Pay-per-click advertising has been around for a long time and is one of the most common ways to market online. But businesses that haven’t tried it will want to know, “Why is PPC so important?”
PPC is important, make no mistake.
But before making a PPC plan or spending money on a full-fledged ad campaign, it’s important to know why PPC is important for online business growth. We’ll tell you why!
Most people agree that this type of online advertising is one of the most effective. This is the main benefit of this type of marketing. It works quickly and gives reliable results. It’s also one of the most common ways to advertise. It makes businesses more visible on search engines like Google and Bing, and PPC visitors are much more likely to turn into customers.
What does PPC stand for?
For businesses that aren’t sure PPC works, you need to know what it is and how it works before you can understand why you should use it as part of your marketing strategy. PPC, which stands for “pay-per-click,” is a type of digital advertising that is used on a wide range of websites. Simply put, it means ads where businesses pay anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars for each click on their ads.
Search ads (PPC ads that look like regular search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), display ads (graphic or banner ads that show up on third-party partner websites), and paid social media ads are the most common types (which operate much like display ads, within specific social media platforms). The way “PPC” works in each of these styles will be different depending on the platform, but the main function of all of these types of internet advertising is to pay for each ad click.
Marketers often bid on key search terms so that their ads will show up in search results, or they pay for their ads to show up in user feeds, videos, web pages, and other places.
Here’s why it’s important to use PPC advertising to keep up with competitors.
It can give results right away and over and over again
This is probably the most important reason to use PPC. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, focuses on “organic” traffic growth. PPC advertising, on the other hand, can give marketers results almost as soon as their ads go live.
This is why pay-per-click advertising is important for businesses that want to make money quickly or take advantage of a very short-term marketing window (such as for special events, product launches, holidays, seasonal sales, etc.). In fact, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a key part of both short-term and long-term digital marketing plans.
For search ads on Google or Bing, advertisers set up their ads through each platform’s portal, they set-up their ad campaigns/ad groups, set-up a budget, and determine their ad parameters – once the ads are launched they can begin immediately appearing in search results and they can immediately begin attracting clicks/conversions. However, it’s important to note that PPC campaigns can get better results once they offer enough feedback data on campaign performance – this data can be used to finetune campaign scope, improve keyword targeting, focus on high-value audiences, and use bid strategies more efficiently.
Part of the value of PPC is that you can use the short-term data it gives you to cut or cancel budgets for campaign attributes that aren’t working and focus on the ones that are.
PPC helps you reach your business goals and make money
This may seem obvious, but another reason PPC is important is that it directly affects a business’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and can bring in revenue in a way that can be measured. In the end, that’s the point!
We’ve already talked about how this kind of advertising gets results quickly. The fact that it’s also a reliable way to make good money makes it even more appealing. Why use pay-per-click marketing when you have to pay to run ads on search engines, partner sites, and social media? Well, Google says that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they get back an average of $2 in sales. That’s an amazing 2:1 ROI!
Most pay-per-click (PPC) platforms have KPIs built in as campaign goals, so businesses can use them to focus on specific business goals:
- For search engines, ads can be designed to generate: sales, leads, website traffic, brand awareness, app downloads, off-line conversions, session duration, and a lot more.
- Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. offer similar goals, such as brand awareness, product sales, video views, messages, app downloads, post engagement, etc
This is a big part of why it’s so important for online businesses to use PPC advertising. Major ad platforms are built around the entire purpose of helping businesses grow online with a range of ad styles that are built around your specific goals.
These types of ads can help businesses advertise for their specific needs, as well as track performance and measure results.
It’s one of the most successful forms of digital marketing
PPC is one of the most popular ways to advertise online, and the numbers show that it is also one of the most successful. Statista data shows that search PPC is one of the best ways to market online, with up to 20% of people saying it gives them the best return on investment (ROI) of any digital marketing strategy.
Wolfgang Digital says that by 2020, paid search advertising will have overtaken organic search engine traffic as the best way to make money through digital marketing. In fact, search engine pay-per-click (PPC) now brings in 36% of retail sales, and as much as 46% for “online-only” businesses. And since PPC traffic leads to 50% more conversions than organic traffic, it’s easy to see why PPC is so important for any online business.
Search engines and social media sites are important parts of how people use the internet. Almost everyone who uses the internet regularly uses one or both of these sites. To ignore PPC would be to ignore an important part of how people shop online. Three-fourths of people (75%) say that search ads make it easier to find the information they are looking for.
PPC works so well that 79% of brands say it is one of the most important things for their business. This is why PPC is important, and it’s also why you need to use PPC advertising to keep up with your competitors, who are probably already doing it.
You have a better handle on your budget (only pay for the clicks)
Pay-per-click advertising is based entirely on budgets. Because of this, it gives you a lot more control than other types of paid advertising. One of the biggest reasons why to use PPC advertising is because businesses get very granular control of how their budget is spent.
Also, for common types of paid ads, like search engine PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. There is no cost to join, and there is no minimum budget for ads. Businesses can choose to spend as much or as little money as they want.
Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising (Bing) let marketers create a campaign hierarchy that’s broken down into account > campaign > ad group > ads > keywords/audience. Most popular social media sites have a similar structure. This way marketers can break down and fine tune their budget anyway that they want, with exact controls for how budget is spent on every campaign, group, or specific ad.
