10 outstanding benefits of PPC
Some online entrepreneurs are making a lot of money through their understanding of the benefits of PPC in digital marketing.
PPC is helping several digital marketers to promote or let’s say advertise their products and services, or those of their clients online, as Tradmill Digital Marketing, explains below.
By so doing, these digital entrepreneurs reach out to millions of people that they ordinarily wouldn’t have reached using the conventional means of advertising.
Although pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a thoroughly modern activity, its foundations in direct response advertising have been studied and refined for almost a century.
Pay-per-click or PPC campaigns can be very effective methods of online marketing. Advertisers bid for spaces on the search engines. And as you may know, getting a prominent space, like on top of Google’s search results, is very good for business.
For instance, we’ve got the ubiquitous internet that provides a huge platform for advertising products and services online.
Advertisers around the world have shown a keen interest in making good use of the internet to market various products and speed up their business activities.
You may be familiar with traditional techniques of push marketing, such as brochures, television advertisements, radio ads, banners, bills, balloons, and so on, in which people are compelled to hear, listen, and watch the product or service available.
Unlike the conventional model, modern internet marketing approaches employ new techniques to attract more eyeballs and online traffic to visit, listen to, see, or purchase a product or service on sale.
It’s done through a model that’s now being widely regarded as Pay-Per-Click (PPC). It’s a successful model for internet advertising that directs online traffic to particular websites, where the advertisers pay the publishers a certain amount when their ad is clicked.
HISTORY OF PPC
PPC advertising’s been around for almost a decade. The term, PPC was coined when businesses began conducting business on the Internet in the 1990s.
Goto.com was one of the first companies to implement the concept. It was taken over by Yahoo in 2003.
When Google released its AdWords PPC marketing solution, a flurry of activity erupted in the PPC world. Aside from Google, several other search engines, like Yahoo, Bing, 7Search, ABCSearch, and Findology, offer PPC ad services as well.
WHAT IS PPC?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. It’s an internet marketing model where the advertisers use the publishers’ websites to promote their products or services through ads.
You often see PPC ads on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines. It involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads.
Put simply, it’s a form of search engine advertising where an advertiser (that’s you, a digital marketer or website owner) pays a particular amount to an ads service provider, for any website visitors who clicks on these links or banners and land on the advertiser’s web page.
Pay-Per-Click is of immense benefit in the digital marketing space.
Your ability to succeed at PPC advertising depends solely on one very thing: you being able to make people take action by using just a few well-chosen words.
Having said that, using a few carefully-chosen words in your ads campaign is an important factor in your journey into an effective PPC campaign. It’s more important than understanding the intricacies of search algorithms or other countless features of the Google AdWords, Bing, and other PPC service providers’ consoles.
Besides, your ability to writhe a persuasive ad copy using no more than 145 characters is a big challenge, particularly, if you’re up against the significant competition.
For you to profit from your ad campaigns, such campaigns mustn’t only persuade; they must stand out from a crowded page full of words screaming for your customer’s attention.
And after your words have convinced the searcher to click through to your site, it’s those persuasive words (augmented by graphics) that convince the visitor to become a customer.
HOW DOES PPC WORK?
In PPC, an advertiser pays an agreed amount per click for advertisements on the publisher sites. For example, Google AdWords is an example of a popular PPC advertising model. It enables businesses to publish ads on Google’s search engine.
So, PPC works similarly to (Cost-Per-Click).
In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results and listings.
As an advertiser, you do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to the products or services you provide.
The higher the bid you make, the higher the spot you get on the search results.
I guess you’re now imagining the impact that’ll have on your business.
Well, if you don’t know the impact of it, let me give you the good news – the outcome will be more targeted people finding your ad and clicking on it to visit your website where they can probably buy what you’ve got to offer.
That’s the very reason some people call PPC an act of “keyword auctioning.”
More often than not, ads service providers charge the ads that are useful and relevant in the search engines fewer fees per click. This is like a reward for the advertisers, as they get more business in exchange for minimal fees.
In addition, don’t forget that you paying for clicks can also mean that you’re getting impressions that cost you nothing, particularly with digital display advertising.
The following are some of the important procedures to follow when planning on a pay per click campaign:
1. Know your product inside-out. Take an inventory of the product and/or services that you have to offer (before anything else).
2. Control your budget. Establish a daily or weekly budget and stick to it. This includes keeping your budget in mind and, if at all possible, avoiding bidding wars.
3. Be careful while placing a bid. Know how to bid right – a bid that’s too high can deplete all of your money, while a bid that is too low can make you lose that spot too.
4. Know when to pull out if it isn’t working. Measure your profit margin against your spending or expenses. Know when to stop after your PPC program – if you spend more on advertising but have little or no sales at all.
5. Research the right keywords. Choose the keyword phrases you want to bid on and how much you want to pay for them. Perform keyword research, either by looking at existing search phrases or using online keyword suggestion tools, to determine which search queries your potential buyers use when looking for information about what you have to offer.
