What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
As a small business, the cost of advertising can be a deal-breaker. Even though it’s a necessary expense, it’s one that often gets compromised due to other non-negotiable ones. When you start working advertising into your budget, it’s important to get the most “bang for your buck.” One way to do that is to take advantage of pay-per-click advertising.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising can help your marketing in a number of ways. It can display your business at the top of search engine results. It can put an ad for your business on another website that your customers may be visiting, even a competitor’s site. The ads can include a description, a phone number, ratings, prices, or reviews that can help legitimize your business in the consumer’s eyes. Despite this wonderful marketing tool, not all businesses know how to take advantage of them, or even why they should.
Why You Should Be Using PPC Advertising
Think about traditional marketing tactics. A TV commercial, radio spot, billboard, magazine ad—all of these can be effective but have one major flaw that PPC doesn’t. They are shown to a large number of people who may or may not have any interest in your business. It doesn’t matter how good a commercial is for a car dealership if the viewer simply isn’t in the market for a new car. What makes PPC different is that you’re essentially showing your advertisement exclusively to people who are already interested in your specific product or service. We know that because your ad is only shown when they are searching for that product or service.
Outbound sales can be expensive and fruitless, but with pay-per-click, the leads are coming to you. Not only that, but no matter how many times your ad is shown, you only pay when someone actually clicks on it. PPC dramatically reduces costs, and its effectiveness can be easily measured with quantitative data.
This isn’t to say that PPC is right for every business or service. Consider your profit margins when deciding. For example, if your product is sold at $3, and each customer typically buys only one, it may not be worth it for you to pay $2-3 for one click. If your product is sold at $100, or if it’s a service the customer will use many times over their lifetime, then that profit margin looks a lot better. So think about it – how much is a qualified lead worth to you?
How To Get The Most Out Of PPC
Understand Your Customer
An online ad should have as much thought put into it as a traditional paper, television, or radio advertisements. You should understand who you’re speaking to, what they’re looking for, and where they are in the buying process. Google Adwords has a great research tool called Keyword Planner. It can help you get a grasp on how people are searching for things. Understanding the phrasing and keywords people type into Google will help you create an ad campaign that appeals to them.
Create Quality Landing Pages
Having quality landing pages is critical for both you and your potential customers. We’ve talked about the importance of landing pages before, and that’s because Google decides how often and in what position it will show your ad based on the quality of your landing page (along with the bid and other factors). That means a landing page with little to no relevant information will make for a low-performing ad. But let’s say your bid is high enough to get your ad shown, and people start clicking on it. If the landing page they see doesn’t give them the information they wanted when they clicked on the ad, they’ll immediately leave. This lowers your quality score with Google, costs you the amount of the click, and ultimately doesn’t get you a lead.
Decide What Your Goals Are
How will you measure whether or not the ad is successful? By the number of clicks on your ad? Purchases on your site? Visits to the contact page? Having clear and measurable goals will help you or your PPC manager make sure your budget is being used effectively. Ads may need to be rewritten or targeted to new demographics, and it’s important to have a way to measure how well you’re doing.
There are so many options on how, where, and who you target with PPC advertising, and the best option varies per business. In a future blog, we’ll dive deeper into how to craft the perfect ad and how to make sure it’s being shown to the right audience.
Paid Advertising can be very beneficial to your business, and we want to help you use it. View our video on PPC Marketing to get more information on how PPC can help your business. And reach out to RevenFlo for help managing your online advertising or to set up a Google Adwords training session with a Google Certified team member.