Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: What It Is and How to Get Started

Discover how to create effective PPC marketing campaigns that drive results. Learn key strategies, platform options, and tips to optimise your ad spend.

Ever hit search on Google and noticed that the top four results are sponsored ads? You may be wondering what that means and, more importantly, how you can access those ads to bring more awareness to your product or service. The answer lies in pay-per-click marketing.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a marketing model that lets you bid to have your website appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) when someone searches for a relevant keyword. You’ll then pay a predefined fee every time (and only when) someone clicks on your ad.

This guide will explain the basics of PPC, why it’s so beneficial, and how you can use it to get your brand noticed and start competing with established businesses.

• What is PPC (pay-per-click advertising)?
• PPC vs. SEO: Is there a difference?
• How PPC works: 3 key stages
• Key benefits of PPC advertising
• The most popular PPC platforms
• AI and automation in PPC
• 4 Tips for an effective PPC campaign
• Wrapping up
• FAQs

At its core, pay-per-click advertising is a marketing model where you bid for an ad spot. Once you’ve secured your spot, you’ll then pay a fee when a user clicks on that ad. That means, unlike traditional advertising methods, you aren’t paying for views or impressions. Instead, you only pay when someone actually engages with the advert you’ve listed.

• How it works: You bid for ad placements. Your ad shows up in search results or on websites (display ads).
• How you’re charged: You pay every time someone clicks on your ad, with costs based on your bid and competition.
• Where it appears: Wherever you decide to run your ads, this could be Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn or across the display network.
• Used for: Always-on campaigns, lead generation, seasonal campaigns, and remarketing.
• What’s new: Ads now appear in AI Overviews on Google, and will soon feature in AI Mode , giving advertisers new ways to show up during search.

We’ll dive deeper into how pay-per-click marketing works and how it creates a level playing field shortly. But for now, let’s clear up a point of confusion.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a collection of tactics used to drive more traffic to your website from search engines. It involves targeting the right keywords, creating valuable content, and gradually climbing the search engine results page (SERP) to bring organic (non-paid) customers to your site over the long term. Although technically free, it takes skill, the right tools, and often takes months before you begin to see results.

In contrast, the PPC model is a shorter-term strategy focused on driving targeted traffic faster. It requires continuous investment, but there are few better ways to gain immediate traction and quickly move prospective customers from awareness to conversion.

Here’s a quick comparison of the two.

In short, PPC buys visibility; SEO earns it over time. One is immediate and dependent on budget, while the other is a gradual process. The good news is that it isn’t an either/or decision. Both strategies complement each other brilliantly to cover both short-term and long-term growth.

You might expect that businesses need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get started with PPC, putting the strategy off-limits to all but the most successful companies. However, this isn’t the case.

While you will need to allocate some of your marketing budget to a PPC strategy, there’s nothing stopping even the smallest businesses from using PPC to compete with much larger companies. Provided you target the right keywords and your ad copy is compelling, you can out-compete the best-known brands in your industry.

How is that possible? Let’s take a deeper look at the process to understand why PPC creates a level playing field regardless of the size of your bottom line.

To secure ad placement on their chosen platform, companies bid on keywords that are relevant to their target audiences and business offerings. Once they find the right option, they’ll specify the maximum cost per click (CPC) they’re willing to pay for that keyword.

This bid-based model works much like an auction house: every marketer bids their max CPC, and the highest offers win. The more valuable a keyword is, the more interest it’s going to generate. This equals more competition and higher bids for the top spot.

Short-tail (one to four words), high-volume keywords are a hot property because they attract a broad audience. That means higher competition from bigger brands and a higher CPC as a result. For example, this puts terms like “sneakers” and “shampoo” almost off limits for all but the biggest brands.

However, small businesses can stay efficient by targeting long-tail, high-intent keywords. For example, “sneakers made with renewable fibres” or “purple shampoo without fragrance”. These are more likely to convert and, crucially, have much less competition than broad terms, meaning they have a lower CPC.

Expert tip: Set negative keywords to avoid wasted spend. For example, if you sell luxury appliances, add “cheap” or “sale” as negative keywords. This prevents your ad from showing to people who are unlikely to convert, helping stretch your budget further.

Now for the interesting part, just because a business bids the most doesn’t mean its ad will get the top spot. Platforms like Google Ads look at more than just bids, instead using the below formula to determine which ads rank highest.

