By Nikki Buergel ~ General Manager & Head Of Paid Media
As a PPC Specialist, I am often asked what exactly is PPC Advertising and what are the benefits.
PPC Advertising is online advertising based on a pay per click (CPC) or cost per 1,000 impression (CPM) model. Simply put, ads are placed on a channel e.g. Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and you only pay for the click when a visitor clicks on the ad, known as cost per click (CPC), or charged at a cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). Impressions is the number of times your ad appeared, so you are paying for the number of times your ad appeared, regardless of how many times it was clicked. These costs can vary greatly depending on the sector and competition. These ads can be in the form of text ads, display (images) and/ or video ads.
PPC + SEO = more search visibility.
What Are The Benefits of PPC Advertising?
1.) It’s Targeted.
You can choose who to show your ads to based on location, keywords, age, gender, language and device. This means you can target your services to the people who are more likely to be interested in your services/ what you are offering. We more often than not, advise our clients to run PPC advertising alongside their SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Strategy.
2.) It Allows You To Advertise To Previous Website Visitors (Remarketing).
Not all visitors to your website will convert. On average, out of every 100 visitors to your website, two will convert. Simply put, 98% of the initial traffic is lost. Remarketing allows advertisers to collect data that allows them to collect a remarketing list to visitors who did not convert and target this traffic with display/ text ads to attract them back to the site. It can also be used to target visitors who show an interest in a particular product (even though they did convert) and target them with other similar and/ or new products.
3.) It’s Cost Effective.
You only pay a fee (CPC) when your ad is actually clicked, or for every 1,000 times your ads are displayed. The great advantage of PPC ads is it allows you to place your ads above the organic search results (providing budget allows). The top 3 advertising spots in the search results get 41% of the clicks.
4.) It’s Trackable.
Digital advertising is all about collecting data and utilising this data to make better informed decisions for advertising campaigns i.e. measurable. The beauty of PPC advertising is that we can measure how our ads are performing and adjust these ads based on the data
5.) It’s Fast.
SEO is an ongoing process and takes time. It is important to rank in organic search results, but this is an ongoing process and even when you are ranking on page 1, an algorithm update can cause your rankings to decrease. This is where PPC advertising is great. You can put ads up with targeted keywords and appear on page 1 within hours (results are based on budget). This way you can attract more traffic to your site instantaneously and boost sales. Traffic is more targeted because people are searching for those terms (providing the campaign has been set up properly) and your website gets the right traffic. Bearing in mind, it is crucial to have good landing pages/ website experience.
6.) You Can Run A/B Tests On PPC Ads.
A/B testing consists of an experiment with two variants, A and B, testing a single variable e.g. call to action (CTA), headline, font colour etc. in order to determine which one is more effective. These needs to be run simultaneously for a period of time with the same targeting. This provides advertisers with more information on how better to target PPC to the target audiences i.e. continue optimisations to improve results.
There are however some cons to PPC Advertising, namely, it can be expensive, depending on the sector. And it is crucial that campaigns are set up correctly in order to maximise budget/ ROI.
SEO helps you to rank on search engines, but it takes time and is an ongoing process. PPC is a quick acquisition strategy that requires a budget to place your ad in front of a targeted audience, generally when they search for specific keywords online.
With a heightened migration to digital due to the pandemic, can you afford to miss out on this traffic? Let’s Talk and see how we can help you with your PPC & SEO?
