The Benefits Of Using PPC Advertising

Competition in every industry has never been fiercer. This makes it that much more difficult for your website to get onto the first page of Google and see the visibility you deserve. While SEO usually focuses on organic growth, when combined with the force of PPC advertising you could see the results you want, and faster.

Many people usually choose either SEO or PPC. But I am here to tell you that you should start thinking about running the two strategies simultaneously. The benefits from doing this could be simply amazing. If you want more details about running an SEO and PPC campaign together, I wrote a blog about this.

For the purpose of this blog however, I will be solely focusing on the benefits of PPC. I think that PPC doesn’t get enough credit and people tend to choose SEO over PPC.

The great thing about PPC is that it is quite easy to implement and master.

Although, this doesn’t mean that no one makes mistakes and something they can fail. It is important for you to fully understand PPC and how it works if you want to make the most of all the amazing benefits. Contrary to popular believe, PPC is not a set and forget kind of thing. If you want to see the benefits, it requires constant work.

PPC should always be a no-brainer, especially for small businesses who are finding it particularly difficult to see results with SEO alone. What’s even better is that even if you don’t have the skills or time necessary to run your PPC campaign yourself, majority of SEO agencies now include PPC management as part of their service.

Even if you are leaving your PPC campaign to the skilled professionals, it is still important to have a general idea of what PPC is, how to set up a campaign and what the benefits are. If you know just the basics, you will have a better idea on what the SEO agency is doing and if the strategy is something that is suitable for your business.

What is PPC Advertising?

PPC is known as Pay Per Click. It is one of the great promotional tools you can use to propel your business into higher levels of visibility. The model for PPC is very simple and this is why it has become so popular over the years.

PPC advertising usually takes place on search engines. The most common form of PPC advertising is Google AdWords. Essentially you are paying to place your listing on one of the advertisement slots the search engine results page.

This is what PPC advertising looking like on Google when the term “food delivery sydney” is searched:

                                                                                                                 

You can see that the first two listings are ads, and the second two are the proper results.

The great thing about PPC is you don’t have to pay anything unless a user actually clicks on your ad. The price per click is dependent on the competitiveness of the keyword you are looking to place in your ad. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive the click.

Also, with AdWords there is no guarantee of where your ad will be placed. Google's algorithm works this out (although if you pump in more money you are likely to see your ad in a better position). If you are targeting a highly competitive keyword, your ad could be right at the top of the first page, or it could be at the bottom, it could not even be on the first page at all.

Every time someone makes a search with your chosen keyword, all the different ads for that keyword will be in a different place. Therefore the more ads for a particular keyword, the greater the chance you won’t be on the first page in the ad section.

When setting up your PPC campaign you will have a budget. So for example, if your budget was $10 and the price for each click was $1, then you would have maximum of 10 people clicking onto your website.

However, just because they click onto your website doesn’t guarantee a sale. This is where on page SEO comes in! You have to woo potential customers with your amazing website. If not, you could be potentially paying a lot of money for PPC but not actually seeing any sales.

I know this all seems a bit doom and gloom, but when you choose the right set of keywords and develop a proper strategy, you will see all the benefits PPC advertising has to offer.

How to Set up a PPC Campaign?

It isn’t that difficult to set up a PPC campaign! Below are the summarised steps. Once you complete the following steps, your PPC campaign should be off and running.

1. Finalise your goals – think about what you want your PPC campaign to do for your business. Are you looking for more sales, increase in branding/ awareness, encouraging people to sign up?

2. Choose your search engine to advertise – if you are just starting out, I would recommend Google AdWords, it is very popular and quite easy to use.

3. Decide on your keywords – it is important for you to finalise your keyword choice. Try to go for a mixture of competitive and non-competitive. That way you are sure to be found even easier.

4. Set your bid – on each keyword, you choose a bid and once you have done this you then set your daily (or monthly) PPC budget.

5. Write your advert – this is your actual listing that users will see. It needs to include a compelling title and description if you want people to click on the ad. Also, the link the ad is directing users should be related to what you wrote in the description. As well as this, the webpage should also allow for the user to make a purchase quickly and easily.

I said this before, PPC advertising is not a set and forget kind of thing. Once your campaign is finalised, it is important for you to always be monitoring it to make sure nothing goes wrong. Alternatively, you can hire an SEO professional who can take care of the entire campaign for you.