6. Concentrate on precise keywords rather than broad ones (more on that later).
7. Write compelling and attention-grabbing ads copy. A good PPC ad persuades and moves web surfers to take action.
THE BENEFITS OF PPC IN DIGITAL MARKETING
There’re many benefits of PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) in digital marketing. The following are some of the outstanding benefits digital marketing derives from PPC:
1. PPC DELIVERS QUICK RESULTS
The very first of the benefits of PPC in digital marketing is that it gets into work immediately. And it gives your ads immense traffic, quick results, and more hyper-branding in a short period.
Another of its benefit is that it can go ‘online’ within an hour of winning and paying for the bid. That’s unlike organic SEO you may have to wait for some months or time before it appears on Google results.
2. IT GIVES YOU A TARGETED TRAFFIC
A good PPC campaign doesn’t target everyone. It targets specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic.
PPC gives you high-quality traffic that is well-targeted. It helps to narrow visitors down into ‘qualified’ individuals who’re looking for certain items and/or services that you provide.
3. YOU ONLY PAY IF SOMEONE CLICKS ON THE ADS
With AdWords PPC advertising, you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. This is unlike normal offline advertising, where you pay for people to see your ad whether it makes sense to them or not.
4. IT IS COST-EFFECTIVE
Yes! This is certainly one of the best benefits of PPC in digital marketing.
Do you know why this point makes a lot of sense?
Well, in case you don’t know, let me just whisper it gently into your eyes – several thousand people can see your ads based on the geolocation you want them to appear.
The juicy part of it too is that you won’t pay a dime to Google unless someone clicks it.
The reality is that this model of online advertisement has resulted in a new age of cost-effective online marketing.
5. IT GIVES YOU CONTROL OVER THE ADS
You can control certain features like the locations, budget, demography, sex, time of the day the ads appear, etc. when putting your ads together. This will help you use your campaign to target qualified leads and help reduce costs.
You do all these to the keywords and sites you choose. This is also possible with organic SEO. But it involves a lot of work and your inability to choose a time your ads appear!
6. IT WIDENS YOUR REACH
PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from those you get from the “organic” search engines. It makes you and your brand go global.
7. YOU CAN TRACK YOUR INVESTMENT
PPC advertising employs a tracking system to determine who visits the site and what they do on it. It also records the time they spend on the site and the number of pages that they view.
These are useful tools for calculating statistics like return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors that become customers or leads).
8. IT USES MULTIPLE FORMATS
PPC allows you to run your ads on advertising websites in multiple formats. You can do this on the Google content network. This method is often faster and cheaper than going to each site individually.
9. YOU CAN USE LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS TO TARGET SPECIFIC SEARCH QUERIES
The use of long-tail keywords to specifically target certain online buyers is one of the key advantages of Pay-Per-Click, and PPC in digital marketing.
Long-tail keywords are simply keywords that contain between three to four (or maybe five) words. They are more specific and targeted in nature and much harder to target with organic SEO.
For instance “London” is a short-tail keyword, “London hotels” is a mid-tail keyword, and “luxurious hotels in London” is a long-tail keyword.
From the above example, you can see that “luxurious” and “in” have refined our keywords by making them more specific – we aren’t looking for “London hotels,” (they’d be too many hotels in this case), we’re only interested in “luxurious hotels in London.” The former is generic while the latter is more specific.
I guess this now makes sense to you. Long-tail keywords are too useful and powerful for both organic and paid searches.
10. IT ALLOWS YOU TO TEST WHAT WORKS BEST
This method of advertisement allows you to gauge the performance of your ads in days or weeks. That’s contrary to offline ad campaigns that may take months or years for you to know if it’s working or not.
THE BAD SIDES OF PPC
Well, nothing is perfect. So, PPC isn’t an exception. The following are a few of its noticeable disadvantages.
1. You’ve to make monthly payments to the search engine of your choice before your ad is up and running.
2. Pay for each click your website receives. Visitors can sometimes be your competitors or persons executing search engine pranks. Their activities on your advert can make you spend more money on the ads.
3. The ads companies will remove your ads once you’re unable to pay for the ads listing.
4. You only use it temporarily because it’s difficult to manage such an advertisement in the long run.
5. Pay-per-click pricing can be costly for long periods. All you’ve to do is stop it once the campaign is over.
PPC is a vital part of online advertising activities and the value it brings to both digital marketing agencies and their clients is second to none.
If your business needs a regular blog or the help of digital marketing specialists, you should go ahead and get in touch with Tradmill Digital Marketing. You will fall in love with the results that these specialists can offer you in the long run! Call us on 07818 406870 or email us at paul@tradmill.co.uk.
You can also read about ‘The benefits of Email Marketing’ here or ‘Tips to boost your Sales and Conversions.
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