PPC gives businesses a lot more control than traditional paid advertising because they can increase ad spend in areas, demographics, or queries that work and decrease ad spend in areas that don’t. This means that the value of PPC lies in its ability to squeeze every penny out of a budget for a better return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
This can be scary for many businesses, and it’s a big reason why many choose to hire PPC management experts, especially when the benefit of getting professional return-on-investment is so appealing.
More controlled and targeted advertising
Like we said above, control over the advertising budget also includes control over other important advertising metrics. Specifically audience targeting. One reason why PPC is so important for many businesses, is that few other advertising models allow for such specific control.
Most businesses know that audience is critical to greater transactions and sales – so why use PPC advertising then? PPC ads can be made to reach very specific groups of people.
For the Google ad network PPC marketers can control which ads are displayed where – to a very precise level. PPC lets marketers choose how, when, and where their ads are shown. This includes which days, which locations, which search queries (and which keywords they shouldn’t show up for), which user demographics, user interests, previous purchases, and more. For PPC across social media platforms, the control over target ad demographics can be even more specific.
Because these platforms have a huge wealth of user data, they can give ad options that are based on things like:
- Age, gender, language, and other demographic data.
- Global, national, and even local locations.
- Interests, hobbies, jobs, etc. of the user.
- Previous shopping habits, brand interests, and web browsing.
- Device, mobile vs. desktop use, and cross-platform browsing habits.
- Education level, income, and employment.
- Things in life.
- Political affiliations.
PPC can improve SEO performance
Search engine pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization work well together because they have a lot in common. PPC and SEO are important together because businesses will be aiming for the same keywords on the same platforms and for the same audiences.
There’s no direct link between PPC campaigns on Google/Bing and SEO rankings – however businesses that optimize both are more likely to improve SEO. PPC is important for SEO because companies that improve their site and content to get a better Google Quality Score often also improve their SEO ranking.
If you do keyword research and keyword density in the same way for both SEO and PPC, you are already halfway to completing key strategies for both! Businesses that do both often anecdotally believe that PPC does help SEO. There are some indirect reasons for this that can make PPC advertising an important extra strategy:
- Searchers that see a brand’s ad might be more likely to click on its organic listing.
- PPC ads can help a business get its name out there, which makes it more likely that SEO will lead to a sale down the road.
- Paid ad clicks can get your pages to the top of Google’s page 1, where they can lead to more sharing, more mentions, and more backlinks, which means better SEO rankings.
PPC is also important because it gives you access to data. Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising offer ad platforms that provide lots of feedback on ad campaigns. Marketers can improve their SEO campaign by using the data they get from keyword research, keyword performance, A/B ad tests, conversions, impression share, etc.
Plus, since search PPC offers results much faster than SEO (weeks instead of months), it’s possible to test keyword strategies in PPC and then use conversion rate (CR) and traffic data to determine if similar strategies would work for long-term SEO.
Measure and track data to make ads more effective
This is another one of the big pluses in PPC that traditional non-digital strategies don’t offer: tons of feedback data.
Marketers can measure a wide range of metrics, such as keywords, target audiences, platforms, devices, demographics, and more, and use the data to improve their PPC campaign. The importance of PPC depends on how well a business can read its data, change its advertising campaigns, wait for new data to come in, and then measure how well its changes worked.
This area of advertising has a lot of data and gives marketers a lot of data and control over their ads. This is a big part of why PPC is so important in modern marketing, as these changes can add up to huge budget savings and even better ROI. Businesses can do the following with PPC:
- Use the ad budget to get the most clicks possible.
- Set a desired cost-per-action (CPA) for each type of conversion (like product sales, signups, app downloads, etc.)
- Target a certain amount of return on ad spend (ROAS), which is basically a certain balance between spending and making money.
- If a business doesn’t mind spending more money, try to get as many sales as possible.
- Maximize conversion value (for ads that are set up for high-value keywords).
- Look for the lowest prices for ad space.
- Set daily budgets and budgets for the whole trip.
PPC is important for advertisers who put a high value on data because of all of these strategies, which vary from platform to platform. Most of the time, platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook, etc. can automatically look at how well your ads are doing and make changes to them to reach the goals above.
PPC visitors are more likely to make a purchase.
Unbound data shows that 50% of visitors to a retailer’s website who came from a paid search ad are more likely to buy than those who came from a natural link.
Formstack says that PPC ads are one of the top three ways that people convert on a page. Another big benefit is that PPC ads put brands right at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). More than 40% of clicks go to the top three paid ad spots on the page.
This is another reason why PPC is important for getting fast results. For businesses that are willing to pay to play, it can be a quick way to put your brand or products in front of shoppers and start making money quickly.
It’s easy to get going.
All marketers agree that getting started with pay-per-click (PPC) is usually very easy.
PPC is easy to set up and get going quickly, unlike content-based marketing strategies, SEO, which takes a long time to work, and traditional advertising, which takes a lot of work. Marketers can set up a free account with Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising and start making ads almost right away. Once ads are made and approved, they can show up in search right away to start getting results.
Unlike email and social media, there are no requirements to build an audience organically or find contact information for your target audience. These platforms walk marketers through the process of making ads, and once brands are ready for their ads to go live, they can reach millions of users around the world right away.
Ads can be turned on and off quickly, which means that increasing brand awareness is as easy as flipping a switch.
Rizer Technology Solutions is one of Design Rush’s Accredited California PPC Agencies. Give us a call at 949.232.1390 to see how we can generated leads for your business using Google Adwrods PPC.