Ad Rank = Bid x Quality Score

Quality Score is determined based on how relevant your ad is to the landing page customers click through to, their experience on your website, and the anticipated click-through rates (CTR).

In short, this means that a strong ad and a website with an excellent UX can earn a higher Quality Score and place higher even if their bid was lower. As a plus, a higher Quality Score also lowers CPC, helping forward-thinking businesses maximise their return on investment.

This is the great leveller of PPC. Every business can compete through the quality of their ads rather than the size of their marketing budget alone.

Expert tip: Boost your Quality Score with ultra-relevant ad copy and landing pages. For example, if you're bidding on “organic dark-roast coffee,” your ad should mention that in the headline, and the landing page should feature that exact product, not a general catalogue.

Once a business secures a spot on the ad rankings, each click triggers a payment at the advertiser’s predetermined CPC rate. There are a few things to note here:

You don’t always pay your maximum bid: You usually only need to pay enough to beat the next highest bidder. For instance, if you set your maximum bid at $2 per click and the bidder below sets theirs at $1.50, you’ll only pay $1.51 for each click, not $2.

Your quality score can change with time: Your quality score isn’t set in stone. If you improve the user experience and secure a higher click-through rate, it can increase, improving your ad rank and lowering your CPC.

Your ad position can change: Your ad placement isn’t secure. It can change when new bids come through, or when your quality score increases or decreases.

For these reasons, businesses need to make PPC an ongoing strategy rather than a set-and-forget solution. Track conversions, continually calculate ROI, and reinvest in the keywords that are driving the biggest returns.

Expert tip: Always track conversions. Use Google Tag Manager or Meta Pixel to measure sales or sign-ups, so you’re not wasting money on ads that drive traffic but not sales.

PPC has become increasingly important to marketers as the “awareness” and “consideration” phases of the customer journey begin with online advertising more frequently. With the right strategy, you can capture attention rapidly and even out-compete established businesses.

To show you why PPC can be so effective, let’s talk through five of its benefits.

1. Specific targeting: PPC search ads let you target a niche target audience through highly specific keywords, search behaviour, or even demographic data.
2. Rapid results: As we’ve discussed, PPC lets you start driving new visitors to your website from the moment you secure an ad placement.
3. Budget-friendly: PPC is generally cost-effective because you only pay for clicks. You can also set your maximum bid in advance so you never spend more than you’d like.
4. Easily trackable: Platforms like Google make it easy to track all of your PPC metrics. This lets you see what is and isn’t working, so you can boost and reduce your budget.
5. Easy to manage: PPC is a fairly easy concept to grasp. If a specific keyword is bringing a ROI, increase your max bid. If it isn’t, do the opposite.

In summary, the PPC advertising model is easy to learn, simple to manage, and (provided you have a small budget) a cost-effective way to beat the competition, even if you’re just starting out.

PPC advertising isn’t limited to search engines. It spans across social media sites and even marketplaces. Here are five of the most popular platforms.

Unsurprisingly, Google is far and away the most popular platform for PPC ads. In terms of popularity, it blows every other site out of the water, including Facebook and Instagram. Once you place a bid, the platform will assign you a Quality Score to determine placement and cost. You’ll then appear in the SERP when a user searches for your chosen keyword.

Google is the ideal option for any marketer or business owner who wants to get their business in front of the largest possible audience, fast. That said, a large audience can sometimes mean significant competition, so it’s worth keeping in mind that ad spend can be higher.

Microsoft Ads (previously called Bing Ads) is the second most popular PPC option behind Google Ads. And it works in much the same way. You can bid on keywords and have your ad displayed on Bing. The audience is smaller than Google's, but competition is less intense as a result, meaning you can place higher with a lower budget.

Microsoft Ads also lets you import your Google Ads campaign so you can get started without starting from scratch.

Meta does away with keyword bidding in favour of audience-based targeting. Instead, you target users based on their interests, location, and behaviours.

Once you define the audience you’re interested in connecting with, you can create ads that appear in your ideal customers’ feeds. One of the main benefits of Meta is that your ads are visual rather than text-based. This opens up a new social media channel for you to develop interesting creatives that capture attention.

