Intro note: In an ever-changing digital world that offers countless avenues to allocate your marketing budget, SEO/SEM Specialist Matt Hoffpauir outlines the tangible ways PPC advertising can help you meet your goals.
More and more, businesses are opting to focus a greater amount of their ad spend to digital opportunities. And for good reason.
While technology, trends and options are perpetually changing, there is one thing that we can be certain of: digital isn’t going anywhere. You only need to walk down a crowded sidewalk for the affirmation provided by heads buried in phones while crossing the street (walk responsibly, people). Or count how many different screens you encounter by the time you settle in at your desk in the morning.
Because strategy should precede all actions when it comes to your budget and bottom line, here are 6 ways pay-per-click (PPC) ads can help move the needle.
1. Immediate Results
PPC will deliver results fast. This is because the moment your PPC campaign is approved and your bids are high enough to get a good position, your ads will be available for thousands of people to see. Hence, PPC works amazingly well with product launches, squeeze pages, high converting offers, seasonal promotions, event-focused marketing, and more.
2. Highly Targeted Traffic
Unlike SEO, PPC marketing will allow you to narrow down your prospects based on their demographic data. Many PPC platforms, like social media sites, allow you to promote to the age range, gender, income bracket, education level, and even marital status of the people who will be able to view your ad. Popular social media sites like Facebook also allow you to target people based on their hobbies. This makes PPC a powerful way to reach the narrow band of people your business needs and lead them to your web pages.
In addition to the amazing targeting options, many platforms such as Google and Facebook also allow us to advertise to “look-a-like” audiences. Their algorithm can analyze the visitors on your website and create lists of people that have the same general demographics – the same geographic area, same income levels, similar interests, etc., in order to put your ads in front of people that are most likely to become a customer.
3. Time-sensitive Offers
Marketing products, services or events with an expiration date are always a race against time. Often, the long gestation period of SEO campaigns can produce belated results. For these time-sensitive offers, the speed of PPC marketing is a great option. Promoting an offer that will end in 2 days? No problem. PPC can deliver the traffic you need in a matter of minutes.
4. Highly measurable
Unlike mass media such as TV commercials, billboards and print ads, every single impression and interaction with PPC ads are measurable. You will see every click generated from every keyword, and every conversion made after that click. You’ll see what demographic and geographic regions perform best, and your strategy can be shifted based on that knowledge.
Conversion tracking should be set up on your website to monitor how an ad helped influence user behavior, such as filling out a lead form, visiting product pages, signing up for your newsletter, or any other interaction you’d like to track.
5. Helps Organic SEO
All the major search engines will tell you that you can’t purchase better organic rankings directly, but there are indirect benefits to your organic SEO that PPC advertising provides. There are over 200 search engine signals that are measured when determining your rank. Some include how often your listing is clicked and how long people stay on your website after they click. PPC ads keep your brand messaging in front of more customers and after they see multiple impressions of your ad, people tend to click your brand name more frequently because you are familiar. When combining PPC with an active SEO strategy, results are always seen faster.
6. Faster Testing
A big advantage PPC advertising has over other marketing channels is faster testing. When you launch a new campaign, you can quickly ascertain how effective (or ineffective) your website and calls-to-action are.
By purchasing traffic through PPC you’ll learn what needs to be changed or improved on your site. And if you use A/B or multivariate testing, you can obtain this data even faster, with greater accuracy.