Digital marketing is all about exposing your brand to the masses. It’s simple. The more people that see your business name or your business logo, the more people that will show interest in and follow through in purchasing a product. But how do you go about marketing your brand? What is the most effective way to do it? A major part to these answers—pay per click strategies.

PPC isn’t like SEO, where your business can benefit from organic traffic; free of cost. PPC requires payment; therefore, you have to be wise with your budget and only bid on keywords that will help gain web traffic.

Your PPC portfolio should consist of high-volume keywords, but also some low volume. And it’s not just one word you need to bid on, you should spend time researching specific long-tail keywords that play into web searches as well.

“Digital marketing” is an example of a keyword. “Digital marketing in Dallas, TX”, on the other hand, is an example of a long-tail keyword. The former will get your more looks, while the ladder will reach a more refined audience, meaning less competition. Less competition means lower cost for keyword bidding.

Ultimately, you want your pay per click strategies to be well-rounded. Try a few things out and see what works best. There is nothing wrong with starting out low risk and becoming more aggressive as you learn more about the game. Experience plays a role in everything. As you become more experienced in developing PPC campaigns, you will naturally grow more confident. It’s like investing in the stock market, but you have more control.

Every PPC ad earns a rank between 1 and 10. The ranking is determined by multiplying CPC (cost-per-click) by Quality Score. CPC is the bid amount that won you the ad space, and quality score takes into account click-through rate, relevance and landing page quality. The higher the ranking, the better. If your ad ranks as a 10 then it will have an outstanding chance of populating once the intended keyword or keyword phrase is searched.

Click-through rate is defined as the percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement. So, basically anyone who reaches your website through an ad click, in this instance. Click-through traffic is very meaningful to a website because it brings in visitors indirectly.

Relevance is straightforward. It’s simply how relevant your ad is to a keyword or keyword phrase that was searched. Of course, a keyword included in your ad text as part of your pay per click strategies will give you the best chance of being relevant to searches. Hence, the extreme importance of keyword research. If you bid on high volume keywords and niche keywords, you should have a leg up on your competition in regard to relevance.

We already touched on landing page quality. Just remember, search engines see all. Their algorithms are incredibly advanced and every ranking, whether it be for an ad or a page, is determined systematically. It’s wise to keep up to date with any tweaks to the algorithms so your business does not fall behind in the race.