Also commonly referred to as PPC for short, pay-per-click advertising is a model that allows you to only pay when people actually interact with your ads. More often than not, this means that someone clicked on one of your ads - but you can evolve this method to account for any type of interaction you're concerned with, like video watches. Regardless, you're only charged for the interaction and not for your ad being displayed - which is why it's a technique that has become so popular over the last few years in particular.

Why Paid Search and Social Advertising Matter

One of the major reasons why pay-per-click and social advertising are so important is because results can start coming through almost immediately. Every ad auction takes place in real-time - meaning that you don't need to wait for bots to crawl your website. 

This means that not only will you start generating interactions right away, but you can also begin learning, analysing and optimising your campaigns just as fast. They can be a great opportunity to test for optimum messaging, targeting and even pricing - all before rolling out the most successful versions of your ads across your entire website.

Having said that, there are a few key things you'll need to keep in mind to help make sure you're getting the most from these techniques. Every campaign that you conduct will need a budget, for example - which can be either the maximum amount of money you want to spend in a day, or the total amount you want to spend over the lifetime of the campaign. Your advertising network will take this information and try to spend your budget evenly throughout the day.

Where to Begin

To get started, you'll need to set a maximum cost-per-click bid on your ad group - meaning the maximum you're willing to pay for an interaction. Bids can also be set at a product group or keyword level if you prefer.

But the major benefit of all of this is that you can largely control who your ads are being shown to, which is often referred to as targeting. You have the option to target your ads based on country, city, region or even postcode levels depending on the advertising platform you're working with. You can also exclude specific locations from your targeting, all to make sure that your ads don't actually show in these areas.

What you're left with is a perfect storm in the best possible way. Not only do you have an ideal way to see what is working and what isn't in terms of your campaigns, but you also have a powerful opportunity to always get the right message in front of the right people at exactly the right time. That's not just how you generate a steady stream of new traffic for your website or ecommerce store - it's also how you increase conversions across the board at the exact same time.