PPC advertising offers a variety of advantages for your business. With a wide range of data that you can use to help structure your campaigns, you’re able to target prospects a lot more accurately. To get started, here are the main points we’ll discuss:
- PPC works towards your business goals.
- Easy entry, fast results.
- Measurable and trackable results.
- Complete control.
- Combines well with other marketing channels.
- Various targeting options.
- An abundance of marketing data.
PPC can help almost any business spread brand awareness and attract new customers. If you aren’t running a paid campaign, chances are you’re missing out on valuable traffic and revenue.
Want to find out how PPC can help grow your business? Here are just seven advantages of using PPC.
1. PPC Works Towards Your Business Goals
One of the most appealing aspects of PPC advertising is that it gives you a chance to achieve many of your business and marketing goals. From online exposure, brand authority and thought leadership to contact forms and phone calls, there’s a lot for you to gain when running a PPC campaign.
Moreover, almost every type of conversion can be tracked, making it easy to see which ads are most effective. Although content marketing and thought leadership strategies have recently taken priority over many other forms of marketing, PPC continues to work by moving potential clients through the middle of the sales funnel.
Whether you advertise content downloads, newsletter signups, contest entries or app downloads, PPC can support several areas of your sales funnel by guiding prospects from the awareness phase to conversion. No matter the goals you’re trying to achieve, PPC campaigns can be designed to help you meet them.
2. Easy Entry, Fast Results
Even if you’re five years behind your competitors on starting a PPC marketing campaign, you can still enter the game quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is different from starting an SEO campaign, which can require a lot of time and effort to provide the same positioning and traffic that AdWords can achieve within only minutes of launching.
Unlike other channels like organic social media and email, AdWords allows you to target users outside of those who already know about your brand. This means you aren’t restricted to your existing followers or customer lists.
Instead, PPC lets you reach a larger audience so that you can begin reeling in new prospects and customers. What’s more, you can get your campaign off the ground by working directly in the PPC advertising platform—from research and build out to writing the ads.
3. Measure and Track Your PPC
One of the best advantages of running PPC advertising in AdWords is that it’s easy to measure and track your data. Based on the goals that you set, you’ll be able to see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks and conversions.
Your PPC performance won’t involve any guesswork. Instead, stats will be readily available and help give you insight into how your campaigns are performing, and the type of traffic and results they’re delivering for your budget.
The performance of other advertising and marketing channels is usually harder to evaluate. The relationship between direct results and the attribution of your budget can be more of a mystery than anything else.
When you direct your PPC traffic to custom landing pages and track it all the way down to the conversion level using Google Analytics, you can see what you spent compared to what you achieved regarding your end goals. Traditional advertising methods like radio, billboards, magazine ads or newspapers don’t even come close to providing similar data.
4. Complete Control
Although there are slight variations for default campaign settings, you still have complete control over different options for how you reach potential customers. This all begins with the keywords or placements you want to target and the restrictions you set in place.
PPC also provides you with budget flexibility, especially if you want to start small. You can determine your own ad budget and bids, and then decide what you feel comfortable spending. However, keep in mind that you generally have to pay at least close to the market rate to play.
If you’re noticing positive results, you can scale up right away. On the other hand, if you want to take a break, there’s no harm in hitting pause and stopping your ad spend whenever you choose. Such conveniences are simply unavailable with other types of ongoing marketing campaigns.
PPC gives you the advantage and budget flexibility to pull back when it’s time to reevaluate and act quickly when it’s time to capitalize on an opportunity. Google AdWords and the algorithm involved is the ultimate decider of where your ads are displayed and your spending compared to competitors. Keep in mind that your landing pages, keywords and ad copy should all be strung together in terms of relevancy, or else the inconsistency will work against you.
Moreover, you have the flexibility to perform quick edits and to optimize while your ads are live. You can even run new tests every day to find innovative ways of improving your campaign. Unlike other mediums, there isn’t a long process from edit to deployment. And if you find that your ad isn’t working, you can pull it without having to wait until it has finished out a contracted media cycle.
5. PPC Combines Well with Other Marketing Channels
Content marketing has taken the digital marketing world by storm, which is why content strategies play an essential role in most campaigns. As you invest in original content to help build brand authority and drive the customer buying cycle, AdWords can supplement these efforts by driving users to your content more quickly; thus, boosting the ROI on your investment.
SEO and PPC make for an excellent combination as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are usually from the same audience—the people searching on Google for information, products or services. The performance data of impressions, clicks and conversions from AdWords helps you evaluate your keywords and determine where you should prioritize your SEO efforts.
On the flip side, your organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also give you more direction for PPC if the data is available. All of this falls in line with content marketing and ensures both efforts are working efficiently and business end goals are being met.
AdWords remarketing is a great tool to keep visitors engaged, no matter how they may have initially landed on your site. Based on the specific rules or audiences you select, remarketing ads are displayed to people who have visited and left your site.
There are other situations in which PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing methods. PPC can also be positively compared to traditional mail with cost per impression and conversion. If you can steer away from more expensive traditional marketing to strategies that offer real-time data and better tracking, you have all the resources you need to make improvements to your campaigns.
6. Various Targeting Options
When it comes to testing and ensuring you cover all the networks and targeting types that contribute to brand exposure, advertisers generally use a multi-layered approach in AdWords.
Whether you target keywords through text ads, run ads through remarketing based on past behaviors, or focus on specific demographics using the display network, you have a variety of variables to choose from for ad targeting.
By running tests, you can have more confidence in knowing that you’re leveraging the full scope of AdWords and getting as many impressions as possible while staying focused on your targeted audience. When it comes to business goals, you can also find out what performs best and come up with expectations on what the tolerance is for the cost per click and cost per acquisition. This way, you can compare the performance of different targeting methods.
All in all, the major advantage of PPC targeting options is that you’re able to get your brand in front of people who haven’t already been exposed to it or who aren’t already in your audience. Without a doubt, you have a ton of options for how far you want to extend your reach.
7. An Abundance of Marketing Data
Google AdWords obviously provides you with plenty of data and performance information. However, the value of this data far exceeds the ability to improve your PPC performance. You can also use impression, click and conversion information for each keyword to help guide your SEO and content marketing strategies.
Even further, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to figure out where your audience is. You can also cross-reference where your competition is using third-party tools including KeywordSpy, SpyFu and iSpionage. In doing so, you can find out what you’re up against and what market share you can capitalize on.
Summary
PPC advertising in Google AdWords provides a reliable and profitable channel for businesses of all sizes. From B2B and B2C to nonprofits, this form of advertising is perfect for companies looking to attract quality traffic and conversions quickly.
With all the advantages of PPC, it can’t hurt for you to test it out and see what opportunities it may present for your business. Plus, you’ll gain an abundance of valuable data that you can use to make more informed decisions while adjusting all of your other marketing and optimization efforts.