PPC Advertising: For When You Can’t Wait
If you have a marketing itch that needs to be scratched straight away, then pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can bring you instant gratification. As a digital marketing option, it can deliver traffic to your website in a flash. If you’re promoting a time-sensitive offer or need a quick revenue boost, then this is widely regarded as PPC’s biggest single advantage.
Organic marketing efforts such as standard SEO will gradually help your website appear on the first page of Google but PPC advertising slots are already there. Of course, that comes at a cost – you pay for every click. This is why organic growth is still beneficial for any business; it might not work as quickly as PPC but as a budget-friendly strategy over the long term, it is indispensable. Thankfully, pay-per-click and organic SEO go hand and hand, and there’s plenty of room for both in any online marketing strategy.
While the benefits of PPC are things that have to be paid for, that doesn’t mean this form of marketing is unaffordable. Pay-per-click allows you to control your budget, targets, and ad placements. It’s up to you how much, or how little, you spend on your chosen keyword. In other words, once you have set a budget it is easy to stick to it. And if your ads work as effectively as you have planned, it is a simple process to scale up and add more to your budget. And, as the name of this marketing strategy makes clear, you only pay when a user clicks your advertisement and reaches your website.
As with any good digital marketing plan, PPC is easy to measure and track. When using Google Ads, for example, the Google Analytics tool shows you performance details, impressions, clicks, and conversion – in other words, you can clearly see how effectively your money has been spent. Reports are easily available, so you can calculate how your campaigns are performing. It also gives you key insights as you seek to fine-tune your strategy based on viewer demographics.
Another benefit to keep in mind is that PPC advertising gives you the opportunity to choose your target customers based on keywords, age, location, interests, and more. You can pinpoint the people you want to promote your products or services to, unlike traditional marketing which is very hit and miss and often necessitates creating and paying for ads on multiple platforms to reach the right people.
While an immediate traffic boost is seen as PPC’s greatest advantage, it delivers a lot of other benefits when it is used as part of your online marketing campaign. In conjunction with organic SEO, pay-per-click forms a potent digital advertising strategy, with one building your profile over the long-term and the other chipping in for short term gains when you need them.