Why PPC is Important
At Carden Digital, we’ve run successful PPC ad campaigns for a variety of different businesses in a diverse set of industries, and that’s given us some insights we’d like to share about the benefits of PPC ads and how you can use them to reach new customers, generate leads, and boost their sales.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads are online ads where the advertiser is only charged when the user clicks on the ad. The most common use of pay per click ads is on search engines like Google. Advertisers set the PPC ads to show up when a user searches for their chosen keywords and then bids a maximum amount they are willing to pay for each ad click.
PPC search ads are an incredibly powerful tool for businesses as they can target users when they are already searching for related products and services. This increases the chances that the ads audience will be interested and therefore more likely to click on the ad. A click on a PPC ad normally leads to a website or single page “landing page” site. From there, you can try to convince the user to take a desired action. The eventual action that you want each user to take is known as a “conversion”. This conversion could be the user contacting you (lead generation) or making a purchase from your website (sales).
By monitoring these actions and comparing the revenue generated by them to the money spend on your advertising, you can have a clear picture of the return on investment (ROI) on each ad campaign. If you need professional help with setting up or managing your business’s PPC campaigns, our team can help. Give us a call today or read more to learn how we can use PPC to boost your leads, sales, and brand recognition.
Why is PPC Important For Businesses?
PPC ads can have a lot of benefits for businesses. Here are just some of the benefits you can see after having your PPC campaigns managed professionally.
– Understand your audience better
Knowing how many people are searching for your products and services and how much time they spend on your website, as well as demographic data like age, gender, and income, can all be invaluable data for your business. It can also help influence things like advertising copy, budget, and keyword targeting.
– Save time and money on marketing campaigns
Running a successful PPC campaign takes time, especially if it’s your first one. Leave that task to our experts to manage and you can get back to the parts of running your business that you enjoy.
– Know what keywords people are searching for
Your customer might not be searching for your services using the same words you would use to describe them. Reviewing the “search term reports” from ad platforms like Google Ads can help you see what your target audience is searching for and how they are searching for it.
– An effective way to market your product or service
Using PPC search ads gets your business in front of people looking for your services at the very moment they are actively searching for them. Compared to older, non-digital marketing methods, this makes PPC a very efficient way of reaching your target market at a time when they are more likely to become a customer.
– Increase the number of leads that come in for your business
One of the benefits of PPC for businesses is that it is an automated method of gathering leads which can then be followed up on in person by a sales team.
Benefits Of PPC For Business
Google Ads Give Faster Results Than SEO
SEO and paid ads are both important for a business’s online marketing strategy, and companies which use both see the best results. However, SEO campaigns take a lot longer to start showing results. Changes you make to your website and content today may not affect your search rankings for weeks or even months.
This by no means makes SEO unimportant, but it means that in order to start seeing the results of your marketing efforts sooner, you should utilise PPC paid ads too. You can learn more about our SEO services here.
If you need new leads now, and not in six months, use PPC ads!
Google Ads Are More Trackable Than Other Forms Of Advertising
If you are already using traditional methods of advertising, such as printed fliers, postal, radio ads, and billboards, you’ll know how difficult it is to check whether that advertising is actually working.
Some businesses try to track the success of their traditional ads by using promo codes, like “20% off when you use the code SUMMER2021”, but this has two major downsides:
- You are relying on the customer to remember that promo code and remember to actually use it when the time comes to make a purchase.
- While a promo may attract some customers, you are already cutting into your ROI by offering a discount to every customer that sees your ad.
Online ads, and Google Ads in particular, have advanced tracking built into the actual code of the ads themselves. This means you can track the customer’s journey from the moment they see the ad, to the moment they make a purchase (or whatever action you have set as your ad’s goal). With the info Google provides you can know exactly…
- How many people saw your ads.
- How many of those people clicked on them.
- Which pages on your website they visited after they clicked.
- Whether they converted to a sale or a lead after they clicked.
- What profit was generated by each ad click.
- Which ads performed better than others.
PPC Ads Are Highly Scalable
PPC ads are only really limited by budget, and the large amount of data provided by the ad networks makes their performance easy to forecast, and as such, easy to expand when you have the budget to do so.
For example, if you have a weekly budget of £100, which gives you an average of 75 clicks, and of those 75 clicks, 5 will convert to sales or leads. Doubling the budget to £200 would likely also lead to a doubling of your conversions. Equally, reducing your budget would have the opposite effect, halving your budget would halve your conversions. There are very few marketing methods which offer this level of 1:1 scaling.
Build Different Campaigns For Different Audiences
A lot of traditional advertising targets a location or medium where the advertiser thinks their ideal customer will be. Search-based PPC ads can skip this step completely and target the ideal customer directly. Search engines and social networks have a lot of information about who is using their services and where they are. That means if you have a service aimed at men in their 40s and you only operate in Sussex, you could target your ads to only display to men aged 35-54 in the Sussex area.
Google and Bing let you target numerous different demographics including:
- Age
- Gender
- Household Income
- Location
This lets you build separate campaigns for different customers and adjust the budget for those campaigns accordingly. For instance, you could assign more advertising budget to users with a higher household income as they may be more valuable to your business.
You can also look historically at the data of which users are converting and how much ROI they are generating, and then adjust your strategy accordingly.
Potential Disadvantages of PPC
While PPC is a powerful tool, there are some things you should be aware of before starting a campaign. Here are some potential disadvantages of a PPC search campaign.
- Lower organic traffic
If your website already ranks organically for certain search terms and you do not have competitors running ads, you may end up paying per click for web traffic you could have got for free via organic search results. If this seems to be the case, you can
focus your ads on more obscure search terms and try and capture traffic which you would not capture organically. - Competition and increasing costs.
If your business and a competitor are both bidding on the same keywords, you can end up paying increasingly more for each click. You can set a maximum daily budget so you don’t overspend, but certain industries will be more competitive and thus have higher click costs for their target keywords. - Ad budget required
This isn’t so much of a “disadvantage” but it is something to keep in mind. Ads need an ad budget, and that budget needs to be realistic. If you’re looking to spend £5 a week on advertising, PPC is probably not the way to go. The require budget can vary depending on how competitive your industry is and the amount of leads/sales you want to achieve. However, at Carden Digital we are always upfront with customers about what we think a realistic budget for them is before we start running any ads.
PPC advertising may not be for everyone, but you can get some good results if they are set up and managed correctly. You stand the best chance of success if you partner with a digital marketing agency.
Ready To Start Your First PPC Campaign?
These are just some of the benefits of PPC ads. While platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads are incredibly powerful, they’re not the most user-friendly platforms for beginners and making a mistake while setting up your campaigns and targeting could result in a lot of wasted ad spend. That’s why partnering with an experienced digital marketing agency like Carden Digital ensures your campaign is set up and managed correctly from day one. In addition to building and managing the campaign we also provide detailed monthly reports on the campaign’s success and guidance on budget and strategy.
Speak to Carden Digital’s PPC team to find out more.