PPC Management

PPC or Pay Per Click is one of the tools you can use to promote a business in the online World. The PPC Model works in a very simple way and this is why it is so popular. In short, you run your ads and how much you will pay depends on how many people clicked on your ad.

10 Benefits of PPC

The purpose of this article is to outline the benefits of PPC for small businesses from a business perspective so that you can decide if this is something to use in your digital marketing strategy.

#1 Fast Results

Businesses need results and they want them fast. PPC is perhaps the fastest way to run an advertising campaign and get instant results. To simplify things, if you have a website up and running you can quickly create an adwords account, setup your ads and run them in the Google network and start getting traffic.
This is a very simplified version of how it works but I just wanted to help you understand that PPC is very efficient when it comes to reaching your target audience in the fastest possible way.

#2 Measurable results

Another important benefit of PPC is that everything you do has a clear measurable target. You can measure anything that is related to a ppc campaign from costs, profits, views, clicks, visits and many more.

#3 No dependencies on SEO or Google Algorithmic changes

For long term success you need to have a SEO friendly website and also comply with SEO best standards and practices. BUT one of the nice things about PPC is that once you create profitable campaigns you don’t need to worry about Google and the changes they are doing to their ranking algorithms.

#4 Reach the right audience

When running a PPC campaign you choose where and when your ads will appear based on a number of factors including keywords, location, website, device, time and date and much more. The flexibility that you have allows you to segment your market and bring your products and services in front of the right audience.

#5 Take advantage of business opportunities

Let’s say that you are selling web hosting packages and one of your main competitors is offline due to a technical problem. This is a great opportunity for you to run a targeted PPC campaign and give those angry customers another option. This is only possible with PPC because it is easy to implement and generates instant results.

#6 Brand recognition

You can use PPC to target keywords related to your industry so that people searching for those keywords will constantly see your ads. Although general keywords will not generate more sales, indirectly they help you increase brand awareness and establish your business as an authority and leader in your industry.

#7 Open your doors to local customers

PPC is highly effective for local search. People searching using their mobiles for products or services in their area can see your ads, click on them and get instructions on how to reach your store. Recent statistics show that 75% of people are more likely to visit a store if they find it in the search results. If they don’t see your ad then most probably will click on your competitors ad and you just lost a customer.

#8 Budget Friendly

When it comes to PPC there are no budget restrictions. You choose how much to pay for a click and how much money to spend for an ad or campaign. As mentioned above since everything is measurable you can easily analyze if what you are spending is creating a profit or a loss and decide accordingly. As a rule of thumb if a campaign is profitable you can safely spend more money until you reach your maximum ROI.

#9 It’s a great tool to test your marketing strategies for other mediums

Let’s say you want to test which product headline or ad copy will perform better in a campaign. What you can easily do is setup different ads in a Google Adwords campaign, run them for a couple of weeks online and analyze the results. The ad with the highest CTR (Click Through Rate) has probably the most attractive copy for users.

#10 Rich Functionality and Reporting

PPC platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Ads provide you with all the tools you need to run your campaigns, collaborate with your teammates and analyze your data and results (reporting). This is considered a business advantage because without the right tools and reporting system is like swimming in the sea with your eyes and ears closed. The right tools with the right marketing strategy can give you the right results.

There are many compelling benefits of PPC advertising. Whether you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the value of Google AdWords (or Bing Ads), there’s a powerful case to be made.

For starters, PPC:

• Offers quick entry.
• Results are easy to measurable and track.
• Works well with other marketing channels.
• Provides a wealth of useful data

PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most businesses and brands. If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing, you’re likely losing out on valuable traffic and revenue.

Need to make the case for PPC advertising? Here are some most efficient benefits of using PPC.

1. PPC Contributes to Business Goals

This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.
Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.

In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads.
PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path that your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer. Regardless of the set of identified goals, PPC campaigns can be set up effectively.

2. PPC Is Measurable & Trackable

A major benefit of PPC advertising run through AdWords is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the AdWords tool in combination with Google Analytics.
You’ll see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals).

There’s no mystery to your PPC performance. Stats are readily available and show how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they are driving for your budget.
In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture isn’t as clear for attribution of the budget to direct results.
When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and track it all the way to conversion using Google Analytics, you’re able to clearly see what you spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals. No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like that.

3. Quick Entry

Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors on jumping into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same type of positioning and traffic that AdWords offers within minutes of launch.

When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who are already aware of your brand, and you aren’t limited to your existing followers or customer lists.

PPC lets you quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and customers.
Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform — from the research to campaign build out, to writing ads. You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking and any desired landing pages.

4. You’re in Control

While there are several nuances regarding default campaign settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for how you reach potential customers. This starts with the keywords or placements you choose to target and how restrictive you want to be.
You also have a lot of budget flexibility if you want to start small. You can set your own ad budget and bids, and choose what you’re willing to spend (though you have to pay at least close to a market rate to play in most cases).
If you’re seeing positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop your ad spend right away. This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when necessary or desired.

Google’s AdWords auction and the algorithm involved has the final say as to where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.
The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and to optimize while your ads are running, and to try new tests every day if you wish. There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment that you see in other mediums, and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to let it finish out a contracted media cycle.

5. PPC Works Well With Other Marketing Channels

Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now. With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, AdWords is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content investment.

PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience — the people using Google to find information, services, or products. The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from AdWords can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for where to prioritize SEO efforts.
On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and business end goals are not siloed.

AdWords remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on specific rules or audiences you select.
There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing activities. PPC can also be directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and conversion. If you can shift away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, it can be a big win.

6. Incredible Targeting Options

Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in AdWords to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.
This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors, or focusing on specific audience demographics on the display network.
By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of AdWords is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.

Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience as well as those that have been exposed to your brand. You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.

7. A Wealth of Marketing Data

While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly available in Google AdWords, the value of information gained goes beyond just PPC performance.
Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.
Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to find where your audience is.