How Can PPC Help Your Business?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is one of the most powerful concepts in online marketing, so understanding PPC is essential if you want to grow your business. Pay Per Click services can transform your visibility by using tools such as Google Ads to promote your brand on search engines. PPC services are a good investment – but you must know how to make the most of them.
PPC is a very effective way of getting your business noticed online. While search engine marketing work like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) takes time, Pay Per Click is an instant strategy which moves your site up to the top of search engine results pages (SERP). Pay Per Click is a good short-term strategy, while SEO is better for the long term.
Using PPC at the right time can give your business an immediate boost, whether it’s an ad to notify customers about an end-of-season sale, or to alert them to a special offer on your website. PPC gets it to the top of search engine results pages, and if done right will.
Although Pay Per Click does involve a cost, understanding PPC properly means that you will be able to control these costs and ensure a good ROI. The benefits of PPC certainly outweigh the costs.
You can set up Pay Per Click on your own, but as it requires a good understanding of AdWords, Bing Ads and other paid search services, it’s often better to let online marketing PPC professionals monitor campaigns and update keyword research for you.
How Does Pay Per Click Work?
Pay Per Click is a form of advertising in which you set a budget for your ads on a given platform, such as Google or Facebook Advertising, and then only pay for the clicks you receive. There are other variations of the idea, such as pay-per-impression or pay-per-view; these work on the premise that you pay only when the intended views or impressions happen.
PPC can be an important part of your business’s broader online marketing campaign, and is particularly useful for specialized, time-sensitive campaigns, to directly address competitors, or to break into new territories. However, PPC services can be far too expensive, time-consuming and temporary, if used as a sole approach in your online marketing presence. Instead, PPC should be used as part of a strategy including strong analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content and video development, and social media.
On Google Ads for instance, you pay Google however much you wish to have them list ads for your site at the top and right of the organic search listings. When someone clicks on your ad, you pay the current Cost Per Click (CPC) from your budget. You set a budget to spend daily, and the account balance is replenished manually or automatically based on your settings). There are several different ways to advertise on Google, including: Search Ads, Smart Ads – previously AdWords Express, Display Ads, Shopping and Remarketing.
What Is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords, now Google Ads, is Google’s own advertising service, which allows you to pay to place search results for your website on a search engine results page (SERP). This form of PPC means that there’s no need to wait for your site to work its way organically up the rankings. You can see immediate results, and these Pay Per Click services are easy to use and inexpensive.
One of the benefits of PPC is that the SERP is coming to look more organic, so it isn’t immediately obvious to the customer that you are using Pay Per Click services to promote your business.
Understanding PPC services isn’t all about Google AdWords; other paid search services such as Bing Ads, and in some cases they can outperform Google AdWords.
To use Google AdWords, you choose some keywords that a user might search on Google, then create an advert that will appear on the SERP based on those keywords.
You won’t get exclusive rights to these search words – your rival may bid for them too – but the more you Pay Per Click, the more likely it is that your ad will appear in the search results.
But understanding PPC and its uses isn’t just about putting in the biggest bid. To determine whether your ad appears in the SERP, Google will assign it what’s called an ‘Ad Rank’.
The amount of your bid is just one of five factors that go into calculating your Ad Rank. Other factors include –
- The quality of your ads and landing page (reflected in your Quality Score)
- The Ad Rank thresholds, a set of quality thresholds regarding elements such as the topic and nature of a search, location, and device type
- The search context, including the query, the time of the search, the other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals like location and device type
- And finally the ad extensions and other ad formats (pieces of additional information such as phone numbers and links to other pages on your website).
You can choose a maximum PPC bid amount, and if you select the automatic option, Google sets the bid amount for you (within your budget), then theoretically delivers you the most clicks possible within that budget.
Another less popular option called Cost Per Impression (CPM) is where you pay the search engine for every 1,000 times your ad appears on the SERP – but here, the user doesn’t have to click through to your website.
So, understanding PPC isn’t completely straightforward but can pay dividends if you appreciate the benefits of PPC to your business.
What Are The Benefits Of PPC?
So what are the main benefits of Pay Per Click?
- Quick to start – even if you’re new to online marketing, PPC allows you to get up and running much faster than alternatives such as SEO.
- Achieves business goals – PPC Services deliver a wide range of business goals from brand exposure and thought leadership to lead submission and e-commerce sales.
- Measurable and trackable – you can use AdWords tools in combination with Google Analytics to show high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions.
- Controllability – understanding PPC allows you a wide range of options to reach potential customers, as well as budget flexibility while you work out what’s best for you.
- Scalability – once you know what works for you, you can take your positive results and scale them up immediately.
- Flexibility – in any campaign using online marketing, PPC works well with other channels such as content marketing and SEO, as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience – people using Google to find information, services, or products
- Targeting – it’s easy to use online marketing PPC to set up a multi-layered approach, ranging from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on past behaviour , or focusing on specific audience demographics
- Marketing data – PPC returns a wealth of marketing data such as Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword, which can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.
Why is PPC Important to a Business?
Ultimately, the benefits of PPC make it an essential component of any online marketing campaign. Pay Per Click can respond immediately to your changing needs, and paid search services can be set to work to your schedules, rather than you having to adapt to the schedules of traditional marketing channels. Pay Per Click services give measurable results, so you know you are getting a good ROI, and AdWords, Bing Ads, and other paid search services provide you with a wealth of customer information.
Understanding PPC levels the playing field for your business, so you can compete effectively with rivals even if they have a longer-standing online presence. PPC services can work for you whether your website is high-ranking or low-ranking.
Making PPC part of your online marketing campaign helps you to attract the audience you want, whether it’s local, national or international, using mobile or desktop platforms. And perhaps most importantly, PPC works for almost any budget; you choose when and how much you want to spend on PPC, meaning that with instant profitability analysis, you are always in control of your PPC spending.
TRON Media can help with all your PPC and digital marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in Pay Per Click, web design, content creation, SEO, marketing, digital strategy, and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing strategy perfect for your business.
TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to help you reach your audience. Get in touch today to find out about our latest digital marketing and web design services, and what a creative digital agency can do for your business.
Contact us using our Contact Form, call Lasharie in London on: 020 7870 9041 or Simon on: 020 3006 6889 or by emailing us at: [email protected].
Read Our Previous Blog Post: “How To Choose The Right Digital Marketing Agency For You”