Should Your Business Invest in PPC?

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising refers to adverts that appear within search results, which you only pay for when someone interested clicks on the advert you have created. This is totally different to traditional advertising, where you would spend money beforehand and simply hope it works out – but will it work for you?

What are the benefits?

With Google constantly moving the goalposts for advertisers, it is getting more and more difficult for your organic listings (natural results based on quality content) to appear, especially on mobile. This means that PPC is becoming essential for many industries who rely on being found in search engines.

One of the many benefits of PPC advertising is that you only pay when someone clicks on your advert – the people that are interested in learning more about you, your product or service. One of the biggest benefits is that we can monitor how many people click on your advert and see how many people convert and perform an action as a result of clicking on your advert.

PPC adverts can be set to target a specific demographic, meaning you can change the location of where the adverts are displayed and at which time they are shown during the day – i.e. during opening hours. This means that you can save money knowing that you’re only advertising to who you need to, when you need to. You can also change the adverts to show on specific devices only, for example mobile phones, and increase phone calls to your business at the same time.

In addition to this, you can also set your budget per campaign to control costs and reduce the risk of overspending. This means that you are able to put a cap on what you spend daily, weekly or advert lifetime, resulting in a very flexible way to generate more conversions and factor into your marketing budgets.

What are the dangers?

PPC advertising can generate more traffic to your website, Facebook page or drive phone calls to your sales teams, however, many people make the mistake of using highly competitive or broad keywords for their campaign. This means that the adverts can be displayed to a lot of people generating a lot of clicks, but few conversions or in the case of highly competitive keywords, cost you a lot of money for a small amount of clicks. This means that your adverts will reach their budgets much quicker.

This percentage of clicks to conversions is called a “conversion rate” and the higher this percentage is, the more effective your advert is. Good PPC requires a strategy to ensure you can attract the right amount of conversions at a reasonable cost. (See related article on how we made better use out of a clients budget and more than quadrupled their conversions).

It is also important to use relevant keywords to your business and the landing page that your advert will direct traffic to. Landing pages are hugely important in the conversion process but I’ll cover this in a follow-up post.

What platforms are there?

Google Adwords offers a service in which you can create paid ads that show up when someone searches for your product or something similar. 64.6% of people click on Google advertisements when they are looking for something online. This means that you can target your audience with precision, as you can advertise directly to people who are looking for what you provide.

Facebook is another platform where you are able to advertise using Pay Per Click adverts and is the second biggest search engine after Google in the UK. By using Facebook you can select specific demographics of the people you wish to advertise to, including age, gender, interests and even relationship status. This means that you can advertise specifically to people you think will be interested, whilst cutting down on costs as you aren’t advertising to everyone else.

So, should you invest?

We often recommend PPC campaigns as a short-term campaign rather than a long-term investment, to boost enquiries and sales usually over particularly quiet periods, or to promote new products, campaigns or services. Nevertheless a lot of our clients find it provides a good influx of new leads for them throughout the year.

In order to determine whether PPC advertising will work for your business it is important to look at your market, your product/campaign, industry competition, and the conversion process, as this will determine how feasible PPC is for your budget.

With all of this information available, it is then easier to determine whether your cost per acquisition is going to be higher or lower than your average customer cost. Then we can determine whether PPC advertising is an investment you should make or not.

Want to discuss your PPC strategy further? Contact our Senior Account Manager, Alice, on 0121 321 2828 or email alice.j@creativeinsight.co.uk