PPC for Small Businesses: What Should You Know?

Small business owners always had a love-hate relationship with Pay-Per-Click advertising. 

Whether you believe it or not, PPC advertising is one of the fastest ways to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Unlike SEO, PPC advertising can help to generate traffic & leads that your small business needs, FAST!

So, if you’re a small business owner looking for ways to increase your website traffic and leads, you should definitely consider PPC advertising. 

The best part? — You don’t need to become an expert to run a successful PPC advertising campaign for your small business. 

There are certain simple strategies you can take advantage of & generate your desired results even on a small business budget.This article outlines everything you need to know about PPC for small businesses to increase website traffic, reach more customers, and grow earnings.

What does PPC for Small Businesses Mean?

For the uninitiated, Pay-Per-Click is an online advertising model in which businesses bid on keywords that are related to their target audience's interests.

Through PPC advertising, you can bid to show your ad as a result generated when an internet user searches the keyword(s) you bid on.

For example, let’s say that you want to buy car accessories. The first thing you probably do is go to Google and search for “buy car accessories”.

Within microseconds, Google returns a list of results having that specific keyword. These results are automatically arranged based on your location, intent, relevance, etc. by Google’s search algorithm.

But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the first 2-5 results are paid placements ranked based on the highest bidder for that particular keyword.

As you can see in the above screenshot, PPC advertising helps to take advantage of this search results trajectory when your target customers are searching for related keywords.

In other words, PPC advertising refers to the process of bidding on target keywords to appear first in the search results.

The best part? — Google only charges brands when someone clicks on their ad links and goes to a landing page of their website.

Thus, it was named Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Now that you’re aware of what PPC for small businesses means, let’s also check out the primary benefits of PPC for a small business.

How does PPC Benefit Small Businesses?

Let’s look at how PPC benefits small businesses in different ways.

Generates Fast Results

In today’s fiercely competitive market, it’s crucial for small businesses to generate results fast. And as you just learned, PPC is one of the fastest ways to get instant results in terms of website traffic, leads, etc.

For instance, if you have a website for your small business, all you have to do is create an Adwords account, set up your ads, and run your ads campaign in the Google network to start generating traffic to your website.

All in all, PPC is extremely efficient for small businesses to reach their target audience in the fastest way possible.

Helps you Target the Right Audience

PPC is highly-flexible because it allows you to choose when and where your ads need to appear depending on various factors such as target keywords, location, device, time period, and more.

This level of flexibility enables you to niche down in a specific market and get your products or services in the eyes of your prospective customers as long as you’ve identified them by audience profiling.

Cost-effective Advertising

With PPC advertising, you can choose how much you pay for a click and how much money you are willing to spend on an entire campaign.

More importantly, everything in PPC advertising is measurable, from costs, clicks, and visits to profits and more. And since you only pay when someone (with a high chance of conversion) clicks on your ad link, you’ll most certainly get your money’s worth.

Even Low Domain Authority Sites can Rank in Ads

If you’ve recently launched your website, chances are it’ll have a low domain authority score. And Google most of the time does not prefer ranking a website with low domain authority.

Even though you’re performing all SEO best practices, SEO is still a long-term game. PPC, on the other hand, allows you to rank your website in top results even if it has a low domain authority.

As soon as you launch your Ad campaign, your website will instantly start appearing on top results and generate traffic from highly-relevant visitors.

Highly Effective for Local Search

Besides targeting customers all over the world, PPC is even more effective for local search.

You see, most people nowadays use their smartphones to search for products or services near their location.

Not only that but according to the official Google Blog, 82% of smartphone users even notice mobile ads. Furthermore, 88% of smartphone users who search for local businesses on their smartphones either call or visit the store within 24 hours.

The point here is that by optimising your PPC ads for local search, you can easily get in front of your local target customers.

Conversely, if they don’t see your ad, they’re most likely to go to your competitors’ websites through their PPC ads and you will lose countless genuine customers.

How to Build a PPC Campaign for Small Businesses

Building a PPC campaign is easier than you think. All you have to do is, familiarise yourself with the steps involved in setting up a PPC campaign once and you’re good to go forever.

Below are the 5 steps involved in building a PPC campaign.

1. Set your Campaign Goals

Before you begin to set up your PPC campaign, it’s critical to determine exactly what you’re aiming to achieve with PPC advertising first. Is your goal to increase foot traffic to your physical location? Is it to increase the conversion rate? Is it to build brand awareness about your latest product?

Remember, whatever your end goal is, it will ultimately influence every aspect of your PPC campaign, including where your ads will be displayed and how you will run them.

For example, let’s that you’ve just started a new salon business located in Sydney, Australia. As the owner, you’re probably aiming to increase awareness of your new salon and increase foot traffic to your physical location.

Therefore, your PPC campaign ads & landing page must be designed in such a way that it leads potential customers to schedule an appointment.

2. Choose the Right Platform for PPC Ads

Once you’ve decided on your PPC campaign goals, the next step is to choose the right PPC advertising platforms for your business.

Right now, the most popular PPC advertising platforms are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads.

Ideally, a small business should begin with Google Ads. The reason for this is simple. — Google is the world’s largest and most used search engine with an 83% market share.

More importantly, when your potential customers are searching on Google, they’re actively typing in the keywords to find something they need or want to buy.

Now, back to our Salon business example. If you’re hoping to increase the number of appointments, you should choose a platform after performing a thorough search intent analysis.

With Google, you can easily target people who are actively searching for the best Salon in their city.

3. Determine the Campaign Type

After you’ve decided where you want to run your PPC campaign, you’ll also need to determine what type of PPC campaign you would like to run.

There are numerous different types of PPC advertising campaigns you can run.

However, figuring out which PPC campaign type is best for your small business mostly depends on where you can reach the mass of your target audience.

