Organic website traffic is the best. It means you’re visible. It means your strategies are working.
But taking your website to another level takes a little bit of investment beyond your time. There will always be places on the internet you can’t reach.
Potential customers are out there. They may not be actively looking for your content. They won’t know about your site unless you put it in front of their noses
This is where Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing comes in. And before you sign on, you probably want to know how PPC works.
This is completely understandable which is why we’ve set down an explanation for you here.
1. How PPC Works: It Begins With A Campaign
The most widely known PPC marketing service is Google Adwords. Because Google is top dog in the search engine world, their ads are everywhere. And you can sign up for their service to display your ads everywhere.
And it starts with your Adwords campaign.
In the marketing world, we typically think of campaigns as a series of marketing techniques and actions. But Adwords defines campaign a little differently.
To Adwords, a campaign is a set of ad groups.
A set of keywords defines an ad group. These keywords tell Google where to place your ads on the internet. It helps define your audience.
2. Three Kinds Of Keyword Matching
If you want to know how PPC works, look no further than keyword matching.
Google still uses keywords to help users find content. They also use keywords to help match users to ads.
There are three kinds of keyword matching relevant to an Adwords campaign.
Broad Match
If you’ve ever picked up a Thesaurus, you know about broad match.
This is the default ad group setting. And it matches keywords to their synonyms.
If you sell jewelry and jewelry is one of your keywords, it will match to ring, diamond, jewel, necklace, etc.
You can file this down a bit by asking Adwords to match to extremely close variations. This way your jewelry ad about diamonds doesn’t end up on a costume jewelry site.
Phrase Match
If you would like a slightly more exact method of matching, go with phrase match.
If you ever want to search Google more specifically, add quotations around your search phrase. Then Google will look for that exact phrase.
Phrase match is exactly that. But it matches your ads to exact user search phrases.
For example, if you use the phrase “how PPC works” in your ad group and set phrase match, your ad would show up on a page like the one you’re reading now.
But it would also place an add on sites with the phrase “that’s how PPC works with blogging.”
Exact Match
Exact match is exactly what it sounds like. Exact keyword matching.
This is a match to identical keywords. These ads would only match to searches and sites with the words [How PPC works] if those were your keywords. They would have to be alone and not part of a phrase.
Conclusion: It’s Time To Convert
Once you understand how PPC campaigns work, it’s time to get started.
If you’re interested in starting a PPC campaign, check out our PPC marketing services. We’ll help you get the traffic that converts.