9 Reasons To Use Pay Per Click Advertising

With Pay Per Click becoming more expensive, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a good return on your ad spend (ROAS).  There are however a number of good reasons for running a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign. Here are nine of them.

1. SEO can no longer be seen as “free”. There is a cost involved in developing good content and visibility to get high search rankings. You need to compare your return on investment in SEO with your return on Ad Spend.
2. New websites usually take time (new domains probably around 8 to 10 months) before the search engines start to give them any serious ranking power. Therefore pay-per-click advertising can be the answer to getting visibility on search engines for new businesses.
3. PPC advertising gives you immediate results. SEO can take time to get high natural search rankings. You can use a PPC campaign to test the interest in a new product or service before you launch. This can tell you which search terms give the best conversion and you can then use these words in your website content, SEO, and off-site promotion.
4. Local search results are getting high visibility on the first page of results and push standard web results further down the page. To get into local search results you need a physical address in that region, therefore if you don’t have one you can use PPC advertising to target local search terms.
5. As local search, video, news, social media, product search, and other types of search results compete with the standard web results for first page real estate on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you really need to be in the top 3 natural search results if you want any clicks, therefore PPC may be the solution. The downside is that clicks for highly competitive words are going to make a big hole in your advertising budget.
6. PPC is not restricted to search results. You can use pay-per-click advertising on the content network to have your ads appear on other websites.
7. With PPC you can very accurately target your search marketing campaign at a specific countries, regions, or languages.
8. PPC is not restricted to search engines. You can also run PPC campaigns on social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn and this allows you to pin-point your marketing campaign to target specific demographics, such as age, or profession.
9. With PPC you can schedule your ads to appear on specific days, or at specific times of the day. Testing will reveal when your ads have the best click through and conversion.

The advantage of Pay per click advertising is that you can very accurately measure what you are spending on your search campaign as well as measure the return on your advertising spend. By using tracking code on your landing pages you can measure exactly how many enquires, leads or sales result from your search marketing campaign.

Using PPC you can measure the return right down to the keywords or search terms used to find your website. By micro-managing the campaign you can keep only those words which have a positive ROI (return on investment) and stop any words which are not performing well.

The main thing many people don’t realise with PPC is that you have to be prepared to spend a lot initially on testing which keywords or search terms perform well and which don’t.  The problem with first getting into PPC is that you are going to be competing against established advertisers who have optimized their campaigns already and will be paying less than you per click.

This is because search engines reward advertisers with high click through rates and high quality landing pages, because they are providing good quality ads which are relevant to searchers, and search engines need to provide their users with relevant search results to ensure a good customer experience. Therefore PPC campaigns which have a high click through rate (CTR) and high quality landing pages get rewarded with lower cost per click (CPC).

So if you want to start advertising using PPC search marketing make sure set aside enough of your marketing budget to properly test whether it is a viable channel for your business or website.