Living in a digital age it makes sense for online advertising to be an essential activity when it comes to your business and marketing strategy.
There are many options when it comes to online advertising and PPC is a popular and effective platform for online success. It’s an efficient way for businesses to create and closely monitor campaigns whilst providing efficient and controlled results.
What is PPC?
Pay-per-click or PPC, is a platform for paid online marketing. The process involves paying search engines certain fees based on the number of clicks to your website or product, generated by your ads that they’ve displayed.
Put simply, PPC is a method of buying visits and increasing your website traffic, rather than generating purely organic site visits.
PPC advertising works by reaching highly targeted audiences, based on options and attributes that you define. And as the term implies, you only pay based on the clicks generated by the ad.
Bringing value to your business with PPC
Pay-per-click advertising brings more value to your business aside from just generating traffic and visits directly. Any kind of business – whether big or small – can benefit from PPC advertising and implementing strategic and intelligent tactics.
Understanding your audience, relevant keywords, and the right strategy, will not only drive traffic but will also eventually bring you higher conversion rates.
Additionally, PPC advertising provides an unparalleled array of opportunities and options for your business compared to other marketing channels.
Control your ad budget
One of the reasons PPC advertising is so popular is the control you have over your budget. Since closely monitoring budgets is often the core element of any marketing effort, the control offered by PPC methods eliminates elements of risk of massively overspending.
At the forefront of any PPC campaign should to be assessing ad spend. You need to establish how much value each click provides to your business. This saves not only valuable resources, but also prevents you from losing them if done incorrectly.
PPC provides options depending on the platform you choose. There are automatic and manual bidding for the ads, which should likewise be considered.
You can work your strategy around your allocated budget for paid advertising. If you’ve noticed that having a small budget for an ad brings a small amount of leads, you can tweak it to increase it based on your goal. Another great benefit of working with PPC is that it allows you to change budget at any time, allowing more flexibility. A daily, weekly, or monthly cap can be placed on your maximum budget, so you remain in control.
Gain consistent traffic – fast!
Advertising with a PPC platform is one of the easiest ways to gain traffic. And running a PPC ad to gain that traffic takes a minimal amount of time. In fact, you can set up your ads to appear in the first page of Google within an hour of campaign set up and activation.
Generating traffic for your website can be done organically, though it may time through your SEO efforts. It takes time to work and it doesn’t guarantee a top spot in the SERP.
PPC, on the other hand, serves as the best alternative to get that traffic fast. It also provides a consistent stream of traffic as opposed to a just a short sharp burst from when you begin the campaign.
Improvement in your overall ROI
Like any other marketing effort, the ultimate goal of advertising is to generate the best return of investments (ROI) as quickly as possible. Unlike traditional advertising, all PPC metrics are measurable. This provides a deep analysis and strong insight to how well your ads are performing. From number of impressions, clicks, and even sales, your PPC platform can calculate your ROI based on the value of your leads or sales and how it scales to your advertising spend.
Taking into consideration the different needs of businesses, the customers attracted vary as well. Although each differ, PPC can make certain types of these customers profitable with minimal effort.
Customers with high lifetime values improve the overall ROI of certain industries. These can vary from doctors, internet providers, or even colleges. So even if you spend a higher amount to attract these leads, they will still provide you with a higher ROI, based on their lifetime value.
Another type of customer perfect for PPC is customers with high margins on single purchases. Examples of these kind of sales would be cars, computer equipment, home appliances, and even services such as repairs and lawsuits. Once you’re equipped with that data, you can optimise and improve future campaigns for an increased ROI.
PPC complements your SEO strategy
PPC and SEO are two intertwined marketing channels. So it makes sense you should ensure they’re working to complement each other. SEO is critical for your businesses’ long-term commitment to getting traffic. It helps you discover keywords that attract clicks and visitors. But at times, relying simply on your SEO strategy will delay your online presence.
Having a well-performing PPC campaign increases those underperforming SEO efforts. It usually takes months or years for your website to generate organic traffic based on your SEO, while PPC drives that traffic instantly.
Moreover, PPC maximises online profits easily. It provides a substantial amount of profit for a predictable amount of investment but with less time and effort.
Keep in mind, however, that organic results still yield importance to your business’ success. But a combination of traffic coming in from organic searches and those influenced by paid ads should cover all areas.
Only pay for ads that bring results
Unlike other channels where you pay without notable results, PPC is pretty straightforward and cost efficient. Here, you’re paying only for those clicks towards your ads. These ads then lead the visitors to your targeted intention such as visit your website or fill out a form, all of which intend to close a sale.
It can’t be guaranteed, however, that these clicks will always result in a sale. But by running your campaigns with your targeted audience in mind, such as a subscriber for your base audience or a current buyer, there should be noticeable results.
Use targeted ads
Targeted ads means you’re only displaying them to your relevant target market. You can choose where your ads are displayed.
Doing this allows you to reach potential customers specifically, and not just every single lead that encounters the ad. Remember, you’re paying for every click, which means every penny that you spend should count!
For example, you can include keywords relevant to your products into your ads. This means you’ll only attract visitors who are actively searching for your product, who have more potential of becoming customers.
Building a PPC campaign with your ideal audience and solution to their problems in mind, you can adjust your bids to give preference to more profitable areas.
Ad scheduling and geo-targeting
Ad scheduling is also another way to keep your ads within your control. This allows you to choose which time or days of the week your ad will run. This is effective once you’ve understood your target audiences’ behaviour.
Are you running a company that offers services during the weekends? Products that are more saleable – and thus, more searchable – at night? Take these factors into consideration to know when your advertisement will perform best. This saves budget by only displaying your ads to visitors who are more likely to convert based on their immediate need.
Geo-targeting is also another important element of your PPC campaign as it excludes those outside your target location. Unless you’re a global provider that has an exclusive product, your target market should be set at specific locations.
By targeting only potential customers in certain locations, or areas that your business caters to, you’re able to save your ad spend and increase the value each lead collects.
Whatever PPC campaign may be best for your business, they can all be heavily customised and tailored to meet your business objectives and to target your ideal market. If you’d like some help with getting PPC set up or PPC management, get in touch! You can call us on 0117 933 0570 or contact us online.
