A Comprehensive Look at PPC Ad Targeting Options

A Comprehensive Look at PPC Ad Targeting Options

If you’re about to run a PPC campaign for the first time, you’ll probably be asking yourself:  Which PPC channel should I use?

With the abundance of PPC ads platforms, you have many choices. From the most popular Google ads to Bing, Yahoo, Gemini, and others, you can push targeted messages to your audience based on several criteria, which includes search behaviour, preferred content, past viewing patterns etc.  

To give you a detailed picture of PPC ad targeting landscape, let’s dive into the ins and outs of targeting options for search, display, and remarketing campaigns.

How do PPC ads work?

PPC advertising is quite extensive and comprises a wide array of platforms. Nevertheless, most of the PPC campaigns fit into the circles of Social Media Advertising and Google AdWords.

Let’s dig in how PPC works on Google Ads.

As an advertiser, you have to pay Google a certain amount of money to make your ads visible on the right and top side of organic search listings. When a user clicks on the ad, you’ve paid the Cost Per Click (CPC) that comes from your designated budget. The moment your budget is spent, Google will stop running ads until you can deposit more funds. Google Ads are further segregated into Local Search Ads, Search Ads, Remarketing, and Display Ads.

How do I target Google ads?

Targeting ads has become an integral part of successful ad campaigns. Over the years, audience targeting has evolved greatly in Google Ads. Remember, you might have curated the most killer ad; however, to get views and acquire customers, you have to show them to the right segment of people in the right time to reach your goal.

What are the two types of targeting that can be done with PPC advertising?

You can choose to target Google ads via:

  • Content Targeting
  • Audience Targeting

Content Targeting: This type of targeting is based on topics, placement, content keywords, and display expansion.

Topics: With topic targeting, you can reach a wide array of pages at once on Display Network. Google Analytics analyses web content and tends to consider factors like language, text, link structure, as well as page structure. Further targets the ads on the basis of topic selections.

Placement: If you choose this targeting medium, Google will search only for the relevant sites. In placement targeting, you do not require keywords. There are chances that placement targeting might either be a subset of the website or the entire website.

Content Keywords: Always choose the keywords which are relevant to the products and services you provide. You also have the liberty to curate any set of keywords to meet desired goals and reach demographics.

Display Expansion for Search: You can also allow Google AdWords to simply find users for you. All you have to do is combine smart targeting and automated bidding.

Audience Targeting: Audience targeting focuses on Demographics, Affinity, In-Market, Customer Intent, Similar Audiences, and Remarketing.

Demographics: You can target the ads on how your services & products trend among users with certain ages, locations, device types, and genders.

Affinity: Advertisers who are running TV campaigns could extend their campaign to the internet and reach their target audience by using Display Network or Google Search.

In-market: With in-market, you can show the ads to users who search for services and products that you offer. These internet users are best for the category retargeting.

Customer Intent: You have to choose the keywords or phrases which are relevant to users who will visit your site and avail your services.

Similar Audiences: You get the chance to expand your audience by simply targeting users from remarketing lists. These types of users aren’t interested in the search for services or products; however, they are interested in interacting with your ads.

Remarketing: These are the target users you’ve already interacted via app, website, and ads. The peculiarity of these users is they are at the brink of conversion. Also, these users might return to avail service or purchase a product.

Social PPC Ads

Google has around 98% of reach across the web, so investing in Google Ads is beneficial. Nevertheless, Paid Ads on Social media platforms offers unparalleled refinement. Facebook has around 1.55 million active users. In addition to this, Facebook also has Instagram, the photo-sharing platform from a recent acquisition. So you can get the most out of these social media platforms.

Social Ads

How are ads targeted?

Google AdWords regularly analyzes several web content and takes language, text, page structure, and link structure into consideration before the ads begin targeting users on the Internet. As mentioned-above AdWords then decides the central theme of webpages alongside target ads. This analytics helps AdWords to have an understanding of where your ads belong. Thus, you start getting traffic on the website.

