Master Pay-Per-Click Marketing to Boost Your Traffic

Regardless of your niche and business size, if you sell online, your profit goes hand-in-hand with your traffic volume. And while organic traffic channels – website, social media, and email – require time to gain traction, PPC advertising can boost your web engagement as soon as it’s set up.

The best part? As a performance-based model, pay-per-click marketing means you pay only for tangible results — specifically, clicks. With PPC, you can tap into new audiences, retarget your products, and even validate keywords, putting your SEO on the right track without time-consuming testing.

Read on to explore the basics of pay-per-click marketing campaigns and learn how to launch the campaigns that reach the right audience and drive conversions.

Book a demo and see how Phonexa’s solutions can inform your pay-per-click campaigns, ensuring maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

What Is Pay-Per-Click Marketing?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a performance marketing model where businesses promote their ads through networks (Google, Meta, Amazon) and pay them only for ad clicks.

Networks use a real-time ad auction to determine which ads to display, factoring in:

• Bidding strategy
• Keyword targeting
• Landing page

A mix of these attributes creates a competitive environment, where you can gain an edge not just by winning the bidding war but also by producing genuinely useful, targeted content.

Let’s look at ad placements available in different networks:

Network	Ad placement
Google Display Network	Third-party websites, mobile apps, YouTube, and Google applications
Amazon Advertising	Amazon-owned platforms, third-party websites, and apps
Meta Ads Manager	Facebook and Instagram news feed, stories, reels, Marketplace, and Messenger
PropellAds	Pop-unders, push notifications, and full-screen mobile ads
Taboola	Content recommendations across major publisher websites

Types of Pay-Per-Click Ads

• Static banners: Images that appear on the majority of platforms to spread awareness and retarget your products.
• Animated banners: Short animations displayed on websites, mobile apps, and social media to drive clicks.
• Video ads: 15 – 60 second videos designed to demonstrate your product features or present your brand.
• Native ads: Web page recommendations that appear in related environments to drive organic traffic to your website.
• Shopping ads: Product images that appear in search results and on website interfaces to boost your sales.
• Push ads: Intrusive ads that interrupt the user’s experience to communicate a specific message to capture attention or re-engage users.

“I find that text links outperform banner ads. And if you’ve got a banner ad on the same page as a text link for that product, the text link will perform even better.” – Jeannine Crooks, from Phonexa’s Amplify Webinar

Benefits of Pay-Per-Click Ads

Quick Results

For SEO, it may take weeks, if not months, to drive tangible traffic. And although you can’t shake content marketing from your global strategy, you can support it with paid advertising to achieve results much faster.

Control Over Traffic Intent

Keywords let you target your pay-per-click ads to users with specific intents, which, for example, can be useful for businesses that focus on building a deep connection with their audience and require more ToFu traffic.

Budget Flexibility

Thanks to adjusted bidding, pay-per-click marketing is available to businesses of any size:

• Small businesses can opt for manual bidding and granular ad spend control.
• Large businesses can maximise clicks to expand their reach and strengthen brand visibility.

Measurable Results

Running ad campaigns gives you free tracking tools for click attribution. If you want to stay on top of the entire ad-driven user journey, you can use web analytics tools that capture users’ post-click actions.

Increased Brand Awareness

Since you pay only for clicks, not impressions, pay-per-click can be a cost-efficient way to raise your brand awareness, making it especially useful for aspiring businesses.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Step-by-Step Guide

1. Define Your Goals & KPIs

Goal	Description	KPIs
Spread awareness	To make your brand and its offers easier to recognise	Impressions and reach
Grow website traffic	To increase the number of users who land on your website	Click-through rates
Generate leads	To drive more users to convert into leads	Conversion rates
Boost sales	To increase the number of sales	Return on ad spend

2. Align Your Bidding with Budget

You want to set your pay-per-click budget based on real data, including trends, competitor ads, and seasonality.

Next, choose a bidding strategy that matches your budget:

• Manual bidding: You’re not paying more than a selected cost per click.
• Enhanced CPC: The system adjusts your manually set bidding, staying close to the initial sum.
• Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Bids are dynamically adjusted according to the selected ROAS.
• Maximise clicks: Bids automatically selected to maximise clicks while staying within your daily budget.

3. Choose a Platform

TikTok, popular among users under 24, is an excellent platform to tap into if your product is for youngsters. LinkedIn, on the other hand, a business social network that lists over 67 million companies and most of their employees, is a great medium for promoting B2B solutions.

Just as important, you should consider the available ad types. For example, because they’re constantly in the user’s field of view, static banners on Google’s third-party sites can be effective for brand awareness, while TikTok videos are better for engagement.

4. Target Your Campaign

Use your ideal customer portraits (ICPs) to build your keyword strategy and align it with user intents. Are your ads for the top of the funnel? Prioritise more general queries, such as “What are the types of financial assistance?” or “Benefits of HVAC systems”, which are more natural for searchers in the awareness stage.

