15 Mar How to structure a PPC Search Campaign to bring more traffic to your business.
Have you ever wondered how many people are on the internet using search engines to find products or services that you sell?
If you’re thinking about whether you need to work on your SEO or PPC to gain more traffic, then these statistics highlight how many people are using search each day.
People are online and you could be attracting them to your website to increase your sales or leads by utilising better SEO and PPC techniques.
Google Search Engine Facts
The website internetlivestats.com has some really interesting facts about search engines and in particular Google. The data shows how dominant Google is in the search landscape.
- Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second! This equates to 3.5 billion searches per day! That’s 1.2 trillion searches a year globally!
- Google was founded in 1998 and at first was seeing 10,000 searches per day.
- in 1999 Google spent 1 month crawling and indexing 50 million web pages. In 2012 this same action was completed in less that 60 seconds!
- 16%-20% of all search terms on Google have never been search before!
- Each search term travels on average 1,500 miles to a data centre and back before answering the users query.
- A single Google query uses 1,000 computers and just 0.2 seconds to provide an answer to a query.
- In 2012 Google received over half of the search volume worldwide with a whopping 65.2% of search volumes!
| Search Engine | Percentage Share of web search volumes | Quantity of searches per month (Dec 2012) |
| 65.2% | 114.7 Billion | |
| Baidu | 8.2% | 14.5 Billion |
| Yahoo | 4.9% | 8.6 Billion |
| Yandex | 2.8% | 4.8 Billion |
| Microsoft (Including Bing) | 2.5% | 4.5 Billion |
There is a huge amount of traffic especially on Google and therefore advertising on Google can be hugely beneficial. But making sure you are using Google ads correctly really helps! If you hire an agency or even myself, you’ll hear things like Keywords, Search Terms, Adgroups, Campaigns and accounts mentioned but what are these?
What is a PPC Campaign?
The PPC Campaign is the overall umbrella that holds all the adgroups underneath it. You can have many adgroups within a campaign.
What is a PPC Adgroup?
If you were to sell two different products, Ladies shoes and Mens shoes, you could batch together all the keywords related to Ladies shoes, in one ad group and all the keywords related to mens shoes in another.
What is a PPC keyword?
A PPC keyword is a keyword that you define in your adwords campaign that is relevant to your business and the products and services you provide. The keywords specified help you show up when users type in search terms. (Or speak search terms – i.e Voice search.
Keywords are added to your adgroup using a variety of different match types. I recently wrote an article explaining these different match types that you can read here. However, these match types were actually updated recently by Google and In the coming months Google will be changing the way the broad match modifyer keyword works.
What is a negative Keyword?
Negative keywords are used to block your ads from showing and gaining clicks that waste your budget on irrelevant terms to your business. Negative keywords can use the same match types as regular positive keywords but help stop your ads from showing.
For example, if you sell brand new products you might want to add ‘2nd Hand‘ as a keyword to stop your ad from showing when someone is looking for something second hand. Another good example is ‘free‘ if you sell a product and want someone to pay for it, you don’t want people clicking on your ads looking for ‘free‘ items as these won’t be spending money with you. Using negative keywords well, actually saves you money, as it stops you from wasting budget on ads from people that are highly unlikely to make a purchase.
What are the elements of a PPC ad?
If you thought it was just a simple case of creating just one type of text ad, you might be mistaken.
Currently there are 5 different types of search ads available in the UK.
- Text Ad
- Responsive Search Ad
- Call Ad
- Dynamic Search Ad
- Responsive Display Ad
Although the ads might look similar, the way they are set up and behave is different. Most search ads are made up of a headline – That needs to have a strong call to action, that clearly highlights your offer or service and aligns with the search term and keyword used to show the ad.
The headline below showed an ad when I searched for ‘Toddler Slippers’ it has the search term I used within the headline and therefore ‘should’ be a useful ad result.
Headline
Under the headline is the description that is further used to highlight features of the business and often includes another clear call to action. In the example below, the description mentions ‘Children’s Clothing’ ‘Fresh looks’ ‘smart’ ‘soft’ and ‘available’ all enticing me in to want to click on the ad.
Description
Paths
Paths are actually an option that you define in your adwords account and you can choose 2 paths. In the example below Next have used path 1 as ‘children’s’ and path 2 as ‘winter’ When using paths, you get the option to add 2, the paths ideally want to be relevant and using calls to action like buy, book, play etc. The path url can be different to the URL the customer goes to. Think of paths as vanity URL’s not the actual URL.
Now that you know how popular Googles search engine is and how PPC campaigns are made up of adverts and keywords, it’s time to start utilising the power of PPC and driving qualified traffic to your website to increase leads and revenue.
If your ready to start utilising the power of PPC and want some help setting up and managing a campaign please get in touch to discuss further.