The Benefits of PPC Advertising

So now you have a basic idea of what PPC is and how you can go about setting up your own campaign, it is time to get stuck into the benefits!

There are so many benefits to PPC advertising (obviously, otherwise so many businesses wouldn’t be using it).

Have a read below at the top 5 benefits of PPC advertising:

1. Measurable and Trackable

One of the great benefits of PPC advertising is that is it very easily measurable and trackable, especially if you use Google AdWords. When using AdWords, all you have to do is link this tool with your Google Analytics and presto everything you could ever need to measure and track is at your fingertips.

There will be no mystery to how your PPC campaign is going.

You will be able to see important performance metrics like clicks, conversions and impressions. All this and more is readily and easily available for you. Google Analytics is easy to use and it only gives you the information you need.

It is easy to measure return on investment for PPC. With each click, you are able to follow it all the way to a potential conversion and see what you spent and the amount of sales that derived from that click.

Think of this in comparison to other, more traditional forms of advertising. If you hired a billboard or placed your ad in a magazine, would you be able to see the same kind of measurable and trackable results? Probably not!

2. Quick Results

Where organic SEO can take 3 months to see results, a PPC campaign will tend to show results considerably faster. A lot of people are into instant gratification these days.

This is why they turn to PPC advertising, because they know they will get results fast.

PPC advertising will usually increase the number of traffic onto your website. But it is important to ensure your website is up to scratch, otherwise you could be seeing little to no conversions and a high bounce rate.

PPC allows you to cast an even wider net and potentially pick up consumers that weren’t even aware of your brand and aren’t in your current customer base. Even if a user sees your ad but they don’t think it is relevant to what they are looking for, you don’t pay any money. It is only when the user actually clicks on the ad, then you are charged.

3. Control

All in all, you have total control over your PPC campaign. Obviously if you are enlisting the assistance of an SEO expert, they will also have some control over the campaign as well. There are so many different options for your control and how you are going to reach your potential customers.

You choose your keywords and there is so much flexibility when it comes to your budget. You can decide if you want to start with a small campaign or go all guns blazing.

You set your own bids and select how much money you are willing to spend per click.

If you are seeing ideal results you can scale up, i.e. allocate more money for that particular keyword which allows for more people to click on the ad. On the other side, if you aren’t seeing desirable results, or you want to have break, you have the ability to immediately pause or even stop your ad spending.

4. Helps Reach Business Goals

One of the great benefits of PPC is that it can help you reach a majority of different marketing goals for your business. Some other forms of marketing can help a business reach a couple of goals, but with a PPC campaign, there is a much greater reach. These goals can include brand exposure to increase in traffic or improvement of sales.

Almost any type of goal you have can be tracked. This makes it much easier to align your business goals with actual results. PPC can act as the middle ground for the sales funnel. It can encourage users to sign up, or download a file or even an app.

PPC is a great support for the sales funnel. This type of advertising can help you create an even easier path between potential to current customers. No matter the type of PPC campaign in place, you are better equipped to reach your goals.

5. Works with SEO

I talked in the introduction about how PPC works even better when the efforts are combined with SEO. These two forces tend to work so well together because the goals are usually the same. As well as this, the impressions and the opportunities for traffic usually include the same target audience (i.e. Google users).

The quick results given from PPC can assist SEO in where to focus efforts in terms of keywords. SEO can also provide data (if available) to assist with the development of a PPC campaign. The efforts of PPC and SEO usually are able to go hand in hand.

Final Thoughts

PPC is a proven way to help businesses increase their visibility. When you start a PPC campaign, your ad will be potentially placed in a more visible position then if you were only doing organic SEO. PPC advertising has certainly gained in popularity over the years and many businesses understand the sheer amount of benefits this type of campaign has to offer.

There is little risk in testing a PPC campaign because it doesn’t cost any money unless someone actually clicks on your ad. PPC is also easily trackable and measurable which means you can follow your progress very easily.

Unlike SEO, PPC gives you quick results. Your website is a lot more visible. The more people seeing your ad, the increased chance they will click onto your website. You are also in almost complete control of your PPC campaign, your budget is entirely up to you.

Also, PPC does wonders to help reach your business goals. PPC is great in assisting with providing an easier sales funnel. PPC works hand in hand with SEO. There are usually the same set of goals and the data form PPC can help SEO (and vice versa).

 

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