PPC Interview Questions & Answers (2025)

Pay per click (PPC) is also known by its name on the Internet, as the cost per click (CPC). It is a marketing model that serves the essence of marketing that is advertising. It facilitates the marketers to pay when the online users or customers click their displayed advertisements. One of the most popular search engine Google’s avails this play per click facility. The popularity of this search engine landed up to the situation where advertising is done and is made available on an auction basis. Here it happens that the highest bidder ends up earning the most prominent and relevant placements. There is a long procedure for making this happen. Generally, to show an advertisement on a PPC basis, marketers create ads, and then they bid on particular search phrases.

Different techniques are involved by means of which advertisements are created and then are displayed on the customer’s screen. The advertisements are made such that in the course of action users or customers are curious to know about the product or services. To minimize the same, opt to click on the advertisement and then the advertiser needs to pay the website on a click.

Different ad extensions have their own role to play. Some can successfully increase the traffic, whereas few build a moderate level of traffic. Common Ad extensions used in ad words are as follows:

1. Sitelink Extensions.
2. Call Extensions.
3. Location Extensions.
4. Review extension.
5. Seller ratings.
6. Mobile app extensions
7. Offer Ads
8. Image and drop down navigation Ad extension.
9. Social Annotations.
10. Communication Ad
11. Callout Extensions
12. Lead form Extensions

The keywords are classified into four types on the basis of how likely visitors will click on it they are:  

• Research Keywords: It tends to contain the name of the product or service and can contain one or two words – e.g. Speaker.
• Consideration: It tends to describe the product a little and can contain two or three words – e.g. wireless speaker
• Purchase: Should be related to purchasing of the product and must have more than three words – e.g. Buy a speaker
• Loyalty: such keywords are shorter- e.g. JBL

Google AD API helps the developers in order to build an effective and approachable application that directly interacts with Google Ad words server. The main motive behind designing this was to represent large and technical savvy advertisers and third parties.

With Google Ad API, an application can be build, which can do following things

• It can automatically generate the required keywords, ad text, custom reports and also the landing pages.
• It can be useful to develop additional applications and tools to help users to manage the accounts.
• It can also synchronize Ad words data with the inventory system to manage campaigns based on stocks available.

Yes, In Google Ad words conversion tracking can be done. It can be tracked in the following ways:

• By means of tracking purchases by involving a few basic tracking codes that are provided by Ad words. There is a need to modify it with the help of additional code unique to the particular e-commerce platform, where the ad has to be displayed.
• With the help of View-through conversion window options, that tracks the activity when a person sees the ad but does not click it (impression). This can have various reasons. Either the person is not interested or the advertisement is not much attractive.
• By enabling the ad rotation setting in order to optimize for each click that means Ad words will serve the ads which it feels are likely to be clicked by the viewer.
• By accessing the search option funnels, available inside the tools and analysis option, one can also know when customers clicked on the ad for the first time and how frequently they saw the ad before converting.

In Google auction, almost every month billion of auctions are made to run, and the results are such that users find ads that are relevant to what they are looking for or are searching for. Here, the search engine always processes the request and runs the auction that determines the ad positions and CPC of every advertiser.

DFA stands for Double Click for Advertisers. It is an ad server generally used to track the impressions and clicks for the creativity of various networks. One can’t buy inventory through DFA. It is only possible to track the performance of the campaigns through this. There are two main functions of DFA and it includes ad trafficking and ad reporting.

DFP stands for Double Click for Publishers. Sometimes it may happen that the publisher prefers to manage t the ads themselves rather than outsourcing or going for third party intervention in order to broadcast on their websites. In such a situation they use DFP. There are few of the public sites, which always opt for DFP for ads. Few of such common names are way2sms.com, w3schools.com etc.

DBM stands for DoubleClick Bid Manager. It is commonly said to be the demand-side platform (DSP) from Google. It helps the developers and publishers to buy display media ads using programmatic strategy implementation, supported by a plan. And it is considered one of the most effective strategies too.

In the first step, there is a need to identify a keyword. The keyword should be such that explains the product. And along with this, the keywords should be short and easy to understand. Once the advertisers are done with the keywords that they want to bid on, Google enters the same keyword from the advertisers account that should be mostly related to the auction and that too with the maximum bid specified, as well as with the associated ads.

Google’s quality score helps to determine that how beneficial and relevant any advertisement is for the user. It is primarily based on the ad’s CTR, quality of the landing page, and also the relevance of keyword. It is always advisable to select higher quality score keywords, as it saves money and also helps to earn an overall better ad ranking.

Ad group serves the purpose of a container, for the keywords, advertisements, and landing page.  Google has taken up this initiative to reward the advertisers who prepare Ad word campaigns with highly structured ad groups. It is never advised to include all the keywords into the single ad group, but to organize keywords into themes along with a proper structure.

There are so many techniques. One of the approaches for this is to utilize the extensions. The Google Tag Assistant for Chrome is easy to use and also to understand. It’s not perfect but it does quickly alert the issues that are worth digging in near future. There is also a Google Analytics Debugger extension that provides a similar kind of service by focusing on GA tracking. In a Similar manner recently Facebook has rolled out the Pixel Helper extension, which helps to aid in diagnosing tracking for the Facebook.

 The targeting options available in display network ads are as follows;

1. Remarketing.
2. Demographics.
3. Interests and topics.
4. Placements.
5. Auto & Manual.

It is an option available that helps to exclude IP address from campaigns, this is done so that all the adds to the campaigns are blocked from computers and networks which are associated with the same IP address. Sometimes it may happen that most of the associated person from the organization keeps on checking the ads directly by searching for keywords on Search them the option and this results in wasting of money.

PLA stands for Product Listing Ads (PLA). This is also a kind of ad strategy, used to advertise products ads on Google search and on other Google partners. This campaign is also known as shopping campaign, which is mostly used by E-commerce websites organic and PPC separately.

The maximum limit for the number of characters cannot be clearly stated as different Search Engines have different Limit on ads character as stating for Google it can have a maximum of twenty-five characters for the headline and seventy characters for description, both one and two combined.

Invalid clicks are actually the fake clicks. These clicks are unintentional or sometimes even malicious software clicks. The giant team of Google has a sophisticated mechanism & techniques and has framed a list of programs in order to automatically detect and filter the invalid clicks from the user account.

There are some of the considerable differences between direct marketing and branding:

Direct marketing:

In a direct market campaign, the advertiser is interested to target the audience who are most relevant to him and also to the business. The major focus needs to consider in this type is the conversion rate, that explains about Return on investment (ROI).
Branding:
Whereas, In a Branding campaign an advertiser needs to exposure his/ her brand on major sites, search engines and also on applications. The most popular methods are Display Ads, Remarketing, YouTube Ads and another major kind of custom ads targets.