Master Pay-Per-Click Marketing To Generate High-Intent Leads

As a traffic-reliant business, you must capitalize on every opportunity to bring in new users. Blogs, videos, and social media lay the foundation for traffic generation – but what about building upon them? 

Paid ads, with their potential to increase traffic by up to 27%, prove to be a perfect enhancement for your campaigns. They push the boundaries of your audience reach, introducing your offer to people who wouldn’t have found it otherwise.

However, it’s challenging to optimize your pay-per-click marketing returns without understanding PPC policies, bidding models, and ad grouping strategies. 

Uncover all that and more in this essential pay-per-click guide.

What Is Pay-Per-Click Marketing?

Pay-per-click advertising is a digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay PPC networks fees for ad clicks. Advertisers have full control over promoted ads, marketing media, and even how much they bid to display their ads.

Here’s how PPC ads differ based on their display channels:

Type	Channel	Promoted by
Search ads	Search engine results page (SERP)	Displaying ad titles before organic results in SERP
Display ads	Google Display Network websites	Static or animated ad banners on websites or apps
Shopping ads	SERP	Displaying product images with prices before organic results in SERP
Video ads	YouTube and video networks	Playing ad footage before, during, or after the selected video
Social media ads	Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok	Banners that appear in users’ feeds, stories, or sidebars

Marketers love pay-per-click for its cost efficiency, which, unfortunately, is less consistent in the affiliate landscape. If ad-generated traffic doesn’t convert into leads, publishers waste their budget on clicks that don’t translate into commissions, making PPC uncommon in affiliate marketing.

Book a demo and see how Phonexa’s cutting-edge solutions multiply your affiliate commissions.

Who’s PPC for?

• New businesses: Instead of waiting tens of hours for their pages to gain visibility, you can promote content immediately
• Affiliate advertising: Supporting your affiliate marketing efforts with pay-per-click ads can expedite lead generation by around two times
• Niche brands: Those who struggle to reach their target audience can benefit from PPC’s granular targeting, combined with increased visibility.

 

PPC Marketing: Step-By-Step Guide

1. Define Your Goals and Budget

Common goals include boosting sales, generating subscribers, or promoting specific pages on your website. After selecting one, consider your budget to choose strategies you can afford. For example, marketers with tighter budgets should set their cost-per-click (CPC) rates low; otherwise, their businesses can quickly run out of budget.

2. Plan Keywords Bidding Strategies

Keywords signal to search engines that a specific ad is relevant to a person.  To identify the most cost-effective keywords, you can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, or one of the free alternatives: Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Trends, or Google Search Console.

Pro Tip: Consider keyword intents instead of relying on sheer statistics. For instance, a person who searches for “local metal roofing experts” is more likely to buy, and thus profit you, than a person typing “what is metal roofing?”

Group Your Ads

It’s either difficult or ineffective to reach your audience with a single ad. Therefore, it’s best to create several ads and group them into clusters, each speaking to a specific segment of your audience and featuring respective keywords. 

Here are examples of PPC ad clusters for a plumbing company:

• Urgent repairs for water or gas leaks
• Quick drain cleaning
• Construction pipe installations

For the first cluster, you’d want your context and keywords to reflect the speed at which your professional can repair a leak. For the third, it’s best to stress your technical expertise, experience, and quality standards. 

3. Choose the Right PPC Platforms

When it comes to social media ads for business,  LinkedIn might be the best choice. On the other hand, if you target a younger audience, you can venture into TikTok PPC ads. Emails and websites fall somewhere in between, catering to middle-aged users with diverse interests. 

4. Set Up Bidding

Bidding is a PPC mechanism that allows you to choose a maximum fee you’re willing to pay for a click. Though not all your fees are on the brink of your bidding limit, you pay just enough to beat your closest competitors. 

Here are popular bidding strategies that you can apply to your business:

Type	What it does	Best for advertisers who
Manual bidding	Set the maximum sum you’re willing to pay per click	Seek granular control over campaigns
Enhanced CPC	Adjusts your manually set CPC in real time, while staying close to the initial sum	Want to bid automatically while retaining control over their strategy
Target return on ad spend (ROAS)	The system dynamically adjusts your bids according to the selected ROAS	Track conversion revenue and strive to maximize ROAS
Maximize clicks	The system selects bids to maximize clicks while staying within your daily budget	Focus on building brand awareness or starting new campaigns that require conversion data

Granular Targeting

The size of your bids matters less if ads don’t target specific users. Besides narrowing the audience through keywords, PPC allows you to fine-tune your targeting through these parameters: 

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, income level, marital status, and language
• Ad scheduling: Select the time of the day at which you want to display ads
• Behavior: Target your ads based on the user’s past internet actions

5. Produce Ad Copy & Visuals

Here are some tips on perfecting your ad elements:

• Headline: Grabs readers’ attention with provocative statements, benefits, or resonating claims, while remaining concise
• Call to action (CTA): Guides the users’ next steps, like “Visit the website now” or “Pass the registration”
• Product image: Depicts a promoted product or a service in its optimal appearance
• Video: Follows an engaging yet concise script that presents the benefits of your offer and calls to action

6. Create a Landing Page

PPC ads act as a medium between users’ organic activities, such as Google searches and social media browsing, and, most frequently, your landing pages. 