If you’re wondering, Do you need keywords for display ads? The answer is yes. When ads display keywords, the user begins to find relevance to his/her search. If your business is about manufacturing laptops, then it should speak the language. As a user who is looking forward to buying a laptop looks for relevance as it would further decide whether the user turns into a potential customer or customer.

Let’s move on to the next question that many aspiring advertisers have — how do I run a paid search campaign?

There are certain fundamentals of running a paid search campaign successfully, such as:

  • Identify the right searches for advertising business
  • Target searches that are looking forward to your products and services
  • Provide an interactive ad and relevant landing page to obtain their attention.
paid search

These are the most fundamental rules to run a paid search campaign. However, there are four things in Google AdWords that you need to implement for running a paid campaign.

1. Choose specific keywords for your ads to attract an audience.

2. Your Google AdWords account should have properly compartmentalized ad groups.

3. Write down the most creative as well as an interactive ad. Also, keep modifying the content of the ad to entice more visitors.

After completion of the PPC strategy and execution, you may be wondering — how do I get my first PPC client?

In the world of digitalization, finding a client can be a little tough. Many advertisers also find it hard to land their first client. Yes, landing the first client could be a challenging task, but it is also something that advertisers can seamlessly achieve.

  • When you’re running a PPC campaign, make sure that the client does all the work for you. New businesses come from good word of mouth and referrals.
  • Turn into a thought leader. Understand your audience, what they want to see, how can you help them and at the same time help your business.
  • Never lose track of the sure-shot prospects.
  • Be honest and transparent about the products and the services you’ll provide to the customers.

How can PPC help your business?

Many businesses are already online as the mainstream scenario of business is becoming more global. This is one of the many reasons why people are in a rat race to grow their businesses. When advertisers run targeted Pay-Per-Click campaigns for businesses, they instantly pop-up in search results. Further, these ads entice unattended customers and compel them to visit your website. Resulting in increased sales and profits.

  • Pay-Per-Click is a revenue driver

Business owners across the world are looking forward to expanding their business to increase profit and revenue. With PPC, businesses find the opportunity to increase their sales with online advertisements. If your PPC strategy is robust and well-structured, then your PPC campaign could immediately enhance conversion rate, website traffic as well as revenue seamlessly.

  • Pay-for-Performance:

Businesses want to increase their revenue for sure. However, they also like to have control over spending and costs. One of the best things about PPC is that you can monitor your spending and check whether the spend is profiting your business. If you find the on-going PPC campaign is spending more of your resources then you can make changes and direct the resources, as per your requirements.

  • Using the right keywords:

When you’re running a PPC campaign, you already know that keywords play a crucial role in getting the clicks. As advertisers, you should always test the keywords to garner an idea if they’re perfect for the website and thus business, or not. What makes Google the leader in PPC is, the search giant thrives for providing precise and accurate data with regards to the performance of all ads. Further, this would enable advertisers to receive valuable insights into the keywords’ effectiveness during a PPC campaign.

PPC has the potential and power to give an upper hand to advertisers in terms of marketing efforts. PPC campaigns not only help businesses boost revenue but aid them to prosper. The entire world is online as of now, as it is the survival of the fittest, businesses are incorporating PPC campaigns all around the year to reach their target audience, thus increasing their reach.

Take A Look At The Below PPC Advertising’s Other Chapters

Chapter 1: Paid Search Marketing: What is it and How it Works

Chapter 2: All About Developing Your PPC Strategy

Chapter 3: Quality Score & Its Impact on Google Ads

Chapter 4: All About Click-Through Rate & Its Importance

Chapter 5: Why Keywords Matter & How They Work in PPC

Chapter 6: Effective Steps to Create & Structure Your Ad Groups in Google Ads

Chapter 7: Things You Should Know About PPC Budgets & Bidding

Chapter 9: Top 10 PPC Copywriting Tips to Create Winning Ads

Chapter 10: The Complete Guide to Ad Extensions

Chapter 11: All Things to Know About PPC Ad Formats

Chapter 12: Top 10 PPC KPIs You Should Keep a Track Of

An Introduction to PPC Advertising Basics