Looking for the best pay-per-click advertising company in Houston? You’ve probably already been told to choose a PPC company with experience maximizing paid search ROI for campaigns on Google AdWords, Bing, and Amazon DSP ad platforms. Shero Marketing has over 15 years of experience managing strategic, high-performing ad campaigns to increase conversions and maximize performance in Houston, Katy, and Fulshear, Texas. Are you ready to get started?
PPC Experts – Strategic PPC Ad Management on Google, Bing, Amazon
But what about campaign strategy? Call Shero Marketing at (346) 218-8472 or fill out the form at the bottom of this page to learn more about our unique PPC strategy and copy craftsmanship.
Why You Need PPC Advertising
Search engine optimization (SEO) can take several months to start generating visitors to your website. Pay per click, aka PPC advertising, generates visitors almost immediately (even the same day in some cases). If you’re already on board with PPC and want to get your campaign up and running, Shero Marketing can help. Get in touch today for a zero-cost PPC ad management proposal.
If you’re not sure PPC advertising is for you, read on. We’ll explain why pay per click advertising is so powerful, PPC campaign types, how to integrate paid SEM into a larger marketing plan, and why you should work with an experienced PPC agency like Shero Marketing.
What is PPC Marketing?
PPC marketing is exactly what it sounds like – you pay when someone clicks on your ad. Your ad is shown to people who are searching for a related topic or reading a web page that’s related to your ad.
Types of PPC Ads We Manage
- Pay-per-click
- Remarketing
- Display advertising
- Shopping campaigns
- Google PPC
- Bing PPC
- Amazon PPC
- Nextdoor PPC
PPC Alternatives
Alternatives to pay-per-click advertising are remarketing campaigns, display ads, e-commerce shopping ads, display ads, and pay-per-view (aka CPM) advertising.
Remarketing ads are shown more prominently alongside content people view on the web. They can be extremely effective at bringing people back to your website to buy a product they viewed previously. They can also help remind users to book services they viewed on your website previously. Remarketing (aka retargeting) ads are also much cheaper to run compared with to pay-per-click campaigns.
Display ads visually display a prominent ad alongside content users are viewing online. Remarketing campaigns utilize display advertising to remind people about products or services.
Shopping campaigns increase retail product visibility by displaying your products in a feed. For example, Google shopping ads are shown in Google Shopping, Google Images, Gmail, and organic shopping results.
CPM ads work a little differently because you pay when someone sees your ad whether they click on it or not. With pay-per-view ads, you’ll pay every time someone sees them. With the CPM model, you pay a fixed amount for every thousand views.
The biggest benefit of pay-per-click over the other options is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. This lets you measure your results more effectively since they’re on your site and you can track exactly what that visitor does or doesn’t do.
How PPC Marketing Works
PPC marketing is based on keywords. When you create your ad, you identify one or more keywords or keyword phrases that will trigger the ad. When someone searches for one of those keywords, your ad is shown alongside the search results.
When you create the ad, you set a “bid” amount for the keyword(s) you’re targeting. This bid is the maximum that you’re willing to pay for a click.
Several factors determine where your ad shows but a simplified way to look at it is based on the bid. Where your ad shows on the page depend on how much you’re bidding versus other advertisers running ads for the same keyword.
If your bid is higher than everyone else’s, you’ll be shown in the first position. If you’re outbid by other advertisers, you’ll be shown below them.
PPC Marketing vs Search Engine (SEM) Marketing
You’ll often see the term SEM or Search Engine Marketing used alongside or interchangeably with PPC. SEM is a catch-all term for different types of paid search marketing, or paid inclusion.
PPC is a type of search marketing but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Organic search marketing (SEO) is the other big piece. They work together to increase your website’s visibility in the search engines.
PPC Management Strategy
Running an effective PPC campaign takes some work and attention. It’s not as simple as creating an ad and waiting for it to drive traffic to your site.
Testing, tracking, and tweaking are all important parts of making your campaign as profitable as possible. You might be able to take an unprofitable ad campaign and make it into a money-maker with some care and attention.
Focus on Your Keywords
You should be testing new keywords regularly. As you identify new keywords and phrases that people are using to find information in your market, add them to your ad campaign.
Don’t run all keywords to a single ad, however. Break your ads up so each one focuses on a small number of keywords, maybe even a single one. This lets you target your audience a lot better and can lower the cost per click for your ads.
Use Negative Keywords
Use “negative keywords” in your ad campaigns as well. These are keywords you don’t want your ads to show for. Sometimes a keyword might apply to different markets in a slightly different context. If you find you’re getting a lot of unrelated clicks because of a similar phrase, you can tell Google not to show your ad if a particular keyword or phrase is part of the search.
