PPC Advertising

PPC refers to all Pay-Per-Click advertising that can be undertaken in the digital space. 

At Icon we refer to PPC primarily as our Search Advertising offering. Our Search Advertising offering focuses on the largest Search network in Australia - the Google Ads network, which makes up over 94% of market share (Oct 2020). 

Icon offers all advertising options available within the Google Ads platform, including Search, Shopping, Display, App, Video (YouTube advertising). At Icon we are innovators and early adopters. This means that as soon as new features are added to the Google Ads platform, we rigorously test them to gauge their potential for helping our clients. This includes testing the newest betas on offer from Google.  

PPC Marketing is the concept of advertising your brand across the world wide web and only paying for your position if someone clicks on your ads or brand. Traditionally PPC has been an extremely cost-effective way to reach an audience when they are searching the internet for similar products and services to your own. 

Over time PPC has become more competitive and CPC’s (Cost-Per-Click) have increased. However, having an agency that knows how to maximise your ROI can make your investment in PPC one of the most effective and cost-efficient advertising channels available. Remember, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

The cost of a PPC campaign depends largely on the industry (competitiveness) and the amount of work involved to get the campaign set up. At Icon we use tools such as Google Keyword Planner to gauge this, which enables us to provide you with an accurate quote for the time required to generate the campaign. Over time this can change greatly and can also be heavily impacted by seasonality. This would require budgets to continually change over time to ensure that we are constantly providing the best bang for your buck for your business.

When considering PPC advertising for your small business, we recommend first starting with a high-quality website, an optimised Google My Business, and a social strategy (presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc) for your small business. 

These steps are important because they build up your brand image before commencing PPC advertising. Doing so will maximise your investment on the Google Search Network with PPC because your brand will be legitimised and achieve a higher quality score on the Google Ads network. 

A fast loading website with well optimised copy and images relevant to your Google search keywords will go a long way in helping you achieve a lower CPC for your campaigns.

The question of whether to start with PPC or SEO can be answered by determining how competitive your industry is. Some industries, such as insurance and banking, require very high CPCs to rank. In turn, this requires a large budget, a well optimised website for SEO as well as PPC, and a well-structured PPC campaign to help support this. 

If you are a local brand targeting a small geo-location audience for non-competitive keywords, then SEO will be less of an immediate focus. Instead, PPC can work to bring you cheap leads over time until you increase your brand awareness and Google starts ranking your site organically. 

This is even more important for new brands with a brand new website. PPC can speed up your business's journey by showing your business above brands that have been on Google (organically) for many years. 

PPC captures users as they are searching; being able to capture these users at their point of purchase can deliver the highest quality hot leads. Traditional advertising generally relies on brand recognition in the path to purchase to convert a lead. And at that purchase point brands trust that the user will choose their brand over the competitors.

However, with lowering consumer confidence and brand trust, being able to show your product alongside your competitors digitally and often will bring you the highest converting traffic.

The Google Partner Program is the ultimate agency accreditation from Google. An agency can only achieve Google Partner Program accreditation

by having employees who have passed all of Google’s specialist exams across all areas of PPC marketing. 

Icon is an accredited Google Partner and we wear our badge proudly across our website. Originally set to be launched in 2020, but delayed due to the COVID pandemic, the Google Partner Program is set to be revised and launched in 2021

PPC Audits are very important for companies who have been working with the same agency for many years, or if their PPC platforms haven’t been touched in some time. We call this ‘set and forget’, and it is a major no-no for PPC. PPC requires consistent optimisation as competitors come and go and increase/lower budgets. 

A truly effective PPC campaign requires a skilled PPC specialist who can precisely structure the campaign to ensure that what you are bidding on is not only relevant but also being represented correctly to the user. 

Over time Google and other platforms update their advertising tools to allow advertisers flexibility and innovation. An account that hasn’t been touched in many years may be missing a lot of important features. Not using these features may be negatively impacting your PPC account, causing your business to miss out on opportunities

An example of this is Google text ads. Google now recommends moving to Responsive Search Ads to show the most relevant copy to users based on what they are most likely to click per their search. This gives a large advantage to advertisers who are utilising this feature.

Search Ads 360, formerly known as DoubleClick for Search, is part of the Google Marketing Platform suite. It allows advertisers like Icon to access larger amounts of data and layer this on top of your campaigns and adgroups with more sophisticated bidding and reporting technologies. 

SA360 allows us to advertise on multiple search engines at once such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more, all from one place. This in turn allows us to track digital campaigns in a single platform, which improves the accuracy of our reporting and attribution using Google’s floodlight system. We develop complex custom bidding strategies for any market