PPC, also known as pay-per-click, and CPC, cost-per-click, are two different terms that confuse many people. However, understanding what the acronyms represent is not enough to help people understand what the two mean. There is a lot of information behind the bars that business owners need to understand to master the difference between the two. PPC vs CPC is the most critical part to consider when running marketing campaigns.
In a real sense, PPC and CPC are two independent sides that make up a coin. To put it in simple words, PPC is a type of marketing ad, and CPC is an advanced marketing performance indicator. Does this information answer all your questions? Don’t worry; let’s dive into more details to highlight the significant difference between the two aspects!
What is PPC?
PPC is an advanced method of conducting online advertisements. This methodology requires the company advertising its products to pay a certain amount of money to the company running the ads on every link clicked by prospects. When you click the PPC link, a certain amount of money is added to the company’s bill. The operating methodology of this strategy is what resulted in the name pay-per-click.
The rule is that you only make payments when the ad gets a click from a potential customer. However, there are certain aspects that you need to monitor closely, such as your choice of keywords that you use when creating the ads. Remember that the ads you create rely on the choice of keywords since you need to target a specific audience within the market.
How PPC Operates?
Pay-per-click advertising varies depending on the platform where you want your ads to appear. Let’s watch out for what happens to PPC on Google to give you a better picture. Given that Google is a giant platform known for running advertisements, PPC is closely related to paid search. This means that when you need to diversify your business to a broad market audience, you need to pay Google for them to help you channel your brand to the most appropriate market audience.
Remember that anything that works on Google mainly depends on keywords. You need to create ads using the right keywords to ensure that you target the right audience likely to purchase your products or services. After creating the ad, Google can take over the responsibility to diversify your brand based on what people search in the engine. When a prospect clicks on your ad, you will be required to pay a certain amount.
In addition, Google has the ability to set ads in different formats. This includes the search and product listing ads, also known as PLA. This strategy displays results depending on the e-commerce and the B2C business models. This shows how Google deals with PPC ads whenever you want to use the platform for marketing your brand.
Facebook or Amazon PPC Ads
This type of ad uses the same algorithm as Google. All you need to do is ensure that you have selected the most appropriate keywords essential in your market field and conduct smart bidding. The main aspect that makes this type of ad different is the parameters to evaluate them across their respective platforms. Facebook displays ads depending on the interests, behavior, the nature of the custom audience, and the community.
Amazon is known for picking ads depending on the behavior of consumers and traceable cookies. This works based on the operating model of the Amazon SER. Also, Amazon categorizes ads into different segments, including sponsored product ads, product display ads, headline search ads, and sponsored brand ads.
What is CPC?
Note that it is not a marketing method; it’s a performance indicator reflecting how much you pay to run PPC campaigns. This metric is used to display the relationship between the amount of money that has been spent on every PPC ad and the number of clicks the ad got. The role of this indicator is to help you detect whether your ad has received the success you targeted.
Cost-per-click is an essential metric that you cannot neglect its importance when you are running marketing campaigns. The formula for getting CPC has been condensed into a simple way to make it easier for you to remember. The formula is CPC = TMS/TMC. In this scenario, TMS refers to the total amount of money spent, while TMC is the total number of measured clicks.
This means that when you realize that you have more clicks, the CPC will automatically be lower. As a result, you will have managed to run a successful campaign.
How CPC Works?
CPC uses a simple formula that you can easily use and get a response based on your ad campaign’s success. Let’s consider a real-life example to make it easier for you to understand how this trick works. Assume that you paid $800 for a PPC ad campaign and only managed to attain 400 clicks from the campaign. When you divide the TMS, which is $800, by the (TMC) 400 clicks, you will get the answer to be 2.
In simple words, this means that you paid $2 for every click. It’s vital to understand that CPC has four different levels that you can consider apart from PPC. The levels include the keyword PPC level, campaign level, and the account CPC level. Every marketer aims to record a much lower CPC by simply perfecting different PPC features. However, you need to consider the click-through rate (CTR) to eliminate the chances of bidding less for keywords.
Keep in mind that Google remains to be picky when using these metrics. You need to master how all of them operate to be on the safe side. Also, you need to focus on the relevancy of the ad to the user and intend to make it visible to the right market audience. When you create an ad tailored to what customers are looking for, you increase the chances of the ad being displayed to the right audience. In addition, Google gives every website ranking in the search engine a score based on how they rank.
This means that the higher the website continues ranking, the better. Ensure the landing page experience is awesome to secure as many customers as possible. Remember that the ultimate goal of marketing is to ensure that you attract many customers who will contribute to the development of your brand.
Using CPC as a Report Metric
You can decide to set up a specific budget for your PPC campaign, although you may not know the amount of money every click will cost. However, different factors such as the competition of the keywords used greatly impact the cost-per-click. In addition, it’s difficult to predict the sum of money to pay for the clicks since the charges change from time to time. When you use CPC as a report metric, it becomes easier for you to use the metrics approximately and make an informed decision.
Conclusion
PPC and CPC are two different aspects that work together to achieve the same goal. When running pay-per-click campaigns, you need to involve the cost-per-click formulate to detect how much you will pay for every ad. This is an indication that you cannot manage to run campaigns without learning how the two operate. However, they remain to be two different aspects that you need to master and how they can impact the success of your marketing campaigns online.