PPC Advertising for IT Service Startups: A Guide to Effective Campaigns

Organic marketing is the way to go. However, PPC advertising for IT services can help acquire initial business and push products. Let’s explore this thought!

As per WebFX, around 32% of companies use PPC to sell their products directly to customers. This is a reality for many IT startups that want to make a dent in the market. However, it is tricky to create visibility in the market organically for those who have just started their business. It can be very time-consuming with a lot of to and fro in strategies, and sometimes doesn’t even yield enough monetary results to successfully run operations. What is the solution? PPC advertising for IT startups.

In this article, we’ll try to cover the entire spectrum of pay-per-click advertising. From its core definition, challenges, and step-by-step guide for creating a campaign to finally managing the PPC advertising.

Therefore, let’s start peeling the layers of this topic one by one.

What is Pay Per Click Advertising? Is Google Pay Per Click Any Different?

Google Pay Per Click advertising is paid marketing to make your website, blog, article, etc., searchable on the Google search engine. It is similar to an actual PPC model where advertisers pay a fee to the Google platform to show their advertisement on Google searches for a particular keyword. 

In essence, it is a way of buying visitors to your website rather than earning those visits organically through digital marketing practices like search engine optimizations or other means. From a PPC for startups perspective, it is a great way to bring engagement onto the website, especially if it's a services company.

Types of Google Pay Per Click Advertising for IT Startups and Organizations Looking to Boost Their Traffic!

Google pay-per-click advertising provides several types of pay-per-click advertising options. This PPC advertising for IT startups can be highly effective in terms of boosting website traffic and promoting the business's services. These options allow you to reach a broad range of audiences and target specific audiences that can be converted into potential customers.

These are some of the PPC advertising types that can benefit the IT startups:

Search Ads (Google Ads)

These are text-based ads that appear at the top of Google search results. These ads get triggered when the user enters a specific keyword or phrase. These are highly effective in terms of capturing users and actively searching for IT solutions. 

For IT startups and other businesses, bidding on relevant keywords as per the industry and the type of services can help you appear in prominent search results that are relevant to your company.

Display Ads (Google Display Network)

These are visual ads (banners, images, and videos) that appear on websites and apps by using the Google Display Network. This network has millions of websites that allow it to reach a broader audience. 

Displaying ads is an effective way of creating brand awareness and showcasing IT solutions to a wide range of users. These ads have the capacity to entice new customers and bring in new business to the company.

Remarketing Ads

Remarketing is a great technique to push your services to someone who may be interested but did not convert on the first visit. Remarketing advertises to target users who have previously visited your website. 

These advertisements help in re-engaging past visitors as they browse through websites and other social media platforms. Multiple IT startups can use remarketing in order to remind potential customers about the offerings and can encourage them to return or take suitable action.

Video Ads (YouTube Ads)

Video ads are another format for spreading brand awareness and increasing trust in your services. These video ads can be displayed on YouTube, which is among the largest video-sharing platforms globally. 

Businesses can create engaging video content in order to showcase their IT services to reach diverse audiences. Additionally, Video ads can be highly effective in terms of explaining complex IT solutions and demonstrating their value to the customer.

App Install Ads

Just in case your IT startup has a mobile application, you can use app install ads to promote it on the Google Play Store and target users who are interested in relevant app categories. These ads can be suitable for increasing app downloads and increasing user engagement.
Shopping Ads

There are numerous e-commerce stores online that sell products that range from lifestyle goods to selling hardware, software, and even tech products online. Google provides shopping ads that allow one to display product images, prices, and descriptions directly on the search results. 

Shopping ads can work as a great way to enable customers to compare products with other similar products. This not only helps the customers learn more about the product but also helps them make informed purchasing decisions.

Local Service Ads

There are several IT services that are looking to attract local customers who can benefit from their service. For this, they use local service ads. These ads appear at the top of the search results as per the local queries. These local service ads help in displaying all the essential business information, such as reviews and contact details.

Smart Campaigns

Smart campaigns are automated campaigns that are designed from the perspective of ease of usage and simplicity. These ads are suitable for startups and small businesses that are looking to get started with PPC advertising very quickly. 