You can also select where, when, and on which devices and operating systems your ad will appear. 

5. Produce Ad Creatives

Here are the most popular ad elements and how to perfect them:

• Headline: Attention-capturing phrase that concisely communicates your product benefits and/or addresses users’ feelings.
• Video: Smooth sequence of footage that engages the viewers, persuading them to follow a link.
• Call to action (CTA): Short, authoritative statement that guides users’ next steps, like “Register down the link” or “Read more on our website.”
• Product image: Polished product presentation that, in combination with description, incentivises users to learn more about the product.

Important: If your audience is broad, segment your ICPs and develop a separate ad creative (or multiple ones) for each to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

6. Create a Landing Page

In the first place, ensure that your landing page seamlessly connects with your ad through keywords and query fulfilment. Trust and transparency are also under the spotlight – your website should share its policy and contacts, protect visitors with HTTPS encryption, and avoid aggressive pop-ups, misleading claims, and other deceptive or spammy tactics.

To ensure that users who click your ad will have a pleasant experience, ad networks factor in your landing page’s mobile compatibility, speed, and navigation.

Ad networks also consider your landing page’s key performance indicators (KPIs), so ensure your bounce rate, time on page, and conversion rate metrics are on point.

7. Configure Tracking

Ad network analytics are the most basic way to track your PPC ad performance, including reach, impressions, and clicks. For more comprehensive ad tracking, use Lynx, Phonexa’s click tracking solution for attributing clicks to specific touchpoints and determining their costs.

Take a product tour to see how Lynx and our other Phonexa solutions can elevate your business.

As for web analytics, which you need to monitor your landing page performance, Google Analytics is an excellent choice. You can connect it to your website by setting up a Google Analytics account, installing the tracking code, and verifying the connection.

8. Optimise Your Campaigns

Pay-per-click campaign optimisation focuses on two areas: ads and landing pages. When reworking the former, you often change targeting, copy, and visuals. 

Landing pages, in turn, involve more components, which is why you need behavioural tracking, such as provided by Phonexa’s HitMetrix, to identify areas for improvement.

Designed for conversion rate optimisation (CRO), HitMetrix records user website sessions, allowing you to replay them as originally recorded or aggregate data into heatmaps – website colour overlays that highlight its frustrating areas.

Once the problem is identified, you should eliminate it, for example, through A/B testing:

1. Create variables: Improve an underperforming landing page element.
2. Split traffic: Divide your ad traffic into 50/50 channels using a smart link.
3. Run tests: Test your original and improved landing pages for 24 – 48 hours, and leave the top-performing version on.

 

Retarget Users With Pay-Per-Click Ads

Behavioural insights surfaced through HitMetrix also lay the groundwork for retargeting – a strategy that maximises your conversions by delivering your ads to users who have already interacted with your website.

Here’s how it works:

1. Segment users based on their behavioural patterns exposed with HitMetrix
2. Develop creatives that align with users’ intents
3. Set up targeted campaigns and yield results

 

Learn more about HitMetrix here:

 

Pay-Per-Click for Keyword Validation

Keyword strategy plays a crucial role in SEO, determining whether your page shows up to the right people. Instead of waiting weeks for your web page to get recognised by search engines, you can immediately validate specific keywords through pay-per-click.

Here’s why pay-per-click marketing is great for keyword validation:

• Granular control: You can isolate specific keywords in different match types.
• Measurable results: Ad networks report your keyword performance on the fly.
• Budget flexibility: Ads allow you to tailor your spending to your marketing budget.

Boost Your Traffic Generation With Phonexa

Although well-thought-out pay-per-click marketing can considerably boost your traffic, you can achieve even better results by plugging into affiliate marketing, and Phonexa is your best assistant for that.

Phonexa is an all-in-one performance marketing software suite that helps you generate, track, and manage your leads and calls. It’s designed to fit any business, featuring customisable functionality and dashboards that pull your most important marketing data in one place.

Here are two core solutions you get at a single price:

Features that come along and expand Phonexa’s core functionality:

These additional modules complement Phonexa’s core solutions, consolidating a toolkit that covers all your performance marketing needs. No more searching for third-party solutions and link hopping – just a streamlined framework that stimulates business growth.

Here’s an inside look at Phonexa’s workspace:

 

Take a product tour now to experience Phonexa’s solutions in action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is pay-per-click advertising?

Pay-per-click is a performance-based marketing model that lets you promote your offers through ad networks like Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Thanks to bidding and targeting adjustments, advertisers can ensure their ads stay within budget while reaching the right people.

Is there pay-per-click software?

Yes, starting from pay-per-click optimisation tools, like Optmyzr. It fine-tunes your bidding across campaigns in real-time based on ad performance and your business goals. Semrush and SpyFu, in turn, let you research your competitors to identify and capitalise on low-competition keywords.

What is a pay-per-click agency?

A pay-per-click advertising agency is an organisation that specialises in creating, managing, and optimising PPC campaigns for businesses to help them reach their goals.