Pay-Per-Click Advertising Guide

PPC is an auction, and the auction rewards relevance

Pay-per-click is simple to describe and expensive to do carelessly: you bid to appear when someone searches a phrase, and you pay when they click. The part beginners miss is that Google discounts relevance. A tightly matched ad pointing at a tightly matched page pays less per click than a lazy one bidding on the same phrase. Quality is literally priced in, and that shapes everything below.

Two budgets, not one

Separate the media spend (what the platform takes per click, the fuel) from the management cost (the time or fee spent making that fuel efficient, the engine). Conflating them is how businesses end up "spending £1,000 on Google" with no idea which half did what. We've written up the split with numbers in our PPC cost guide if you want that side of it.

Structure narrow, match carefully

Group keywords into tight themes with ads written for each, so the searcher sees their own words reflected back at them. Use phrase and exact match to control what you pay for, because broad match plus an unwatched budget is how you buy clicks from people searching for jobs, free versions and things you don't sell. Then feed the negative keyword list weekly from the search terms report. The negatives are where the wasted money hides, and trimming them is the least glamorous, highest-return hour in PPC.

The landing page is half the campaign

Send the click to a page that continues the ad's sentence: same offer, same wording, one clear action. Sending ad traffic to your homepage is paying for attention and then misplacing it. If a campaign's numbers look poor, suspect the page before the ads. In our experience the page is guilty at least as often.

Measure to the sale, not the click

Set up conversion tracking before spending a pound, calls, forms, purchases, and judge the account on cost per enquiry and what those enquiries close into. Click-through rates are the platform congratulating itself. The concession worth making: PPC's great weakness is that it stops the moment you stop paying, which is why it pairs with SEO rather than replacing it. Ads for speed while the organic asset builds. Rent while you buy.

Set up right, PPC is the most controllable channel there is: a dial you turn up in a good month and down in a quiet one, with a receipt for everything. Set up wrong, it's a tap running into the platform's pocket. The difference is entirely in the maintenance.