Have you noticed the sponsored ad links on the SERPs? If you haven’t, just skim through the search page of the Google. The four hyperlinks just below the fold and three above the footer on the SERPs are identified as advertisements. These are the very shortcuts to land directly to the relevant destination online.
However, PPC management companies enter the dog-eat-dog world & compete to occupy this space. But only a few emerge winners. It can be you and I who want to display an ad. But the winner is the one who matches every criterion set by Google Adwords.
Let’s understand what PPC is first.
What is PPC ad?
PPC stands for Pay-per-Click. Let’s try to look in to this concept through an example. Suppose Patanjali wants to promote its brand on the search engine. It would be considered as an ‘advertiser’. The search engine where it will pop up is termed as ‘publisher’.
If the Patanjali’s merchant choose PPC mode which is an advertising model, he has to bid on Google Adwords platform. There it would not be alone. Many other merchants would be auctioning with it. Assume as if it has won the bid, the publisher (i.e. search engine) would display its ad. Now, whenever the online users (traffic) click on it, certain amount would be deducted from the advertiser’s account (i.e. Patanjali).
In the nutshell, PPC is the simplest shortcut to buy traffic online rather than earning organically.
Wondering why do advertisers go for PPC ads? The expenditure on PPC will be trivial if the client will consensually pay fat amount. It determines that the revenue (ROI) generated through this kind of digital advertising would far more than the money spent.
What do advertisers do?
- Search the keywords to spin an ad
- Filter the most relevant keywords that they want to bid on
- Decide how much amount he is going to spend on an ad
- Calculate Cost-per-Click (CPC)-It determines how many times the ad has been clicked. Every click prompts the deduction from the advertiser’s account. Multiplying clicks by the maximum bid amount evaluates CPC. This calculation is a responsibility of PPC account management.
Don’t mess clicks with impression since the visit or mouse hovered over is impression. It would not be counted as a click.
Apart from CPC, there are CPA and CPM ad metrics to run PPC campaign.
What does Google do?
The back office team of the Google Adwords team does the rest of work. It
- Digs in the pool of advertisers
- Enters your account
- Recognize the most relevant keywords auctioned
- Select the ad groups with maximum bids
- Check the quality score
How to determine quality score?
Quality score is the report of the ads’ performance. It is evaluated on the basis of:
- CPC ( which is the maximum bid for your keyword)
- The relevancy criteria of the selected keywords. There are several parameters that justify how relevant they are. Usefulness and meaningfulness are the two metrics that ultimate evaluate their relevancy.
- Alongside, optimization of the landing page (where the visitor lands after clicking on the url in the ad) is focused.
How to calculate Ad Rank?
Since there can be many bidders, the ad rank makes it easy to decide who has won the bid for online ad. Despite being bid with higher amount, the bidder may lose it if the keywords are found irrelevant and the webpage is not optimized.
By multiplying CPC bid and quality score, the PPC manager derives Ad rank. The higher the ad rank, the more advertisers would be proximal to winning the bid.