LinkedIn is a stellar choice if you’re working in the B2B space. Like Meta, the platform offers audience-based over keyword targeting, but it focuses more closely on business customers. You can target ads by job title, company size, industry, seniority, and even behaviour.

Now for an interesting twist: AdRoll is a service that advertises to those who’ve already been on your website. For instance, if someone visits your website to learn about the best way to treat acne, you can target them for a new ad promoting your premier skincare product.

Plus, AdRoll can display ads across multiple platforms, including Google and social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, giving you more opportunities for retargeting.

AI is making it easier to run high-performing campaigns with less hands-on management. Instead of manually adjusting bids and testing creatives, marketers can rely on intelligent systems to optimise performance in real time. This is especially helpful given that 93% of marketers are now personalising their ads, a task that can be time-consuming without automation.

Here are some other popular ways AI can help you run your ad campaigns:

• Spend can be automatically allocated based on predicted return, helping you make the most of your budget.
• A/B testing can run continuously in the background, allowing platforms to rotate and prioritise the top-performing headlines, descriptions, and creatives.
• Keywords can be updated dynamically based on user behaviour and current search trends, so your ads stay relevant and meet searchers where they’re at.
• Audiences are segmented and expanded using lookalike modelling to help you reach new users who are more likely to convert.
• Performance data is monitored and analysed automatically, with clear recommendations on how to improve future results.

When you begin to automate the operational side of PPC, it will allow your team to focus on strategy, creative messaging, and long-term growth.

Lastly, let’s finish up with some advice. In order to ensure you achieve a return on investment in PPC campaigns, you should always:

Do you have the time to test the keywords on which you want to bid? What about the time spent actually participating in the ad auctions? Then there’s the reporting to consider, as there’s no point in running PPC ads if you’re not able to see how well they performed.

This is a full-time job for those who work at agencies or in-house for brands who use PPC as a core part of their marketing. For small businesses (SMBs), the more viable route is to use technology, like Marketing Cloud, to support a multi-skilled marketer managing a few marketing channels.

With the right marketing automation platform, for example, a lot of the key steps in PPC campaigns can be done without a lot of human intervention. That means more time you can spend on analysing the results and other aspects of your marketing strategy.

Search engines like Google regularly update how the PPC auctions work. These changes can affect everything from how your ads display to how likely they are to convert. Using Marketing Cloud, you can bring all your campaign data into one place and spot performance shifts early.

To stay ahead, follow trusted blogs, newsletters, and podcasts that break down new features as they’re released. Some updates improve ad targeting or visuals, while others impact performance directly.

There are some hard costs in marketing that don’t vary a lot, like the price of creating a video or having a freelance writer produce an eBook on your brand’s behalf. With PPC, though, you might decide you need to shift the level you’re investing in depending on what happens with your early campaigns. You can use Tableau to track spend against outcomes in real time and confidently shift budget when you need to.

Your initial set of keywords may not have been competitive from a pricing standpoint compared with long tail keywords you later realise are more important. If a campaign is particularly successful, you may also want to spend more to get even greater results. Not a lot of click-throughs? Maybe it’s time to dial it back for a bit.

Your PPC budget should align with your marketing goals, but it’s important to leave room for adjustments as you see what works and what doesn’t.

PPC ads can enhance the customer experience by making it easier for people to discover your brand. That’s why, beyond the technical aspects, you should let your strategy be informed by what you study and learn about people’s search habits. You can bring together all the data you gather on your customers to help create ads that will resonate using Marketing Cloud.

Make sure your PPC ads are optimised for mobile devices, keep your copy clear, and focus on delivering value to your audience. Aside from that, remember that humans are always drawn to images. You’ll want to make sure you have PPC ads that take this into account, including video ads that could be more memorable than words alone.

Lastly, don’t bet the house on PPC ads from a marketing perspective. They can do wonders, but so can SEO, content marketing, and many other tactics. Stay diversified in how you build your brand, and you’re bound to be more successful.

The PPC model is incredibly powerful because it gives businesses the chance to compete on equal footing, regardless of their size, industry, and budget. With the right strategy, you’ll have everything needed to derive value from every click and achieve rapid, measurable results.

If you’d like some support getting the most out of your PPC, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you hone in on your target demographics, automate your campaigns, and unlock real-time insights to find the real ROI of your strategy.

Watch the demo today to see what’s possible.