Split-test everything. Google Ads, and most other ad networks, lets you create two (or more) versions of an ad and it will alternate which one gets displayed. As the ad gets more views, it can identify which one gets a higher click-through rate (CTR) and display that one more often.
This lets you tweak your ads and as you find the “winners” you can drop the second option and replace it with a new one. Over time, you can improve your CTR and lower your ad costs at the same time.
Watch Your ROI & ROAS
Keep an eye on the ROI/ROAS of your ads and different keywords and phrases. One keyword might get a lot more clicks than another but the lower-click ad could be generating a lot more conversions.
In some cases, it’s better to drop the ad that gets more clicks and focus on the higher-ROI ad. You might be able to generate the same number of conversions (or more) at a much lower cost.
Working with an Experienced PPC Agency
It might sound like strategic PPC management takes a lot of time and work. As any experienced paid search advertising experts will tell you, it is.
Running an effective PPC campaign can be a full-time job in itself. Never mind having to keep up with all the latest changes with the ad networks and learning new ways to optimize your campaigns.
Working with a PPC expert like Shero Marketing lets you focus on what your business does best while we focus on getting you more customers for the lowest possible cost.
A good PPC agency can optimize a lot of things right out of the gate. Years of experience (our PPC department lead has been doing this for 16 years) has taught them what works. That knowledge lets them avoid a lot of trial-and-error upfront and usually ends up saving you more in ad costs than what you pay for the service.
On top of the headstart you’ll have on the ads themselves, the PPC expert will be able to do conversion optimization on your landing pages to get the most out of the visitors who click on your ads.
PPC Marketing FAQ
There are a few questions we get asked a lot so let’s cover them up-front.
How Much is a Google Ads Click?
There are a lot of factors that contribute to the cost of a click on a Google Ad. It depends on the market, the keyword(s) targeted for the ad, the time of year, the quality score of your ad, and various other things.
You can pay as little as a few cents per click if you have a high-quality score and there’s not a huge amount of competition. You can also pay upwards of $40 per click in some highly-competitive markets.
Is PPC Better than SEO?
Neither option is “better” than the other. They both have advantages and disadvantages and an effective search marketing campaign includes both.
SEO campaign management also costs money each month, but it is a long-term strategy. It takes longer to see results and that makes it a lot harder to test. With PPC, you’ll see the result of changes almost immediately.
PPC should be used to get short-term traffic and for optimizing conversions. SEO marketing can supplement that traffic over the long-term, and the keyword and performance data you gain from PPC can improve your SEO efforts. Even if you decide to DIY your organic campaign (which we DO NOT recommend), there’s still the hidden cost of time and effort.
Should I Focus on Google Ads or Diversify to Other Platforms?
Google Ads is one of the largest ad networks on the internet, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Google gets the lion’s share of searches so more people will see your ads there than on other search engines.
Google also syndicates its ads to more sites than other networks so your ads will show up in more places.
Having said that, once your Google Ads campaign is underway, you should diversify. Running your ads on other platforms will extend your reach even further and those platforms tend to have lower ad costs than Google.
You Could Be Getting New Leads and Sales in a Few Days
Once your PPC marketing campaign is up and running, you’ll start getting traffic almost immediately. Compare that to an organic search marketing campaign where it could take weeks or even months to see any significant number of visitors to your website.
Not only will it take that long, but you also won’t know how good (or bad) your conversions will be until the traffic starts. If it turns out that something isn’t working well, it could take another few weeks or months to see if the changes you make work better.
Instead, use pay per click to get fast traffic so you can test your marketing funnel quickly. Optimize things so they’re working well and then look at your SEO.
Shero Marketing can help with both pieces of your marketing plan. We’ve got 16 years of experience as a PPC agency so we can get your PPC campaign running like a well-oiled machine.
We work with various ad networks including Google Ads, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook and serve various cities including:
- Katy & Fulshear, Texas
- Dallas, Texas
- Maryland
- Chicago, Illinois
- New York City
- San Francisco, California
- Denver, Colorado
- Miami, Florida
Free PPC Management Quote
When you’re ready to expand your reach, our SEO service will multiply your results. Get in touch today and we’ll send you a customized proposal for your business.
SOURCES
- How Long Does it Take to See SEO Results, by Jayson Demers. Cited September 15, 2019 from Inc.com. https://www.inc.com/jayson-demers/how-long-does-it-take-to-see-seo-results.html