 Here’s how you can create an effective landing page:

• Coordinate your message across channels: Ensure your ad and landing page copies match in tone and offer
• Keep it simple: Break your copy into smaller chunks, introduce lists/tables, and shorten your sentences to increase engagement
• Focus on users: Emphasize how your offer caters to the reader, translating benefits into features

Few address this, but it’s also crucial to optimize your landing page loading speed. If not, your bounce rate will increase significantly, stomping your advertising efforts to the muck.

The best practices for improving website loading speed are acquiring better hosting, compressing page images, reducing HTTP requests, and eliminating render-blocking resources.

7. Enable Tracking

Initially, you must add UTM tags to your URLs to capture user origins, trigger keywords, and other relevant data.

However, if you want to analyze your campaigns in more depth, you need behavioral tracking software, such as Phonexa’s HitMetrix. It gathers actionable insights into your campaigns, enabling you to personalize your ads and optimize landing pages for conversions with precision. 

Here are just some of HitMetrix’s features:

• Friction insights: Reveal mouse-outs, speed browsings, or click errors within your site to identify and eliminate friction points
• Click heatmaps: Inspect your website through heatmap prism to identify sections that translate into clicks
• Session replay: Play records of users’ website journeys to detect UX pitfalls, particularly in forms or shopping carts

Take a product tour and discover how Phonexa’s HitMetrix interprets users’ behavior into business revenue. 

8. Optimize Results

Continuously optimize your ad click-through rates by testing different visuals, headlines, and copy. Speaking of the landing page, its optimization in the PPC context is nuanced. You can overlook search engine optimization (SEO); however, it’s essential to carry out conversion rate optimization (CRO) through engaging content, a clear website layout, and a fast loading speed.

Scaling Your PPC Campaigns

There are two fundamentally different approaches to scaling your pay-per-click campaign: horizontal and vertical. 

	Horizontal	Vertical
Goal	Reach a wider audience with new campaigns	Doubling down on existing campaigns
Methods	Introduce new ads, their types, and channels	Gradual budget increase to fund bidding strategies
Risk	High, you explore audience segments that you didn’t interact with earlier	Low, you reinforce proven strategies with extra investments
Complexity	Venturing into uncharted areas of your business can be difficult and require granular management	Quite simple, as you don’t need to invent new approaches – just increase funding
When to use	You drained current campaigns and seek new sources of conversions	You want to maximize the results of already well-performing campaigns

PPC Policy and Ad Strategies

Don’t jump the gun with PPC campaigns – some advertisers prohibit publishers from promoting their offers through paid ads. That’s when you can only channel PPC traffic to your own landing pages with submission forms, text links, or banners for lead generation. 

“I find that text links outperform banner ads. And if you’ve got a banner ad on the same page as a text link for that product, the text link will perform even better.” – Jeannine Crooks, from Amplify Webinar

Get Your All-in-One Software Suite for Data-Driven Affiliate Marketing

As effective as pay-per-click advertising is, you must accompany it with other channels to generate comparable traffic. That’s where Phonexa comes in – our all-in-one performance marketing suite that consolidates all solutions for lead generation and distribution. 

Our LMS Sync and Call Logic technologies impact leads and callers, providing you with full control over their journeys: 

• Tracking: Explore where exactly leads come from to attribute them accurately to publishers
• Analytics: Identify blind spots within your campaigns and leverage this data to drive business growth
• Distribution: Reduce customer wait times by automatically purchasing/selling relevant leads through custom configurations

The best part is that all our solutions operate within a single dashboard that integrates with third-party services. No more system juggling – just an efficient workflow that streamlines your business. 

 

Get Phonexa’s all-in-one performance marketing software suite at a single price:

Build your plan now, or take a product tour to explore Phonexa’s innovative solutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I determine the most effective budget for my initial PPC campaigns?

First, determine the amount of money you can invest in a PPC campaign without harming your other traffic channels. Next, measure the results of different variations of bids and ads to infer what works best for your specific case. 

What are the common goals in pay-per-click marketing campaigns?

Businesses use social media or website traffic generated by PPC to boost sales, generate subscribers or likes, or promote specific products. 

Can I hire a pay-per-click management company to run my PPC campaigns?

Yes, some marketing agencies provide pay-per-click services. They can handle your business analysis, PPC campaign launches, optimization, and other similar tasks.