15 reasons why your business needs PPC Advertising!

Where to begin?! PPC advertising aka pay per click advertising, is most commonly ran through a platform called Google Ads. However, Google ads is not the be all and end all of PPC advertising.

Bing, Yahoo and almost all other major search engines also provide businesses with the ability to advertise through their own PPC platforms.

Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), is the most popular PPC advertising platform. You are losing money every day your business is not advertising on Google and we’ll explain why!

1. Google ads puts you in front of the customer

There are over two billion people online and 93% of online activity starts on a search engine - the biggest of which is Google.

We’ve talked before about why Google advertising is so effective and we've gone into huge amount of detail in previous blog posts so just explain briefly here;

Google ads puts your business in front of customers who are actively looking for your product or service. They are already interested and what you do or sell before they've even seen your ad. This is why the conversion rate from Google ads traffic is so much higher and from that of traditional marketing methods.

When you put an ad in a magazine or newspaper, or even do a leaflet drop, you're targeting people who may or may not be interested in your product or service. Google ad takes away the “may nots” and targets the people who are interested. We know they're interested because the actively searching for you online! You don't go to Google and search from mortgage advisor unless you're looking for one!

2. PPC advertising drives results fast

You set your ads up, you turn them on and you're instantly visible on the biggest search engine in the world. PPC advertising provide immediate results - different from SEO and other forms of advertising.

3. Google ads will pull in better quality traffic

Traffic from search engines is nearly always the best quality traffic. This reverts back to the first point in this article - the traffic is better quality because we know for a fact that people are interested in your product or service because they're actually looking for you! You've not given someone a leaflet and hoped that they'll be interested in what you're selling. They've actually gone online in search for you. This is why the bounce rate tends to be lower, the average session duration tends to be higher, as well as the conversion rate greater for PPC traffic.

4. Increase website traffic

PPC advertising provides a great way to significantly increase your website traffic. The traffic you can drive isn't completely unlimited after all they're only going to be so many thousands of searches your product each day. But (budget dependent) PPC advertising allows you to tap into every single one of those thousands of searches.

5. It’s measurable

Drop off 5000 leaflets to homes or businesses in your local area and measure your exact return on investment. We know what you're thinking; “how”? Bottom line is, you can’t. Most traditional marketing methods aren't measurable. PPC marketing however, is.

You can track which ads, keywords, search terms, devices, locations and more convert best. You'll know exactly how many leads and sales have been generated as a direct result of your ads. If you’re e-commerce i.e. you sell online, we can track your return on investment to the penny. Pretty good huh?

6. Google Ads Ad Formats Stand Out

Google ads has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. This includes a number of changes to the ad format itself.

PPC advertising formats tend to be better than organic listings. The Google ads ad extensions give you more visibility in the search engine results. You can add site link, call out, call, price extensions and more to make your ad stand out.

7. PPC advertising is not dependent on SEO

We get it. SEO is time consuming. And if it's not time-consuming, it's expensive. If your business doesn't rank well organically and you don't want to spend the time or the money on SEO, Google ads provides a great alternative to get your site seen on search engines.

8. PPC can help identify keywords for your SEO strategy

By using the search terms report from your PPC campaign, you'll be able to identify the search keywords that are most valuable to your business. You can then use these keywords to focus your SEO strategy.

9. Help drive offline sales

Have a shop or a store you want people to visit? You can use PPC advertising to increase footfall. How? Customers are likely to come into your store after seeing one of your ads - you could even use display ads to increase brand awareness around your local area for your store. Display ads are a great way of letting people know you're there.

10. PPC advertising is highly targeted

You control who sees your ads down to the tiniest detail. You can target by location, keywords, peoples online behaviour and interests, you can even target by income. The possibilities are endless but the high level of precision plays a vital role and getting the most out of your PPC campaign.

11. Increase brand awareness

PPC advertising helps people to become aware of your brand.

There are various different types of PPC ads all with a different purpose. Use search ads to target people actively looking for your product or service, use display ads to create brand awareness, or use shopping ads to showcase your products.

12. Kill or be killed

Chances are your competitors are using PPC advertising to grow their businesses rapidly. If you're not advertising on Google search ultimately you are surrendering sales and leads to your competition.

13. Monitor results in real time

If you invest in print media, radio ads, or TV ads, you're unable to change your ad immediately if you do not see results. You may well end up paying for something that just doesn't work.

PPC campaigns are different. You can view your results in real time - if you are not happy simply change your campaign. You'll be able to see which ads, keywords, audiences and more convert or don't convert in real time. You can remove the ads and keywords that don't work and try new ones instead without huge amounts of wasted budget.

14. You only pay when someone clicks your ad

Remember what we said before about PPC advertising being so effective because people are actively searching for your product or service? Well you only pay for your PPC ad when one of those people actually clicks it. In effect, you're only paying for interested people to click through to website. Can’t complain about that!

15. You need PPC advertising

If you're looking to grow fast or just looking to get an increase in your leads or sales, you need to invest in paid search marketing so that you can reap the benefits of PPC advertising.

For every day you are not on the search engines, you are missing out on a whole host of potential clicks and sales. While your competitors are using it to capitalise on it.

Want to get started with PPC advertising? Talk to us today!