in the description below. It'll help you keep up with the competition that's already profiting from PPC ads. Now let's jump into the strategies you need to run a successful PPC ad campaign. First is deciding where you should run your ads. Every online advertising platform offers some form of pay per click solution, so we asked Dominic Tagenaud his advice for choosing the right outlet. He told us there's no one stop shop for every available audience. Your customers might be searching for your product or service, or maybe they need to be introduced first through social media. In other words, you can focus on capturing leads via search engines like Google, where the user types in what they're looking for. Or you can use in feed ads on social media to capture a targeted audience that might be interested in what you're selling but needs to be made aware of it first. Why choose one method over the other? Well, PPC ads on search engines respond specifically to intent like I intend to for you to click on my ad. The user is actively searching for information and your relevant product or service can be the first result they see. It's hard to imagine being more right place, right time than that. New advertisers also like search ads because they're easy to launch. You don't need to spend time taking photos or shooting videos to use in your campaign. As someone who shoots video for a living, I find that very hurtful and I completely understand. All you have to do is enter the text and start running your ad right away. You pay Google every time a user clicks on your link and hopefully that click turns into a lead or sale. It's that easy. The problem is not every product or service gets enough search volume. And if nobody Googles what you're selling, then search ads won't work to increase business. Instead, you need to increase awareness while encouraging clicks. That's why social media ads are great for just that. For example, did you know there are apps designed specifically to help you find and cancel subscriptions that you forgot you pay every month or year? Me neither. But after seeing this ad on my social media feed, I clicked the install button on my phone and it saved me a ton of money. I totally forgot about that intermittent fasting app I downloaded back in 2020. Placing your social media feed ad in front of the right audience can help you get those clicks, leads and downloads you're looking for. No matter whether you choose search or social pay per click ads, it's important to set parameters before you start running any campaign. Otherwise, and not that I know this from experience, you'll end up wasting money on ads that underperform. You need to get specific about the exact result you want to achieve. So if you're selling a mobile app, your immediate KPI is probably people installing the app on their phone. KPIs should be matched up with other metrics like average lifetime value of a customer to determine if the pay per click ads you're running are actually worth what you're paying for. A lot of people ask how much should I be paying for my PPC ads? Well, according to our expert Dominic, the best way to determine your cost per click CPC is is to reverse engineer from your acceptable cost per acquisition. Of course, there's a difference between acceptable cost and optimized cost. A lower CPC means less money spent for the same revenue and more money going towards your bottom line. Which is why, even after you've learned how to run basic PPC ads, you'll want to put effort into optimizing them to get the best results. You can do that by testing different ad copy or graphics or special offers and comparing the results. Like, hmm, yeah, the ad copy where I told everyone that I would cry if they didn't download my product. That didn't work. Hmm. I learned something today. But another way to improve your CPC is through better targeting. No matter where you run Your PPC ads, you can target them to a specific audience. This can be done in two ways. The first is through keywords, which are actually short phrases that help search engines make sure your advertising matches what the user is looking for. Google Ads has built in tools that will recommend keywords based on the landing page your ad points to. It's important that your landing page matches the offer you're advertising. You don't want to just point to your homepage. That would be foolish. All right. Create a specific landing page for each ad so the user can make a purchase or sign up for more information in just one click. Google can also make suggestions based on your specific product or service, or you can mainly enter your own keywords. If you want to do your own keyword research, there are dozens of tools online that will let you dive deep into analyzing the best keywords for your product or service. I did a whole video on keyword research that you can find in the description below. In addition to keywords, both search and social media platforms offer targeting by user interests and demographics. You can target by things like location, language spoken by the user or interests as they pertain to your product. These are all great ways to get your ad in front of the right customer. The better suited the ad, the more likely the click and the lower the cost per click. And look at me. I think we can all agree that that's the good stuff. You know what I'm saying? Now, in order to know how well your ads perform, you need a system to keep track of the analytics that will tell you if your ad campaigns are moving the needle in the right direction. You want to track things like the number of impressions your ad received, the amount of clicks those impressions generated, how many of those clicks became conversions, and the average cost of all three. Remember that free PPC kit link I mentioned at the beginning of this video? It includes a template for recording all the essential PPC ad metrics so you can easily evaluate and improve your PPC efforts. It also includes a spreadsheet to help you organize your future ad planning. And there's a checklist that you should review every time you're ready to run a new PPC ad campaign. You can download the whole kit for free from the link in the description. And don't forget to smash the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so you never miss a video subscribe. That will help you learn all the tips and tricks for online marketing. That's what we call the HubSpot way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I got some ads that I'm going to go click on. You know what I'm saying? You won't see me for a while. Until then, I'll see you next time. I can find this client info.

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