There are Google’s machine learning algorithms that optimize smart campaigns in order to achieve specific goals, such as increasing website traffic or phone calls for business queries.

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic search ads are automatically generated ad headlines and landing pages that are based on your website’s content. This approach can help save time and even manage large websites with frequently changing content.

Call-Only Ads

If your IT organization prefers phone inquiries, then call-only ads can allow users to call your business directly from the search results. This can be achieved without even visiting the website.

Implementing PPC advertising for your IT startups and organization is an essential step if you want a quick boost and recognition to generate business. Therefore, if you are onto this pay-for-click advertising to boost your company’s growth, then you are probably on the right track.

Terms and Definitions of Google Pay Per Click Advertising!

To fully grasp the concepts behind Google pay-per-click advertising, anyone needs to understand its common terminologies. 

Therefore, we have described the most common key terms and definitions related to Google pay-per-click advertising to further extrapolate on this turf. Let’s start:

Ad Campaign

In simple terms, an ad campaign is a group of related ad groups and ads organized by a marketing agency or in-house marketing team. This is done to achieve specific goals and market certain products with a particular theme. In essence, it is the entire advertising initiative that is taken to push a brand, product, or service.

Ad Group

An ad group is created to target a particular service. Essentially, it is a subset of a campaign containing a specific set of keywords and corresponding ads. This helps organize and target ads effectively.

Keyword

Keywords are words and phrases chosen in a PPC advertising campaign to trigger ads whenever a user searches for something on Google. These are the foundation of a PPC campaign and determine the search term on which your ad will be displayed to the user.

Ad Copy

An ad copy refers to the text used along with your PPC advertisement. This includes multiple things, such as:

• Headline
• Description
• Display URL

To advertise with Google Ads and make them effective, it is crucial that the ad copies attract clicks and conversions. The best way to achieve this is by hiring an excellent copywriter who can tap the right intent along with the relevant keywords.

Quality Score

Quality score is a metric used to measure the performance of the keywords, ad groups, and ads. This metric quantifies a score for your click-per-pay ads campaign based on the relevance and performance of the campaign. A high-quality score means lower costs and better ad placement.

Ad Rank

Ad rank determines the positions of the ad as per the search results. The ad ranking is calculated based on the bid, quality score, and the expected click-through rate (CTR).

Bid

Once you have decided to advertise on Google Ads, a bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. This can be set at the keyword or an ad group level to influence ad placement.

Click-Through Rate

CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions. This is the measurement of the ads' effectiveness in attracting clicks. CTR is a key performance indicator in PPC advertising.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your ad was displayed to the user on Google search or the display network in your pay-per-click ads campaign. This metric is shown regardless of whether the user has clicked or not.

Conversion

A conversion happens when the user completes a desired action in your pay-per-click campaign after clicking on your ad. This can be done with the intent of making a purchase, filling out a form, or even calling your business.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks a PPC marketing campaign has achieved that results in a conversion. It is the measurement of an advertisement's effectiveness to drive desired actions.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are additional information or features added to your ads in Google PPC campaigns to provide more context and encourage user engagement. Later in this article, we will discuss some common ad extensions, such as site links, callout extensions, and location extensions.

Landing Page

A landing page is a web page created specifically for marketing purposes. Once a user clicks on a particular keyword on SERP (search engine result pages) or email, it takes the user to the landing page for conversion. 

Budget

Budget is the total capital or money the business is willing to spend on a pay-per-advertising campaign. This budget is established for a specific period, which could be days or months.

Search Terms

Search terms are the actual words or phrases that the user types in the Google search bar while making a search. Monitoring search terms for your Google PPC campaigns can help you identify relevant keywords and even negative keywords.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are the words or phrases that marketers need to specify in order to exclude triggering their ads to the wrong audience. This ensures that you reach the most relevant audience in your Ad campaign.

Ad Schedule

Ad schedule is specified in order to specify the days and times your ads will be displayed. This helps you target users advertising for small businesses that are most likely to convert.

