There’s a good business case to be made for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It’s quite popular (as we will see momentarily), and is effective for most businesses provided they implement a well-conceived and properly funded campaign.
1. PPC Gives You an Edge — Google
Google is one of the largest companies on the planet. Why? Because of advertising. In 2003, Google’s advertising revenue was $1.42 billion; in 2016 — $79.38 billion. Advertising revenue accounts for more than 90 percent of Google’s total revenue, which means Google treats its PPC advertisers well on its search engine. Over the years, Google has given more and more prime SERP (search engine results page) real estate to PPC ads, driving organic results farther down. More recently, Google has begun to make PPC ads look more like organic results, another way the company is setting the table for higher click-through rates. In short, when you invest in PPC, you have Google in your corner. As time goes on, it’s highly likely Google will continue to modify its search engine appearance and functionality to favor advertisers.
2. PPC Makes Your Marketing Nimble
Most forms of online and traditional marketing require long-term commitments and consistently big budgets. Branding campaigns, SEO, drip marketing campaigns and social media campaigns lose most of their effectiveness if they become on-again, off-again affairs. Not so with PPC — the PPC switch can be turned on or off at a moment’s notice. A company with little or no organic search engine presence will go to the top of the SERP immediately, as long as it has an adequate budget. And, if the campaign is not meeting expectations, it can be shut down immediately, enabling the company to divert funds to better-performing options, or simply pause the PPC campaign in order to devise more promising keyword and/or bidding strategies.
3. PPC Makes Your Other Marketing Better
PPC campaigns involve lots and lots of testing. Savvy campaigners continually change it to arrive at the best offers, landing page content, keywords and a host of other marketing variables. The data derived from these tests can be applied to other marketing campaigns to bring about substantial improvement. For instance, if an email campaign continually repeats Offer A, but a PPC test reveals Offer B produces twice the sales leads, the email campaign may well achieve the same results by switching. Multiply this example several times a month over the course of a year, and a company will make great strides in its overall lead generation that it never would have made without PPC in the mix.
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