PPC & Conversion Rates – Explained

If you’re new to using paid advertising as part of your marketing campaigns, then the terms “PPC” and “conversion rate” may sound not only alien but downright foreign.  PPC or pay per click should be part of your overall marketing and branding campaign, and a good PPC campaign will yield good conversion rates and generate more leads or sales.  Up ahead: PPC and conversion rates explained.

Pay per click also known as PPC is a way of online marketing where website visits are essentially payed for by you, the marketer.  You pay when someone clicks your advertisement.  It’s simple as that!  

Quite a bit of effort goes into crafting the perfect PPC campaign including doing quality keyword research, appropriately bidding your keywords for online placement, and creating landing pages that will lead to more conversions.

Paying for website visits is only a piece of the pie when it comes to your online marketing and shouldn’t be the entire focus of what you do as a marketer.  Instead, it should complement your content work, organic search optimization, and overall website content and workflows.  PPC can be extremely lucrative if done correctly.

Conversion rates are how we measure how effectively both your PPC campaigns and organic workflows are working by measuring how well your marketing is converting website visitors into leads or sales.

Unless you’re already using marketing software to measure these metrics, it may be difficult to pinpoint exactly where leads are coming from and whether or not what you’re doing is working.  Part of what makes PPC campaigns so effective is that marketers can see in real time both where their ads are showing, who’s clicking them, and how well they’re converting visitors into actual sales dollars.

As we’ve already alluded to, PPC is only an aspect of your overall marketing picture and should be used with cautious optimism and in conjunction with other parts of your marketing. 

Simply throwing marketing dollars towards paid search PPC campaigns won’t necessarily yield positive nor profitable results.  Part of using PPC as a new aspect of your marketing is, of course, learning how to use it and make it effective for your company and products.

Naturally, the goal of both PPC and conversion is to optimize that marriage into sales.  Needless to say, not every click you pay for will result in a conversion nor a sale but your job as a marketer is to make sure that your PPC is targeting the right buyer personas and leading to the right landing page for that targeted client.

Getting your PPC campaign right from the start requires, in large part, understanding not only your potential clients but also what those clients are searching for, what they expect to see once the click your ad, and where they go once they’re on your website.  This requires a grassroots effort to get your PPC off the ground and should start from your website and work back towards your PPC and keywords.

Once you’ve established a clean workflow from your website, then you can start to do keyword research, establish a PPC budget, and begin to try your luck at finding the right combination of the three in order to make your campaign effective. 

Always work to improve your PPC campaign as the PPC landscape and search algorithms are constantly changing and adapting to make sure customers find the information they need when they want it, we know you might need a bit of help with this contact us today!