These are some of the most fundamental terms and definitions that are related to Google PPC advertising. Understanding these terms and their implications will essentially help you manage and optimize your PPC campaigns effectively.
Requirements and Challenges in PPC Advertising

Google pay-per-click advertising is among the most powerful digital marketing tools that are available out there. It has the capability to drive targeted traffic to your website and drive leads or sales for your business.

On the other hand, quite similarly to any other marketing strategy, it has its own challenges. In order to provide further clarity for our readers from the perspective of PPC advertising for IT startups and businesses, we have discussed the requirements below.

Requirements of PPC Advertising:

There are multiple requirements that are associated with PPC advertising. In order to discuss them properly, we mentioned the most common ones below:

Clear Marketing Goals

Before starting off any PPC campaign that includes Google, it is essential for any business to clearly define its marketing objectives. There are multiple marketing goals with which one takes on Google pay-per-click advertising, such as:

• Website Traffic: Just in case you are suffering from low website traffic and are willing to use pay-for-click advertising, it can make the situation much better. It can help you improve your overall website traffic with relevant traffic that might add value to your business.
• Generate Leads: Generating leads is one of the primary goals behind using a marketing campaign. Leads are interested parties who are highly likely to do business with you or buy services from you. Therefore, by using targeted keywords for pay-per-click campaigns, one can generate leads for their systems.
• Boost Sales: The sole purpose behind opening a business is to create sales. With Google pay-per-click advertising, you can generate leads and convert them into prospective sales, thereby bringing in revenue to your business.
• Raising Brand Awareness: Increasing brand awareness is also important for creating a business. If the customers aren’t aware of your brand, they are highly unlikely to trust your services. Therefore, with targeted keyword campaigns, one can easily increase awareness of their products.

Budget Allocation

Another requirement of an effective Google pay-per-click advertising campaign is to establish a budget. Every keyword comes with its own pricing depending upon the search volume on it. 

The higher the search volume, the higher the quoted price, and vice-versa. Since there are plenty of early-stage and small startups trying to increase their business via it, there should be a budget that aligns with your requirements and the capability of the company to expense. Therefore, optimize a budget for your campaigns.
Keyword Research

While conducting PPC advertising for IT startups and stable businesses, the most important factor behind a successful campaign is keyword research and phrases. These keywords help in aggregating relevant traffic from the Google SERP. It taps into the audience that is looking for the services you are offering. 

This minimizes clutter for the target audience and takes them to a relevant page without making additional strides on the Google search engine. Therefore, it is important that you select the right keywords as they drive the audience back to your website and minimize your ad spend. This would also ensure that you don’t waste money on keywords that are not relevant to your business.

Ad Creative

Creativity is empirical for driving and enticing your audience to the conversion page. With creative ads and Google AdWords, businesses can drive targeted audiences back to the page and convey the value propositions of their product or service. This also includes creating a strong call to action.

Landing Page

A well-designed landing page is the biggest arsenal one can have. One needs to ensure that the landing page loads quickly and offers a seamless user experience. Additionally, make sure that the messaging on the landing page conveys the same idea as your message and encourages the user to convert.

Ad Extensions

An ad extension is primarily used to append more information related to your business and the main body of the ad text. One can easily take advantage of these ad extensions in order to provide information such as location, call buttons, site links, etc.

In order to extrapolate further on Ad extensions, these are the different types of ad extensions that one can use to improve the effectiveness of PPC advertising. Let’s explore the different ad extensions:

• Location: The location extension lets the business know its location along with additional information such as phone number
• Product Extension: This extension lets you connect your Google merchant account with the Google Ads account, thereby helping in elevating product listing
• Sitelink Extensions: The site link extension gives the user the option to visit different pages of the business instead of just the landing page
• Seller Rating Extensions: This extension shows the overall rating with the total number of reviews, thereby helping in building trust and reputation
• Callout extensions: These are 25 char snippets that is used to highlight the selling point, sales, or any other key details related to your business, product, or services
• Structured Snippet Extensions: These are used for highlighting a particular product
• Call Extensions: This extension allows the visiting user to call the business from the ad directly
• Affiliate Location Extension: This extension helps users find nearby stores for businesses that sell through third-party retailers
• Price Extension: This extension lets you display the prices for the users to make a decision-based purchase
• App Extension: Using this extension, one can provide a direct download link from the PPC advertisement itself
• Promotion Extensions: This extension allows the businesses to highlight sales and promotions
• Lead Form Extensions: This extension allows the user to share their personal information directly on the SERP
• Video Extensions: It allows businesses to place video ads on the SERP results 
• Image Extensions: This extension lets you add visual content to complement your text

