Recently, we took a break from our discussions of CRM software to talk about SEO services. While SEO services are important, they are but one aspect of modern digital marketing. In this article, we are going to talk about another pillar of a successful internet marketing campaign, which is pay per click (PPC) advertising services.
As we will show, many digital marketing campaigns can benefit from the use of PPC services. This is for a number of reasons that we will explore in this article. By the time we’re done hopefully you will have enough information to seek out a PPC service provider that can help take your business to the next level.
Basics and Benefits of Pay Per Click Advertising
When you enter a search term into Google, you are fed up a list of results. The top portion of the search page, as well as space on the sides, is reserved for paid advertisements. These are denoted by a little yellow box that says “Ad”, to let you know it’s not an organic search result. This is a paid advertisement by a business to solicit their services or products to potential customers, based on their search criteria.
This model is referred
to as pay per click because the business pays the search engine for each click a user makes on the advertisement. The idea being that once the user clicks, she is taken to a landing page that details the product or service, with text that hopefully entices her to buy the product or service.
The beauty of PPC advertising is that it allows the business to gauge demand for their product in a very clean way. They know that people who type in a search for “cheap dress shirts” probably have an intention to buy inexpensive dress shirts. If that person then clicks their ad, the business knows they have a good chance at making a sale. This type of advertising is fairly narrow in scope, but highly relevant.
This is in contrast to other forms of marketing, say radio ads, where the advertisement has really broad reach but no real impact since the vast majority of people hearing the ad have no interest in the service or product. By targeting the search to only people who want to engage in a transaction, the advertiser is maximizing their chances of success in making a sale, which is the goal of all advertising.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper. Suppose you are the owner of a fledgling business that wants to expand your line of products or services. You don’t really know if the market demand for your new offering is strong, so what do you do? You could forge ahead and invest the capital and time required to launch your new product, in the hopes that the market will catch on. Alternatively, you could run pay per click advertising as a way to gauge real demand. You would pay for the ad and set up a landing page that describes the product. You would have some way for the client to “order” the product, for instance by clicking on a “buy here” button. Of course, once the user clicks on the buy here button you let them know the product is coming soon. Oh, make sure you ask them for their email address so you can advertise to them later!
By setting up these test ads you can gauge demand for new offerings, without investing all the capital up front to develop the product beforehand. This is a really safe way for you to figure out which products or services are going to be profitable for your business.
Another benefit is the potential for ad testing. There are many ways to phrase an offering, and some are going to be more enticing than others. Most PPC platforms will let you set up multiple ads and rotate through them. This allows you to test them against each other to see which performs best. You scrap the low performing ads and keep the ones that generate the most clicks (and hopefully sales).
Once you have your killer ad, you repeat the process with landing pages. You have ads with identical copy but point to different landing pages. Once you have traffic on the site, you can test each landing page vs. the other to see which one generates more sales. Once you have the answer to that question, you have the basics of a pretty strong sales funnel. You have a way to generate traffic (the PPC ad) and you also have a landing page that generates sales.
Another use for PPC advertising is in SEO planning. In our previous article on SEO services, we discussed how search engines rank pages based on keywords, among other factors. Well, how do you know which keywords are best for a given niche? There are tools out there that tell you overall traffic for a particular keyword, but that may not be related to generating more sales, which is what you ultimately care about as a business owner. You can figure out which keywords you want to target by running a campaign of PPC advertising and comparing various keywords against each other. The winner of this competition will decide which keywords you use for your SEO efforts on your webpage. This is a great strategy, as waiting for feedback from SEO optimizations can take weeks or months, if not longer. The paid advertising gives you immediate feedback and allows you to formulate a sound digital marketing strategy.
Another often overlooked benefit of PPC services is that they are like a faucet. When you want lots of business, you turn on the ads and get ready for the flood of new business. When you don’t want a bunch of inquiries in to your business, you turn them off. This is handy if you run a small local business and want to take a vacation, lose a key employee, or have some life altering event like a honeymoon or birth.
The final reason why you should use PPC advertising, and perhaps this may seem obvious, is that you only pay for actual clicks. You only pay when someone is actually interested in your product. This is in contrast to print, radio, or television advertising where you are paying to blast your message to a huge audience that has no interest in what you’re offering. This is an enormous benefit.
Alternative Platforms
So far we have focused on search engines, but this is only part of the picture. We haven’t even mentioned social media advertising. Facebook in particular has been at the forefront of offering this service to businesses. With a massive number of users (they claim 1 billion accounts but considering people give their dogs accounts, I’m not sure how many of them are actually marketable) this platform has incredible reach. Better yet, users willingly give up a great deal of information about their likes and preferences. This allows highly targeted advertising to people who have expressed interest in products and services similar to what you want to sell.
How to select PPC Services?
So, now that you know what PPC advertising is, how do you go about setting it up? I don’t’ recommend the business owner handle their own PPC advertising, as it takes away from the core profit producing activities of the business. You are better off farming out this task to an expert.
The first step is to contact your business frien
ds and associates and see if they have used any providers. If so, ask them about their experiences. If they were positive, go ahead and give them a call. Before you engage the PPC service provider to set up a consultation, you should do your homework and have the answers to these basic questions first:
- What are the demographics of your target audience? If you are marketing to seniors then you may want to skip Google and Facebook and go right for a platform like AOL. When marketing to younger people, social media and Google are going to be great bets.
- How much profit do you make from a single sale? Knowing how much profit you make off a sale is a key number for determining how much you can spend on paid advertising. If you make $3 per sale (profit) you don’t want to spend $4 per click.
- Do you already know something about patterns of inquiry into your service? If you run an emergency plumbing service, you may find that most of your calls come at night. You would then want to target a lot of your advertising to the evening hours.
- Do you already have a website set up? If not, you’re going to need one. It doesn’t have to be super fancy, but it at least has to have enough information to be relevant to people who click on your ad.
Having the answers to these questions will make your consultation with a PPC service provider much more fruitful. They will be able to give you a more accurate estimate of how much you should be spending and what results you can expect.
Conclusion
Hopefully this 50,000 miles overview of pay per click advertising was informative. By now you should know what it is and some of the key benefits it can provide your business. It allows you to reach highly relevant traffic on as broad of a scale as you want. It is a form of advertising you can toggle to meet the needs of your business, and also it has the potential for direct testing of advertising effectiveness. This allows you to dial in your marketing efforts over time to maximize your return on advertising investment.
We don’t recommend attempting to run your own PPC campaign, as it is highly technical in nature. You are better off seeking out a PPC service provider to handle this for you. Start by getting referrals from people you know, or check out local PPC service providers if your friends are unable to provide any recommendations.
Stay tuned for next time!
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