It’s hard to believe that there are still businesses not taking advantage of the benefits of PPC advertising when you look at how search engines have shaped our buying habits.
For customers who are looking to buy, 65% of them are clicking on paid advertisements. Why? Convenience, of course. These paid advertisements are the first results that appear in response to their search queries.
As a business owner (or a marketer working with one), you understand the importance of increasing your organic reach through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but you need to get on the paid side of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as well.
If you don’t do it, you’re just losing out to your competitors who are.
What is PPC Advertising?
PPC advertising stands for “pay-per-click” advertising. This means that a company pays each time a potential customer clicks on their advertisement on a search engine.
PPC advertising is sometimes also known as Paid Search Advertising (PSA). PPC advertising campaigns work with SEO to increase your brand’s visibility through paid and organic reach.
In very basic terms, a marketer creates a search engine PPC campaign by bidding on keywords that are relevant to their business. Every time someone clicks a link with one of these keywords, the company is charged by the search engine.
Still in doubt, if PPC advertising is worthwhile? Well, the experts know it works and furthermore, have put their money where their mouth is. Currently, 55% of B2B marketers and 65% of B2C marketers report that search engine marketing is the most effective way of promoting content.
The Benefits of PPC Advertising
There are many benefits of PPC advertising. It’s easy to get started, the results are easy to track, it provides a ton of data on who is viewing your website and purchasing your product or service and it works well with your other marketing initiatives.
It’s Easy To Get Started
Don’t get frustrated if you feel like you’ve waited too long to get started with PPC advertising. Unlike SEO which is very time-consuming before you see any results, with Google AdWords, you can be up and running within a few minutes.
One of the keys to a successful PPC campaign is constantly changing your text ads, and even your keywords so don’t worry about getting it perfect right away.
Campaigns are managed through AdWords or other PPC advertising platforms. This means you don’t need to worry about having advanced technical skills. From researching keywords, choosing how to target your audience and writing the ads themselves, everything is done through the managing website.
It’s Easy to Track Your PPC Campaigns
Unlike SEO, PPC advertising is very easy to measure and track. Inside AdWords, you’ll get all kinds of data thanks to Google analytics.
This data includes impressions (how many times your text ad is viewed), clicks and conversions. When setting up your campaign, you define what a counts as a conversion – for some businesses that could be collecting email addresses whereas for others it might be making a sale.
Google Analytics doesn’t just measure the traffic coming in from the search engine, it also analyzes how people behave once they reach your landing pages. While some other online display ads provide similar data metrics, you could never get this kind of data from your SEO efforts.
You Can Control Your Ad Spend
Obviously, one of the most important things when running a business is managing your revenues versus expenses.
With PPC advertising, you are completely in control of your advertising costs.
Through AdWords, you can set specific daily and monthly budget limits. Your marketing team needs to manage the cost of your current keywords based on clicks and conversions and adjust the budget and targeting accordingly.
Two of the most useful tools in AdWords is being able to target keywords based on their cost and being able to rule out negative keywords. Depending on your product or services, you will want to avoid spending on queries with the terms “cheap” or “budget” in them.
To run successful PPC campaigns, you will obviously need to have some budget available. However, even with a modest budget and carefully target keywords, you will soon see an increase in clicks and conversions.
Fast and Consistent Results
Easily one of the biggest reasons PPC advertising became successful is due to how quickly you will start to see results. Within an hour of setting up a PPC campaign, you can see your ads appear on the first page of a Google search.
For new businesses, being able to gain this kind of exposure is essential. Furthermore, since PPC campaigns drive more traffic to your website, your marketing team can quickly see keywords that are effective in leading to conversions versus those that have a high bounce rate (how quickly someone leaves your website).
You Can Create Hyper Targeted Ads
Speed and efficiency are what originally made PPC advertising successful. However, the ability to create hyper-targeted ads is the reason it continues to be a successful strategy many years later.
Using AdWords, your marketing team can run tests on many different variables within the campaigns. This includes the keywords they’re targeting, the content of text ads, targeting based on specific audience demographics and device usage.
So while SEO is important for your organic reach, with PPC advertising you’re able to target your exact perfect customers and place your ads in front of these prospective customers.
Get Started With PPC Advertising
Is your company taking advantage of the benefits of PPC advertising? If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the scope of this marketing strategy or even getting started with AdWords, contact WSI Proven Results now. We’ll get you started with PPC advertising in no time!
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