Campaign Structure

A campaign structure refers to the hierarchy or the framework that is used to manage and structure advertising efforts. This is typically done for pay-per-click advertising on platforms like Google Ads. It refers to structuring your campaigns, which is an essential component for effective ad management, optimization, and achieving marketing goals. 

Some of the key components of a campaign structure are:

• Account Level: This level represents the entire advertising effort
• Campaign Level: It is the next level of the campaign that can be used to achieve specific advertising goals. In this, the parameters roll down to budget, location targeting, ad schedule, and campaign type.
• Ad Group Level: This level is a little bit more specific, with a specific theme and keywords that are closely related. For example, running shoes and hiking boots
• Keyword Level: At this level, you specify the terms and phrases that trigger a response as per the user search. 
• Ad Level: At this level, you create ads that are tailored as per the keywords and the theme of the ad group

Some of the benefits of a well-structured campaign include

• Improved relevance of the advertisement
• Precise targeting in terms of budget and targeting options
• Better manage and optimize your ads, budgets, and keywords
• Track performance at each level for better insights and optimization
• Tracking and Analysis

One of the key requirements of a PPC advertising campaign is the capability to implement tracking. This will allow the businesses to track conversions, analytics, and monitor the performance of the PPC campaigns. This data can be used to assess ROI and make data-driven decisions.

Challenges of PPC Advertising

Just like Google pay-per-click advertising has its own requirements, similar to that, there are several challenges as well. To tell you more about the challenges related to PPC advertising, we have tried to cover the most common ones below:

• Competition: Depending on the industry and the target keywords, one can face stiff competition for ad placement. This can help drive the CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and make it a challenge to maintain a profitable campaign.
• Ad Fatigue: With so many advertisements bombarding from everywhere, users become accustomed to seeing them, resulting in ad fatigue. This decreases the click-through rates and conversions.
• Ad Quality and Relevance: The quality and relevance of the PPC keywords are a big concern when determining ad rank and CPC. Therefore, it is essential to maintain high-quality ads in order to create a successful PPC advertising campaign.
• Click Fraud: This is among the biggest challenges that a PPC advertising campaign faces. Click frauds are invalid clicks on ads that are done with the intent of depleting the budget without even delivering genuine traffic or conversions.
• Ad Blocking: Ad blockers are another challenge that are themselves used by users to block ads. This impacts the effectiveness of the PPC campaign.
• Algorithm Changes: PPC platforms often suffer from changes in Google algorithms and ad policies. Keeping up with these challenges in order to drive traffic is an essential requirement while adapting to the strategy accordingly and continuously is a mandatory requirement.
• Conversion Rate Optimization: Maximizing the results from the ongoing PPC for startups and businesses requires constant testing and optimization of landing pages, ad copy, and the ad extensions that are used from the system

At one end, when PPC advertising can be highly effective, it requires a strategic approach in order to monitor and adapt to overcome challenges continuously. This can enable you to achieve your marketing goals and successfully drive results from PPC advertising campaigns that involve the combination of expertise, data analysis, and creativity.

How to build a PPC Campaign?

In order to build a successful PPC advertising campaign, one can involve several key steps and strategic considerations in order to drive relevant traffic. Whether you’re new to PPC marketing or looking to improve your existing campaign, here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

Step 1: Define Your Goals

One thing that is of utmost importance before starting PPC advertising for small businesses or businesses of any scale is to define your campaign goals. 

It is important to ask this question: what do you want to achieve with this PPC campaign? Some of the common goals that businesses use are traffic generation, generating leads, increasing sales, or even raising brand awareness.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

A PPC campaign can not be created based on pure hunch. It is important to establish who your target audience will be, as well as their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Understanding your ideal customers will help you with creating advertisements that are relevant and will help you choose the right keywords.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Conduct a thorough analysis of the type of keywords that you need to use along with your Google pay-per-click advertising. It is essential because these keywords should resonate with the type of brand, product, and services you have. There are tools like Google Keyword Planner and plenty of other third-party tools that can help you find keyword ideas and even provide estimated search volume.

