When using pay per click (PPC) programs or paid search advertising, the experienced search marketers would always aim to get the right cost per click (CPC), the right ad position (placement), and the right amount of clicks purchased. The reason is to get the right or expected rights. Some companies would have been using PPC mainly for driving traffic i.e. visitors to their websites, but others with much tighter budget cap would often aim for the final results. The end results would be the number of customer purchases, number of new customer sign-ups, number of potential leads acquired, return on investment (ROI), etc. The most popular global PPC program is Google Ads (or former known as Adwords). Refer to the Google Adwords Optimization Checklist for properly setting up and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns.
Example 1: Geographical Locations – With an experienced search marketer actually practically managing the paid search account, or more specifically Google Ads, you can ensure this part of the marketing budget is in good hands. In practice, you can go very granular with targeting. You may simply target a single market and single language. The example is you can geographically display your ads to only Hong Kong (i.e. a single local market) and restrict your ads to be showed to the traditional Chinese language (i.e. single language). The outcome to have aimed for granularity is that your PPC campaign would have saved cost for not wasted for getting clicks from geographical regions that do not matter to your business.
Example 2: Mobile Only – It may depend on the nature of your business. The second example is that the service or product your business provides can only be used by users while they are on their mobile phones (e.g. a mobile specific app). In this case it would not make sense at all to display your ads to people using and browsing through a desktop computer or laptop. This approach allows you the required flexibility to prevent risking to pay for unnecessary clicks from non mobile users.
Example 3: Quick Global Markets Expansion – This is the third example. For large companies with business running in multiple countries or even aiming for the entire global market, PPC can allow you to expand your brand’s reach very quickly. You will never have to be personally present in 99% of the countries or regions you are targeting your ads when you advertising through Google Ads. To enable expansion quickly happen, you can even simply copy and paste the campaign materials that you have done for one market e.g. Hong Kong, and have it populated across all the other markets where they have the next highest priorities.