PPC or CPC Defined

Have you ever heard of CPC or PPC ? Pay Per Click ? Does any of that make sense to you ? Well let’s go over some definitions first.

CPC is cost per click. Basically this means you’re going to pay x amount per click for ad campaigns that you set up on a platform like Bing Ads or Google Adwords.

PPC is pay per click. It’s a marketing model where you’re paying a fee every time someone clicks on your ad.

It’s paid advertising.

You may hear that you can either do free traffic / advertising or you can do paid traffic / advertising. I think both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The image above shows you how my PPC journey is going so far. This is one experiment with Amazon doing PPC. Not everyone will see the same results.

Advantages and Disadvantages

With paid advertising, you can immediately start getting traffic. That’s the biggest advantage.

As long as you’re willing to pay and bid on the clicks that are above the fold (in your top group of search result listings). Sometimes even when you pay for the clicks that are on page 2, you can still however get some traffic, but it pales in comparison to what you will get on the first page.

The main disadvantage as you can imagine is that you have to pay for it. While some may think that’s a bummer, the other side of the coin is not having to wait for days, weeks, months or years to break into the top pages organically for traffic for keywords that you’re targeting.

Paid advertising also allows you to compete with far more established websites that have been around for a while even if your website is only a few days old. Now of course that depends on a number of different factors in the campaign that you set up.

An additional disadvantage is that depending on the campaign that you set up, it can cost you a lot of money per click which will also affect your visibility if your budget can’t keep up with the search volume associated with the campaign.

Lastly, having an established PPC campaign running during the holidays is a great way to make some additional cash from commissions as an affiliate. Buyer intent is greatest when you’re nearing the holidays because there are simply more people purchasing products.

Advertising Platform of Choice

This post will focus on Bing Ads (they are now called Microsoft Ads, but most people still refer to them according to their former title).

Bing is more forgiving than Adwords and you don’t have to do too much searching around to figure that out for yourself as well if you spend any amount of time reading about them either in Google or on Bing.

There certainly are similarities and there are differences too.

The Bing Ads Campaign

Each campaign is going to comprise of several main elements that include:

• Campaign name

• Keywords

• Ad Group

• CPC cost

• Daily Budget

• Bid Type

• The actual ad itself

• Tracking

I’ll keep this simple as I go through explaining each section.

The campaign name is self explanatory.. This is just the name of the campaign, but it helps to have a system for how to name this from an organizational standpoint.

As for keywords, the first thing that I would advise is to do your research. I will tell you that my secret weapon for research is Semrush. I personally use this for all of my campaigns because when compared to free keyword research tools, there’s no contest. Semrush gives you high quality competitive insight and data.

Most people have heard of Ahrefs, and to be honest.. both tools are very close in pricing unless you’re getting into the Agency / Enterprise realm where Ahrefs can run you $1000. However, for most of us their $99 plan is more than enough and both offer that within their current pricing models.

Semrush Pricing

I’ll show you how I would go about doing some research for a PPC campaign for a product in a video that I’ve made below. Consider the timeframe for when this post has been written, we are going to target christmas trees.

It’s important to know why getting a subscription for Semrush matters. The data matters folks. I will say it again. The data matters and if you want to have any chance at doing well and competing with everyone else trying to do this too… you have to have the right tools and Semrush is one of the best you can get when it comes to PPC keyword research and insights.  

Not everyone is willing to do this, but in the video, I actually go through and show you over the shoulder how I filter certain columns to get keywords that I use in my own PPC campaigns. This is my go to keyword tool when I do research for anything I’m doing because it’s just that darn good.

Here’s the video.

Get Your Semrush Subscription 

The Bing Ads Campaign (Continued)

Here’s what I know for a lot of people… most people don’t really like competitive keyword research. Why ? Because it’s “research” and it’s data and it feels like work.

Let’s face it.. if you’re going to be successful in PPC, you have got to get used to the reality that you’re going to need to get comfortable with research because that’s where the success of it all begins. It’s in the data and the data is the research. It’s like having the answers to the test before you take it.

Competitive research gives you insights that you will never get if you don’t have the tool and in this case, Semush is the tool you need. So be sure to get your monthly subscription if you’re going to take the information I’ve provided and give PPC a try yourself. Even if you don’t try PPC, Semrush is still an invaluable too even for searching keywords that you would use for daily, weekly or monthly blog posting in general.

Ad groups

Adgroups are where your keywords are going to go as you create your campaign. With the data that you get from Semrush when you do the keyword research as I showed you in the video. You can export those results into Excel and then copy the keywords to your adgroup.

The CPC cost is your cost per click. This is the cost that you’re setting so that when someone clicks on your ad this is what you’ll be charged. Understand that this can change if you have an “excellent” quality score (also referred to as QS) or a really bad quality score.

Daily budget is what you’re willing to spend each day on your ad campaign. There are many instances in campaigns that I have personally set up where I’ve set my daily ad spend at $100 and didn’t get anywhere near that ceiling even after running a campaign for a full 24 hours. I’ve also experienced the same thing when I’ve set my daily ad spend at $10 as well. Just because you set your ad spend at a certain amount doesn’t mean you’ll spend it. It really all depends on how your ad performs and other metrics associated with the campaign.

Winning Bidding Strategy

Bid type is your bidding strategy. There are several options here. The default is Enhanced CPC, but the conventional advice is that you should “never” use this option.

My recommendation is to use manual as your strategy and set your own bid. Note: if you’re wondering, how do I know what is the right CPC to set if I use the manual strategy.. please go back to my video on competitive research. Reviewing the video helps you understand the importance of having a Semrush subscription. Having the competitive research data will help you determine where you should set your CPC bid.

As for the actual ad itself, there are good ways to write ads and bad ways to write them. It’s good to stick to the general rule of thumb to add your keywords in the ads themselves. You’re not going after click bait type of titles, but you want them to be appealing to people searching for the products that you’re targeting.

There are also character limits as well that you will have to pay attention to.

Tracking Your Ad Campaigns

As for tracking, the tracker that I prefer to use is Clickmagick. There are other options out there that are available but none are more reviewed and discussed than Clickmagick and most aren’t as user friendly as they are either which is why I’m recommending them. Tracking is not the most appealing thing to do, but to keep things as brief and uncomplicated as possible… if you aren’t tracking your links you don’t know what is working and what is not.

Clickmagick also offers a 7 day free trial. I don’t recommend using the trial offer until you’ve got at least “one” campaign up to see it in action.

I know that’s a lot to wrap your head around on the subject but there are few more things to mention before I end this post. The first thing to mention is that, there are good days where people are clicking on your link in your ad and you’re making conversions. There are also bad days where you won’t see any conversions at all.

You have to learn to test and tweak your ads. I do this all the time and don’t be afraid to call Microsoft Ads either. I have spoken with several individuals and they are very helpful. However, not all representatives are created equal. I haven’t had bad experiences but I have found that some are more helpful and more knowledgeable than others. Communication and transparency as to what you’re doing is important.