Step 4: Create a Campaign Structure

Creating a campaign structure is of utmost importance. Organize your campaign into a well-defined ad group based on the related keywords and the theme that your services circle around. A clear campaign structure will make it easier to manage and optimize your ads.

Step 5: Set a Budget

Establish a budget based on a daily or monthly cycle. Consider the goals of your PPC advertising, the existing competition, and the expected ROI while determining your budget.

Step 6: Choose Your PPC Platform

Select a relevant platform that you wish to use for PPC advertising. Considering the fact that the majority of people around the world use Google, it is a collateral choice without any doubt. 

Other popular choices that one may consider for the PPC campaign are Microsoft Advertising (formerly known as Bing Ads), Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Step 7: Create Compelling Ads

Crafting a compelling ad copy that speaks to your target audience’s needs and highlights the USP (unique selling proposition) of your services is another important factor. You need to ensure that you have a clear call to action that is creative to the 10.

Step 8: Utilize Ad Extensions

Take advantage of the ad extensions that can provide additional information and features in your ads. These are very essential as they help you establish additional information about your services.

Step 9: Landing Page Optimization

Make sure that your landing pages are optimized for conversions. The landing page you created should be relevant to the ad and should provide a seamless user experience for the visitors. This will help you push your pay-per-click ads campaign.

Step 10: Implement Conversion Tracking

Set up a metric for conversion tracking in order to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. With this, one can track actions such as form submissions, purchases, and even phone calls.

Step 11: Define Bidding Strategies

Choose a bidding strategy for your Google pay-per-click advertising. One can opt for manual bidding, automated bidding, or a combination of both. This will help you adjust your bids based on the performance of the keywords and budget constraints.

Step 12: Set Up Ad Schedule and Geographic Testing

This step revolves around the placement of your PPC advertising. It can help you specify when and where your ads should appear. For this, one can use ad scheduling and geographic targeting in order to reach your audience at the right time and at the right locations.

Step 13: Launch and Monitor

Launch your PPC campaign and closely monitor its performance. Track key metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Step 14: A/B Testing

Once you have created a PPC advertising campaign, it is time to test and optimize your ads, landing pages, and ad extensions. In order to do so, one needs to conduct A/B tests for your ad copy, CTA buttons, and headlines in order to identify what works best. 

Step 15: Ongoing Optimization

After you are done with the previous step for your pay-for-click advertising campaign, it is time to optimize your campaign based on data continuously. This includes things like bids, adding negative keywords, and even refining your targeting based on performance data.

Step 16: Regular Reporting

Generate regular reports in order to assess the success of your PPC campaign. One can use these reports in order to make informed decisions and adapt your strategy as needed.

Step 17: Scaling and Expansion

After putting all the effort into your pay-per-click campaign and making it successful, it is time to consider scaling it up. This can be done simply by increasing your budget or even expanding your keywords and increasing the spectrum of your target audience.

In order to successfully create a PPC campaign, it is important that you optimize your PPC advertising management practices. Make adjustments to your ongoing PPC campaign by reviewing the performance and staying updated with ongoing industry and advertising trends. This will ensure that you maximize your ROI and even achieve marketing goals.

Best Practices for a Quality PPC Strategy!

There isn’t an iota of doubt that spending money on your PPC advertising campaign without tapping into the best practices is tomfoolery. It's understandable that it isn’t the best word, yet you need to understand that as an organization spending your budget without gains is not ideal for the business. This should especially be the case while considering PPC for startups. Therefore, without wasting any time, let’s start exploring the best practices for your ads-per-click campaign.

PPC Ad Copy

Communication is key in every aspect of life. If we talk about your ad copy, it is necessary that your Google Adwords PPC advertising campaign has copies that resonate with the intent of the searcher. In order to ensure that happens, here are some best practices for ad copies that one should be looking at.

