Branded Search (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is a digital advertising model where businesses pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. It’s commonly used on platforms like Google Ads and social media to drive targeted traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate leads or sales quickly by appearing at the top of search results or in users’ feeds. Before we delve any deeper into our PPC guide, let’s take a look at some essential PPC marketing terms that you need to know:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Leveraging search engines to market your brand, services or products to specific target audiences through paid and organic techniques.
Ad Rank
This is ultimately where your ad appears on a search engine results page (SERPS). Ad rank is calculated by multiplying your quality score by your maximum CPC bid.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
How much it costs to earn a single conversion or sale from your PPC ad.
Quality Score
This is a metric that measures the relevance of a PPC marketing ad.
Cost Per Mille (CPM)
This is also known as cost per thousand. With a CPM pricing model, advertisers or marketers pay for every 1,000 ad impressions.
Bid
The maximum amount of money or budget a PPC marketer is willing to spend on each ad click.
Ad groups
The grouping or segmenting of your PPC ad keywords into certain categories or themes.
Landing page
The webpage or destination that a user will click through to when engaging with a paid ad.
What is the Difference Between Paid vs Organic?
Both PPC and organic advertising are essential to a consistent, creative, and balanced digital marketing strategy.
In many ways, paid search is more direct and delivers swift results in terms of brand awareness, engagement, and conversions. But, without utilizing organic marketing or advertising, you will miss out on a wealth of brand-boosting and customer loyalty-inspiring opportunities.
Here’s a quick ‘PPC versus organic’ guide to help you get to grips with each discipline:
What are the Types of PPC Campaigns?
Next, we’re going to explore the different types of PPC campaigns that you can weave into your digital marketing strategy.
Search
Search-based PPC campaign marketing ads are those that appear in SERPs, much like the wedding dress example we explored above. Search-based PPC ads typically appear in the top left or right-hand corner of a search results page and include a clickable headline, URL, and body copy.
Sponsored social
Paid or sponsored social media ads work similarly to search ads, as you can add your content and set your ad parameters before launching your campaign. Social media ads are specific to each platform (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.), and you can view each channel’s native analytics data to measure your performance.
Display
PPC display ads are arranged in a similar format to search-based campaigns, but they include a visual element to improve clicks and engagement. These types of PPC ads include imagery or graphics (often in the form of banners). Top Tip: Try for yourself how to build a responsive ad with our downloadable toolkit, the Google Ads Creator Template.
Video
You can use paid video ads for search engines as well as various social media platforms. Like static ads, paid video ads are highly targeted and include a headline, body copy, a CTA button, and, of course, engaging video content to entice users to engage.
Remarketing
PPC-based remarketing ads are usually presented in a display-style ad format, but they’re designed or programmed to reach customers who have previously engaged with a specific landing page, service, or product.
By targeting a consumer using retargeting, you’re more likely to tap into a warm lead and close a sale. In fact, according to a study by Semrush, people are up to 70% more likely to invest in your product or service when you use retargeting.
Shopping
Paid Google shopping ads are highly visual and appear in a carousel format above the main search engine results list. Succinct and punchy, these ads are served to users based on their search or shopping intent and typically feature the product price, headline, and brand name.
How is AI Changing Paid Search Advertising?
The future of paid search advertising is being reshaped by automation and advanced technologies. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool for bidding optimization — it now assists in generating ad creatives, refining audience targeting, and streamlining keyword suggestions. What once took hours of manual work can now be accomplished in minutes with AI-driven platforms.
Advertisers can leverage built-in AI features from platforms like Google Ads and Meta to create and iterate on multiple ad versions, test creative elements in real time, and adjust campaigns based on performance insights.
By using AI for PPC campaigns, marketers can scale more efficiently, make data-driven decisions faster, and focus on higher-level strategy and storytelling. As these tools continue to evolve, the future of paid search will become even more personalized, intelligent, and results-focused.
Surviving the AI hype
As mentioned previously, AI can easily take over all aspects of your PPC campaign with just a push of a button if you allow it.
However, PPC marketers should be warned that platforms may manipulate via nudges like red budget alerts, "AI essential" tags, and deceptive defaults, which you counter by verifying metrics, pinning RSAs, and disabling expansions. These subtle tactics may not give you more in return, but prioritize more spending over quality results.
What Does a PPC Specialist (S-Media) Do?
Did reading through this guide get you interested in running your own campaigns? While PPC isn't overly difficult, it does require some knowledge of how the process works. If you want to become a PPC specialist, you must be prepared to command a great deal of planning and research if you want to get the best ROI from your efforts.
The key things to remember include optimizing your landing page before anything else, and then setting a budget and choosing a bidding strategy. Then comes the onerous—but achievable—task of researching and choosing the right keywords. You also have to continuously learn and be creative with your ads to keep up with trends and catch the attention of your intended audience.
This is followed by creating your ad. And once the ad launches, you have to track, measure, test, and tweak to make sure that your PPC efforts are producing the traffic, conversions, or leads you deserve.
Lastly, PPC experts always try to stay on top of their game by being up-to-date with PPC trends. Since the landscape of digital marketing is changing fast because of AI, it pays to be aware of the latest news and techniques other PPC marketers are using in their campaigns.