PPC vs Adwords

PPC vs AdWords: Online Marketing Basics Explained

The world of digital marketing is one filled with acronyms, abbreviations, and confusion. Regardless of whether you’re a relative newcomer or an experienced marketer, online advertising can still present challenges. This is mostly due to the rapid development and ever-changing nature. Even if you have the basics, there are constant refinements and improvements being made to the systems and theories that power them. One question that often gets asked relates to the difference between PPC vs AdWords. They are terms that are often used interchangeably, when in reality that’s not quite the case.

In this article we’ll take a look at some of the basics of online marketing. We’ll uncover what the various acronyms stand for and how each differs and relates to other areas. We’ll look closely at PPC vs AdWords, and demonstrate why TEA Software is the ideal solution for helping you get the best out of both.

PPC vs AdWords: Understanding Online Marketing

Below we’ve outlined some of the most commonly used terms in online marketing. It’s important to understand them, as it will give you some context for understanding each different type of marketing. For ease, we’ve separated them into groups:

Search

  • SEM: This refers to Search Engine Marketing. It’s a blanket term that mainly covers PPC and SEO. Essentially it’s activity that helps to promote your brand’s visibility in search engine results pages. Although most people assume that this only covers Google, there are other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! to consider.
  • PPC: PPC stands for pay-per-click. Hopefully you’re already familiar with this term, but it’s a form of advertising where you can buy ad space on a search engine results page. Usually there’s no charge to appear there, instead you place a bid per-click. This means that you will be charged for each visitor that clicks on your ad. It’s a great way to gain visibility on competitive keywords against established businesses.
  • SEO: Search Engine Optimization is all about improving your organic search ranking. Rather than paying for ads, you can instead focus on delivering high-quality and authoritative content. There are many elements to this, and it takes time, but it’s a good additional form of marketing to focus on alongside PPC.

Off-site

  • Display Advertising: As one of the most common forms of online advertising, display advertising takes many forms. Usually though, it’s a graphical ad that is placed on another website, linking through to your own. It can be in the form of retargeting, whereby users who have already visited your site or a related on will see your ad when they navigate to other sites.
  • Affiliate Marketing: This works in a similar way to display advertising, where other sites will display links back to your own website. However, rather than simply paying an upfront fee, the site that hosts your ad is incentivized by a share of the revenue the visit generates.
  • SMM:Social Media Marketing has rapidly developed over the last decade. It gives businesses the chance to leverage the vast social media networks to target their ads to potential customers. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are prime examples of platforms that use this kind of marketing.
  • Email Marketing: One of the most established forms of online marketing is via email. There is so much that can be done with it and it’s a great way to engage with existing customers and reach out to new ones.

Onsite

  • CRO: Although not a tradition form of marketing, conversion rate optimization very much links back to all of the other forms we’ve mentioned so far. By using analytical insight and various forms of testing, businesses can improve their website experience for customers, targeting specific areas to improve conversion. When customers arrive at the site through any of the other marketing channels, CRO helps improve the flow from landing to conversion.

Choosing the Right Marketing Channel

With all of these different marketing channels, how does a business choose which to prioritize? Ideally, your marketing strategy should encompass elements of each. This is the most effective way of running effective activity and maximizing your return on investment. However, there are also a number of different factors that will impact how much you can focus on the different areas:

  • Goal: Depending on what you hope to achieve with your marketing activity, your focus will be slightly different. Some businesses are just hoping to build their brand awareness, in which case social and display advertising are particularly useful. Others want to optimize their site to be the best it can be, and so SEO and CRO should be priorities. It’s important that you outline your business goals before you start your marketing in earnest.
  • Budget:The costs and ROI of each channel varies greatly. You will likely have a finite amount of money to spend on advertising, and so you must use it effectively. Some channels are more expensive but yield a higher ROI, where others are cheaper to start but return a lot less. Depending on your goals, you’ll want to adjust this accordingly. Try and find out which will be the most beneficial for your business.
  • Resource: Even if you have the money to spend on all of the channels, you may not necessarily have the in-house resources to manage it. Carefully take stock of the skills and expertise you have on hand, and then determine whether you want to outsource some of your other activity, or instead spend that money on improving what you do have.

PPC vs AdWords: Is there a difference?

Hopefully by now you understand some of the basic elements of online marketing. It’s therefore time to make the distinction when it comes to PPC vs AdWords. As we’ve established, PPC stands for pay-per-click. This form of advertising is great at driving new traffic to your website, and when done correctly can yield some excellent results. AdWords is Google’s platform for carrying out this kind of marketing. Because of Google’s prevalence when it comes to search engines, the two terms often become interchangeable. However, despite this there is a clear difference. PPC is a form of marketing that can take many different forms, across a variety of different platforms. AdWords is system, specific to Google, where you can carry out PPC marketing. To further show the difference, we’ve highlighted some other examples of PPC systems:

Bing Ads

Microsoft’s Bing platform is hugely under-utilized, despite the excellent opportunities it presents. Bing has gone to some lengths to demonstrate the power of their customer base, stating that customers in the Bing networks spend 25% more than average internet searchers. Although there is less traffic that goes through Bing, it still reaches into the millions, and you’ll likely pay less per-click on ads there.

Yahoo! Gemini

Again, another oft-forgot place for PPC advertising is Yahoo! Their PPC system, Yahoo! Gemini, gives users the chance to advertise across a wide range of ad types to target specific user groups and devices.

Amazon

Businesses in the eCommerce sector should definitely consider PPC ads on Amazon’s platform. If you list your products on Amazon, you can buy ‘sponsored’ ad space that will drive traffic to those products using PPC.

TEA Software: Helping You Understand PPC vs AdWords

By demonstrating the difference in the PPC vs AdWords debate, you should be familiar with where your focus now lies. TEA Software is well aware of the different forms of online marketing, and has developed a powerful set of tools to help you understand how users interact with your website, regardless of where they come from. We can also give you an in-depth looking into your AdWords activity, allowing you to hold Google accountable for your spend. Here’s a closer look at some of our features:

Customer Engagement

Regardless of the marketing channels you are exploring, TEA gives you the chance to track how users from those channels interact with your website. This allows you to determine which channels are working. It also means you can see whether different types of customers convert when they reach your website. With this information you can adjust your spend and your focus to specific areas and make improvements as you go.

Trends and Improvements

We mentioned above how improving your conversion rate can help your business. TEA not only identifies customers and where they’ve come from, the powerful AI systems can also identify areas of your site that are underperforming. This allows you to test and improve these areas, removing any barriers to conversion. TEA presents actionable changes you can make that will improve your customers’ experience and your conversion rate.

AdWords Accountability

It can sometimes be hard to separate out good traffic from bad traffic. This is particularly true when it comes from your AdWords campaigns. This means you can end up spending money buying traffic that won’t ever convert (i.e. clickfraud). TEA Software helps you stop unwanted traffic from clicking through to your website. This both saves you money, and allows you to hold Google accountable for any money erroneously spent on illegitimate traffic.