Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been around long enough that you have undoubtedly heard of it. But how well do you understand it? PPC is similar to legacy marketing strategies in some ways but remarkably different in others. Nonetheless, there is one particular aspect of PPC that makes it truly unique.
If you don’t know what that aspect is, you are about to find out. It is so important that it could very well change your perception of PPC advertising. Here it is:
You Never Waste a Dime
The most remarkable thing about PPC advertising is that company’s never waste a dime on it. Think about it. The very name tells the entire story. When you run a PPC campaign, your goal is to get people to click your ad and be redirected to your website. You only pay when people click.
Let us say you successfully bid $0.50 on a particular keyword popular in your industry. You then build an ad campaign around that keyword. Every time a potential customer clicks that ad, you pay $0.50. The ad would cost you $5.00 for every ten clicks. But what if you get zero clicks? You don’t pay a dime.
Whether or not getting zero clicks is good or bad is another topic for another post. But for comparison purposes, think about how much you might spend on a direct mail campaign. How much would you spend on a TV or radio spot? You pay that money upfront, regardless of how the ad ultimately performs. You could spend a lot of money and get nothing in return.
Other Benefits of PPC
The fact that you do not spend a dime when people don’t click your ads means you have complete control over your advertising spend. You do not have to spend money on ads that don’t work. But why stop there? Webtek Digital Marketing, a Salt Lake City and Austin company whose services include PPC advertising, says the PPC model offers a lot more.
Here are just a few of the additional benefits:
- Audience Targeting – Paid advertising on popular search engines offers the ability to target your ads based on specific keywords. You can get even more targeted by utilizing paid ads on social media platforms. PPC offers a level of targeting you will not get from any other ad platform.
- Instant Feedback – Unlike most other forms of marketing, PPC advertising offers instant feedback. Click-through rates start telling you how successful your ads are right away.
- SEO Enhancements – Marketers track analytics for both SEO and PPC. The smart ones enhance their SEO efforts by plugging what they learn from PPC analytics into their SEO strategies.
- Greater Flexibility – The nature of PPC advertising makes it far more flexible than any other form of advertising. You can run campaigns for just about any length of time. You can pick and choose the keywords you want to bid on. The amount of flexibility built in to PPC is hard to quantify.
No doubt that PPC advertising is not foolproof. In and of itself, it will not turn your company into an overnight success. PPC is best when utilized in conjunction with other digital marketing strategies. That said, it is hard to beat the value and potential PPC brings to the table.
It is all rooted in the PPC model itself. And of course, the icing on the cake is that you do not waste a dime with PPC. If people are not clicking on your ads, you are not spending anything. That is motivation to come up with better ads, but at least you’re not losing money in the interim.
