As digital marketing becomes more necessary with each day, it becomes all the more important to find the solution best suited to your business – between SEO, PPC, blogging and social media marketing.
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is often overlooked because it might seem too good to be true or too complicated to figure out. So we’re here to simplify this super-effective digital marketing tool so that you can decide if it’s the right one for your business.
If you haven’t considered SEO or a company blog to kick off your company’s digital marketing endeavours, read up on what they can do for you in our blogs:
What is Pay-Per-Click (PCC)?
Exactly as it sounds, PPC is a type of advertising where you only pay (a small fee) each time your ad is clicked on. The closest comparison would be paying to place an ad in a newspaper, except that instead of paying for it to be in the newspaper itself, you are only paying every time someone reads your specific ad. What more could you want?
If you use a search engine like Google when searching for products, services and specific companies, chances are that you’ve been exposed to PPC already. For example, when you search for ‘hats’, the carousel of images your see first from various outlets selling hats has been put there by PPC advertising. The first results on the Google search engine results page (SERP) that have a little block saying ‘Ad’ are also there because of PPC.
Only what you see beneath all of that is organic – meaning that it was not part of a PPC campaign, and more likely part of an SEO strategy.
Did you know? PPC also includes the ads you watch while on YouTube, as well as the image ads you find in the peripherals when browsing certain popular websites.
And now that you know what PPC is, here’s why you would need it.
What PPC can do for your business
- One of the main objectives of PPC is that it increases traffic to your website. And whether you want this traffic to land on your Home page or product pages is also up to you.
- PPC is extremely cost-effective. This is because you only pay for what you use, or for what actually works.
- This form of marketing is highly targeted, when used with the right keywords and target audience analysis. You can customise your campaign according to metrics such as user’s ages, locations, and interests, which makes it easy to target specific customer profiles locally and globally.
- It’s the opposite of cold calling. With old-fashioned advertising, you were never sure whether the person you are pitching to even wanted your product or service to begin with. PPC ads, on the other hand, allow you to reach people at the time that they are actively searching for what you are selling. What this means is that your product or service will be put in front of users who are already interested in what you have to sell.
- You have full financial control with PPC. There is no minimum spend to stop you from starting small, and you can set a maximum monthly budget to avoid a nasty surprise at the end of the month, too.
- PPC allows you to test, track and tweak as you go. With the stats available to you from using PPC, you can continuously analyse its performance and make any necessary changes as you go.
- PPC also integrates well with the other major digital marketing methods currently in use, such as SEO and social media marketing. For example, the data analytics from your PPC campaigns can assist with your SEO strategy by testing keywords in a quick and low-risk way. But unlike SEO, the algorithms don’t need to be kept up with because they aren’t constantly changing.
- And speaking of quick, if PPC has anything over SEO, it is that it is incredibly fast. You don’t need to wait for Google to index your changes every time, like with SEO, before you see results.
- Over and above web traffic and sales, PPC also positively impacts your brand awareness. This is because even when an ad isn’t clicked on, it is seen and your brand will be remembered. Another form of creating and maintaining brand awareness with PPC is a method called retargeting. Once a user has clicked on your ad but not made a purchase, you can do a retargeting campaign to keep your brand at the front of their mind over the next few days while they make their decision about whether they are going to purchase or not.
Our PPC specialist has been invited to the Google Head Offices for training and has the certifications to prove it. You’re in good hands with Haystack! Digital Marketing Co.