PPC Ad Basics:
Pay-Per-Click marketing, or Search Engine Marketing is a form of digital advertisement that places your company at the top of search engine results. If your business isn’t ranking well organically for an important keyword, this is the best way to put you at the top of Google or Bing. As you know, if you aren’t ranking on the first page of Google, you’re probably not going to get much traffic. PPC ads get around that roadblock.
While PPC is effective and generally produces a solid ROI, the process of creating and executing PPC ads through Google Adwords may seem quite complicated to a layman. PPC marketing allows you to bid to appear for certain searched keywords. When your ad is clicked, you get charged.
Benefits:
Reach Your Marketing Goals: Even without clicks, PPC ads increase brand exposure and awareness. In addition, e-commerce sites especially benefit from PPC advertising. Leads increase as well. Whether your marketing goal is more revenue, leads, thought leadership, or brand exposure, PPC ads help you get there.
Track Your Progress: PPC allows you to track conversions as well as the path potential customers take from awareness to purchase. Measuring and tracking PPC ads is the simplest part of the process. Familiarize yourself with Google Analytics so you have no trouble viewing impressions, clicks, and conversions. Performance stats display the ad’s efficacy showing the type of traffic and results. PPC ads go to dedicated landing pages tracked by Google Analytics.
It’s Fast: Unlike SEO efforts that give results in the long-term with a lot of time and effort, PPC marketing is immediate. With marketing efforts like email and social media, your reach is constrained to your contacts or followers. PPC is not constrained in this way, so you can reach prospects that are unattainable through other methods.
Flexibility: If you’re new to PPC ads, it’s okay to start small in terms of ad spend. And, once you see positive results, you can scale up then and there. You can also stop your ad immediately if it isn’t giving you the ROI you expected. In addition, edits to optimize your ad once it’s running is allowed.
It Works Well with SEO: The results you see from PPC ads can guide you to the direction you should take in regards to SEO. Keywords that bring in a lot of ad revenue should be prioritized for organic search to go after the prospects who avoid clicking ads. The information gathered by PPC ads such as impressions, clicks, and conversions should advise your SEO strategy. No matter how a prospect found your site- by ad or organically- Google ads re-marketing can target them all. These ads are shown to prospects who already visited you site.
Our Recommendation:
PPC ads offer a plethora of business benefits. We recommend trying them out for yourself. Google offers free trainings to better understand how to run Google ads. If you complete these trainings and it still seems too complex for you, or you don’t want to go through the training, consider reaching out to a freelancer on a site like Upwork. You can discuss your goals and strategy and allow them to plug everything in so that the ad achieves what you want with minimal adjustment.
About the author: Sheri Holshouser is a marketing manager based in Dallas, Texas. In her free time, she likes to read science fiction novels and play with her pug Chloe. Learn more about her professional qualifications on LinkedIn.
