PPC (pay-per-click advertising) is vital for online business success and an important component for a complete and victorious digital marketing campaign. Many businesses miscalculate the profit of Adwords and as a result, they are lashing out on a big chance to develop their online businesses rapidly in a controlled and cost-effective manner. PPC advertising, whether this is via Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter promoted tweets, or even Bing Ads, is the best way to reach your valuable customers fast and brand your products or services. What is Pay Per Click advertising? PPC or otherwise known as Adwords advertising is one of the modules in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Together with SEO, they are the best ways to target customers using search engines (mainly Bing & Google and) to find answers to their queries, generic information, or stuffs to buy. As the name implies, as an advertiser you will only be charged when people click on your ad. Over some years this model has evolved and PPC campaigns will also use other pricing models like CPM (pay per thousand impressions) / CPA (pay when a click on the ad leads to a conversion). The general idea about Adwords/PPC is that it enables you to reach a targeted audience quickly by defining who will view your ads (either by providing specific keywords or demographic characteristics) and you only pay when somebody performs an action in your ad. Let’s review in more facts why PPC is significant for start-ups, small businesses, and generally any companies that want to do business online. #1 – Definitely Cost-effective: One of the misunderstandings around PPC campaigns has to do with cost. Many folks assume that PPC is a waste of money and that keeps them far from using it. It is the fact that if you are not careful about how you use your money, you will end up exhausting your funds on expecting hope and not actual results. But, If you follow the below simple rules, you will increase your probability of making your campaigns beneficial: Begin slow, evaluate and grow large – When you begin with PPC don’t invest all your money on your first campaign but begin with a small campaign, and then depending on the result you can invest more money. The whole thing is measurable from the impressions your ads will get, clicks you get, visits to the website & conversions so ensure that you study the numbers well before spending more money. If you are fresh to Adwords, Facebook, or Bing Ads, it is good to engage professionals to create the campaigns for you and then if you cannot pay them to optimize the campaigns on a monthly basis, at least you will know that your ‘base’ is correct. Use ways to minimize your CPC costs – A best PPC campaign is one that is optimized and there are various ways to lower your CPC costs and achieve more with less money. Don’t think that these ideas are useless; Adwords is like SEO where the optimization process is a basic component. Keep increasing your budget as long as the returns are growing – This is possibly the most essential rule of PPC management: boost your budget on campaigns that are beneficial and not on campaigns that are causing loss. In the beginning, it is usual to run non-profitable campaigns since the optimization period may take some months but in the long run, you shouldn’t invest money without positive returns. Learn from the competitors – The first footstep to make when setting up a new PPC campaign is to have a closer look at what your competitors are achieving. Some low-cost competitive intelligence tools such as SEMRUSH can give you a lot of information about your competition. Things like how much they invest, for what keywords they rank, the exact ad copy they are using is the data you can get by pulling a competition analysis report. Analyze these data and use them for your own benefit. Invest money on keywords that give profit – One more reason that makes Adwords a cost-effective advertising solution is that you have the potential to control the budgets & allocate them to keywords/audiences which are profitable. When you set up your campaigns, you do it on the basis of what you think might work but after a few weeks, you will see that few keywords (or audiences) perform better than others. Use this information and make adjustments to your bids & targets to give more importance to these potentially beneficial areas & less or none to other keywords. #2 – It’s the quickest method to get targeted visitors: When you run an online business you require traffic, not any type of traffic but selected traffic that can possibly lead to increased sales and business. SEO is the main thing that comes to mind when talking about selected traffic but we all know that it takes time to work so the next best alternative that can get you selected traffic quickly is Google Ads/PPC. With Google Ads, you can select which keywords to show your ads & these will show on the top & bottom of your Google search results. With Facebook Ads, you can define your particular audience based on the many demographic characteristics facebook has for all of us. We work with a high number of businesses that make a lot of money online through Adwords without having good unpaid rankings. Their success has to do with 3 things: The quality of products they offer High conversion landing pages High optimized PPC campaigns We are not saying that it is easy to get these areas right from the start but this is the formula for online success. SEO can certainly help with conversion optimizations and PPC optimizations but SEO alone cannot help a new business grow quickly. It might take months/years for SEO to bring in targeted traffic whereas PPC is almost instant. Of course, the profit from achieving high organic rankings is massive but you need to be patient & have a good SEO plan to get there. #3 – It’s the easiest way to check if your product sells: You have a nice-looking website and products are prepared for shipping but don’t know if your products sell / if your website does conversions, what is the quickest way to find out the truth? Run a campaign on Google Adwords & get 1500 targeted visits to measure the results. It will cost you to make this check but if you are planning for a long-term online presence the money you spend now on optimizing the website & product offerings will generate more profit in the near future. Businesses that don’t follow this path of testing and optimization and go blind believing that the website works & their products sell because they assume so are doomed to failures. Your designer and web developer consider being user friendly and converting is not always what actually works for users and a targeted Adwords campaign will assist you in finding the truth. #4 – It works well with the other digital marketing channels: Adwords advertising is the main component of your digital marketing strategy & works well with all the other marketing channels. For example: You can apply dynamic search ad campaigns & let PPC say which keywords are a good match for the website. You can use Adwords/PPC to test the effectiveness of various keywords so that you know which keywords to aim with long-term SEO. You can use PPC as a means to get more installs for your mobile app & strengthen your mobile marketings. You can use PPC to get a lot of email signups and enhance your email marketing campaign. It’s great for local SEO optimization – You can use PPC to steer customers to your shop / get calls from customers searching for products & services in your area. #5 – GoogleAds/PPC allows you to execute advanced marketing techniques like Retargeting: One of the most successful ways to increase conversions is to do retargeting. Retargeting or remarketing is a method where you create campaigns & target people who have already visited your website and there was no conversion. For example, if you have a website selling engagement rings. Customers looking to purchase engagement rings online go via a buying process that includes searching for the products they want & taking a look at various websites. The timeframe to make a decision can get bigger to 30 / 60 days since the products are high-priced and the existing sellers a lot. This is a typical case where retargeting can produce great results. By including a piece of code provided by Google Adwords, Twitter, or even Facebook, you allow these networks to recognize via cookies people that visited the website but did not purchase a product from the website. You then have the opportunity to create campaigns targeting those customers & offer them incentives to re-visit your website & complete the purchase process. #6 – When should you use Adwords? Adwords is a good fit for almost any kind of business. You can use it to sell things, services, raise brand awareness and get new leads from Google / social media platforms. As a startup, you can use PPC & take advantage of all the benefits described above and as an established business you can use PPC to further develop the business online. Use Adwords when you have time-sensitive offers/events since no other digital marketing tool (besides SM marketing) can provide you immediate access to your target customers. Use it for keyword domination – Even if you have good organic rankings for selected keywords, you can still utilize PPC & dominate the search results. When you should NOT use Adwords? In general, PPC is not a good companion when: Your products have a very less price & thus the profit margin is not huge to accommodate for the cost of setting pay-per-click campaigns. When you have an Adsense website, Adsense & Adwords can work together but there are some cases that you should not use them simultaneously. Please read Adwords Versus AdSense for more details. Conclusion: Don’t use PPC if you don’t have the knowledge to do it correctly. Running campaigns on AdWords & Facebook is easy but if you are not sure how they work, you will end up losing a lot of money with minimum returns. Skyaltum offers the best-paid advertising services in Bangalore The message from this blog is that PPC/Adwords is a must-use tool for almost any kind of business & if you don’t yet use PPC, you will miss out on big opportunities for growth.
