PPC or Pay per Click: Google Ads and Bing Ads.
PPC or Pay Per Click
Below are the most used Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad formats across Google Ads and Bing Ads. One benefit of these platforms versus others is how near-real-time they are. Ads can be set up quickly and after a few hours, you already have actionable insights and data so optimisations can be done.
Paid Search
Paid search or more commonly known as search or Google Ads is a digital marketing channel that allows an advertiser to acquire website traffic by having text ads appear within a search engine’s sponsored (paid) results. It works by pre-selecting an array of keywords that will likely be typed in by a consumer looking for a product or service similar to yours. One of the advantages of pre-determined keywords is the ability to write different ads to different set combinations of keywords so they become highly relevant.
The entire process is by a bid and auction system. Each advertiser sets a bid to win a position for a specific combination of keywords against other advertisers doing a similar process. The higher bid gets their ad shown to the user in real-time. But bid price is only one of many variables that affect the balance of the auction. For example, a poor website without content will be taken into consideration and even at a high bid likely to lose the auction.
If you’re a new brand or website and thus have poor organic ranking in SERPs (search engine results page) you can benefit from paid search advertising to gain exposure to your relevant audience and get displayed on the top page. Search ads are available in Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Gemini, Baidu and Yandex.
Remarketing or Retargeting
Remarketing or retargeting, different naming depending on the platform but same technique, allows brands to stay connected to their audience who have previously shown interest in your products and or services. By tracking visitors’ actions performed across your website, app and social media profiles, you have the ability to target those visitors based on the actions they took previously. In a practical and simple example, if a visitor clicks an ad a first time and visits your website, you can then show that same visitor an advert wherever that visitor goes: web, social media and more. So this is why it is called remarketing since it will be the second time you market your product or service to that same visitor. With this technique, you can build out detailed and complete marketing funnels and specifically this is an effective conversion funnel. Different platforms have different remarketing features. For example, Google ads have Dynamic remarketing, RLSA, Video and Email (Gmail) remarketing.
Remarketing typically is highly effective providing really high conversion rates and the better qualified the audience, the most effective it will become over time.
Display Advertising & YouTube Video Ads
Display ads are graphic banner adverts shown on dedicated areas of websites and publishers. These ads come in different formats (static image, animated GIF or HTML5) and different sizes as well. Brands and advertisers can choose an array of ad networks such as Google Display Network to place their banners and use targeting options such as demographics, specific websites, interests and more. This channel is primarily used as a brand awareness tool, putting the product or service in front of your target audience who might be interested.
YouTube Video Ads are also part of PPC mostly because they are part of the same family of Google Ads products. Even though it does not work in a cost-per-click model. YouTube is great for awareness and to some degree for call-to-action if the video ad is really engaging and relevant. There are many types of ad formats such as Bumper Ads, Non-Skippable ads and the most common skippable ads after 5 seconds. Targeting options are similar to Display Ads and besides video adverts, you can also target viewers with display banners. YouTube is also relevant because it is the second-largest search engine on the internet and keyword targeting is also available.
Google Shopping Ads
Shopping Ads available on Google and Bing Ads allows companies that sell products online to showcase them in paid search results when a consumer searches for them. These ads benefit from the obvious which is a product photo and price and can be set up fairly straightforwardly by uploading a list of products or connecting your e-commerce platform to Google Merchant Centre (Shopify, Magento and bespoke). The ads are shown based on the same auction system of text paid ads. Shopping ads more often than not yield an extremely positive ROAS (or ROI) and the secret sauce is careful product titles, descriptions and all the other variables that describe a product such as colour, size, material and other product-specific characteristics.