Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an essential part of digital marketing. In fact, it’s one of the most effective ways to generate leads in the digital sphere. Across social media and search engine platforms, there are dozens of opportunities for PPC advertisements. If you’re just dipping your toes into PPC, it can be difficult to discern which platform is ideal for your business’s campaigns. There are three essential factors to consider when designing a PPC campaign: goal, audience, and budget. Each of these factors will have a significant influence on the platform you choose for your PPC ads.
Goal
What is the purpose of your campaign? Are you trying to target new demographics? Improve online visibility? Drive leads? You should choose your campaign platform with these questions in mind. Social media platforms are ideal places for PPC campaigns that drive sales and engagement. Search engines are the perfect place for increasing brand visibility and landing page campaigns that drive sales.
Audience
Maximize your exposure and reach by building campaigns on platforms that will actually reach your target audience. It is important to know where your audience lives online. Younger generations, like Gen Z and Millenials, are rarely found on a search engine like Bing or Yahoo. For these age groups, it would be better to utilize social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If you are unsure where the majority of your audience can be found, try A/B testing your ads. The results will tell you which platforms are the most effective.
Budget
When it comes to your PPC budget, you want to ensure that you maximize the value of every dollar. Once you have established your goal and determined your target audience, you’ll know exactly where you should be putting your ad spend. That said, it is important to break out your audience into smaller ad sets so that you can see which facet of your audience is performing the best. For example, if you are trying to target women aged 21+, you should break that into three, different ad sets (age 21-34, age 35-50, 51+). When the campaign starts, you can divide your total budget evenly between the ad sets; then, as the campaign progresses, you can see which ad set performs best and adjust the allocation of your budget accordingly.
The beauty of PPC is that it is entirely customizable — you can choose when to start and end campaigns, how much money is in your budget, which audiences you want to target, etc. There is no one, set strategy that is the right for everybody. With PPC, you have the freedom to try a few different strategies to figure out what works best for your brand.