Following are the 5 PPC campaign types you can consider for your small business.

• Search Ads - Search Ads are the most common and popular type of PPC you can run for your small business. They’re basically referred to as Text Ads that show up on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Display Ads - Display Ads are usually images/GIFs/videos type of PPC that are displayed on external relevant websites as well as social media platforms. There are a plethora of ways to run display ads. If you want to display your ads on external websites, you can either use Google Display Network or any other ad networks out there.
• Google Shopping Ads - Google Shopping Ads are ideally suited for eCommerce websites. With Google Shopping Ads, you can show your product along with its image, price, and a short description on a carousel in the search results based on your target keywords.
• Social Ads - Social Ads are basically the ads that you see on various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Just like other brands, you can pay to show up in your target audience’s social feeds or at other places, depending on the social media platform you choose.
• Remarketing Ads - Remarketing Ads generally leverage either cookies or a list of contact information you upload to target your prospective customers who have previously engaged with your website in some way. This could be as simple as visiting a webpage on your site, reading a blog post, or filling out a form.

4. Do Keyword Research

Despite the type of PPC campaign you choose to create, you’ll be required to choose a set of keywords to target. After all, that’s the only way the search engines will know where and when to display your ads.

Ideally, you should aim to select a maximum of 5 keywords per ad group. Note that the keywords you choose must be extremely relevant as your Ad Quality Score will largely depend on it.

So, choose keywords that are relevant to the specific theme of your ad group. In case you discover that the keywords you want to target are not relevant to the current theme, you can always create a separate ad group for those keywords. Plus, you can always perform keyword mapping to tie together the main landing pages on your website.

The most important thing to keep in mind is not to stick with the keywords you choose at the beginning. Instead, monitor the performance of your keywords list closely and eliminate the ones that don’t bring in quality leads.

Keep experimenting with new, more relevant keywords until you feel the campaign is generating maximum results.

5. Track your Campaign

While you set up your PPC campaigns, be sure to track your campaign to monitor its performance.

Google Analytics, for instance, is one of the best, free-to-use website traffic tracking tools that are out there. With Google Analytics, you can monitor how visitors coming to your site through PPC ads interact with your pages and what content they find attractive.

Insights collected from Google Analytics can be leveraged not only for PPC but beyond that as well.

PPC Best Practices for Small Businesses

Now that you have every step involved in building a PPC campaign, it’s almost time to go ahead and set up your first-ever PPC campaign. Before you go, we advise you to learn the following best practices of PPC for small businesses.

Implementing these best PPC practices will help to get the most out of your budget.

That said, let’s get right to it!

Start with Small Campaigns

If you’re starting out with PPC for the first time, it’s best to start with small campaigns. You see, PPC management for small businesses can become overwhelming for first-timers as it requires managing multiple campaigns, their ads, and budgets. And if you’re not careful, you might spend hundreds of dollars in a matter of hours without generating any actual ROI.

Therefore, we highly recommend starting with just a single small PPC campaign on Google Ads. The reason for this is that not only Google Ads is the most popular platform but it can get the website of your small business in the search results of the largest search engine in the whole wide world.

Moreover, if you’ve set up just one campaign, it’d be much easier to track the ROI. And once you have learned all the ins and outs of how PPC advertising works in Google Ads, you can start launching more campaigns along with the existing ones.

Geotarget your Ads

If you’re looking for the best way to maximise the ROI of your PPC campaigns, especially on a limited budget, you must consider geotargeting your ads.

For example, instead of mentioning the city where your small business is located, mention the specific neighbourhood. Doing so will narrow down your target audience and find highly-qualified visitors who are more likely to convert into customers.

Split Test your Ads

Another way to maximise ROI from your PPC campaign is by running experiments simultaneously with your live campaigns.

Google Ads allows you to split your budget between your live campaigns and experimental ads and shows you which is performing better between the two.

Based on this insight, you can implement the changes to your live campaigns. Or, simply delete them and create entirely new campaigns from scratch.

Overall, the Split Test feature is extremely useful when you want to test two or more totally different creatives for the same target audience.

Retarget Website Visitors

If you have set up the infrastructure of your site in such a way that tags everyone who visits it, you can retarget those visitors through Google Display Ads.

As we learned earlier, remarketing campaigns help to re-engage with those visitors who left your website without turning into customers.

In other words, by retargeting your visitors, you can continuously remind them to revisit your website and engage with it in your desired way. When done right, this particular strategy can be a game changer, especially for small businesses.

Use Clear CTAs

The whole purpose of running PPC campaigns is to tell your prospective customers to perform a specific action on your website. This could be either buying a product, filling out a form, or just about anything else.

If your PPC campaign does not have a clear call-to-action, it’s not going to generate much of an ROI and all your efforts & investment will go ashtray.

So, when you’re setting up your PPC campaigns, be sure to mention what action you need the visitors to take.

Leverage Google Analytics

Once your PPC campaign is live, it will continue to generate results as long as you pay for the keywords you bid on. But, you shouldn’t just set it up and forget it.

If you want to get maximum results from your investments, you must monitor the results periodically to make sure the campaign is working at its maximum.

One way to track the performance is by leveraging Google Analytics. The tool, as we discussed earlier, provides you with invaluable insights which can help to adjust/improve your ads’ performance.

In fact, you must continue to monitor & optimise your campaigns to make them more effective and generate results beyond what you aimed to achieve initially.

Get Started with PPC

PPC advertising is neither complicated nor expensive. It can only get costly if you’re not leveraging it strategically. Hopefully, this article has given you all the information you need to start creating successful PPC campaigns for your small business that generates your desired results, FAST!

Alternatively, you can always seek professional assistance from a reputed SEO agency to help you set up targeted PPC campaigns.