• Be direct in terms of messaging
• Include the main keyword that you bid on
• Try to make the offer appealing
• Try A/B testing with your ad copies to see what works best for you
• Make your CTAs actionable

Landing Page Best Practices

Similar to Ad copies, there are several best practices for creating a compelling landing page from the perspective of conversion. Let’s check them out:

• Create a strong headline for the page that resonates with the search intent
• Work on the design and layout to make it conversion-savvy
• Create a responsive form that fits well with the CTA button
• Make your copy specific and relevant as per your target keywords
• Fulfill your promise as it is made in the advertisement
• Conduct A/B testing

A/B Testing for PPC Pages

Another aspect of the Google PPC ads campaign is to conduct A/B testing for your ongoing campaigns. This lets you choose the best version of everything while you pay for advertising. Let’s explore these strategies:

• Start with the goal in mind
• Test one thing at a time
• Use a large sample size to test things out
• Assign users randomly
• Fix time duration to collect relevant data

Maximize your ROI

In order to truly maximize your ROI, one needs to figure out two things, i.e., customer lifetime value and the acquisition cost. Customer lifetime value is the amount of revenue a business can generate from a customer. 

On the other hand, the acquisition cost, as the name suggests, is the cost of acquiring that customer. There are multiple ways where you can decrease your monetary input and see the change in output to figure out the right balance.

Additional Tips and Tricks

Let’s check out some of the additional techniques that you can use to improve your PPC advertising:

• Tailor your audience by using the tools provided by Google
• Adjust your bids based on the performance of your campaign
• Schedule your ads to show them on particular days
• Use sitelink extension in order to add that additional information
• Monitor the performance of your keywords
• Use negative keywords effectively

What is PPC Management?

Learning about running a PPC campaign is one thing. However, effectively managing to produce results is another. A PPC campaign is not something that you set up, and it’ll automatically turn into a lead churning machine. On the contrary, it is important to reiterate your strategies based on the results produced constantly. This is the exact space where PPC ad management kicks in.

To further define PPC management,” PPC management, also known as Pay-Per-Click management, is the process of planning, creating, monitoring, optimizing, and maintaining the pay-per-click advertising campaigns”.

Tools and Software Used for PPC Management

The platform itself gives the user the capability to monitor the majority of metrics related to your PPC campaign. However, there are multiple other additional tools and software that can help you much more in terms of PPC management. Let’s check them out.

• Google Ads Editor: This is a tool from Google that allows you to create, manage, and edit your Google Ads campaigns offline. This tool is a great way of making changes to your campaigns while they are live.
• Bing Ads Editor: This is similar to Google Ads editor and provides you with almost similar features to work with your PPC campaigns.
• SEMrush: It is a popular tool amongst PPC marketers. SEMrush allows you to research keywords, analyze competitors, and optimize campaigns.
• AdEspresso: The user-friendly tool from Hootsuite that is designed to create and manage PPC campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.
• WordStream PPC Advisor: If you’ve heard about AI in marketing, this tool can be used for automated recommendations that can help you improve your PPC campaigns. It can help with tasks like fixing keyword issues, optimizing bids, and improving ad copy.
• Optmyzr: This tool is ideal for enterprise-level requirements. Optmyzr offers a wide range of automation features that can help users save a lot of time and improve efforts.
• Google Ads Performance Grader: Another tool from Google for PPC management that provides a quick and easy way to assess your performance. These tools help in identifying areas of improvement and provide recommendations for optimization.
• ReportingNina: The tool automates the creation of PPC reports by generating reports in multiple formats such as PDF, CSV, and Excel.
• DashThis: This tool allows you to create your own custom PPC dashboards that let you connect data from a variety of sources which includes Google Ads, Bing Ads, and SEMrush.

Conclusion

Majority of startups fail in the very first year. In this dynamic world of IT services where innovation and expertise are paramount, there is a huge queue of startups that are struggling to make big. With PPC advertising for IT startups, one has a chance to generate business without struggling amongst the competition. It is an easier path that can help you generate consistent revenue so that you can establish your own in-house marketing team for the future. In this article, our purpose was to help you explore this amazing opportunity that can get you your initial clients so that you have testimonials and good clientele to push the business further in the future.