Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most well-known techniques of digital marketing. However, for companies that haven't tried it yet, the first question is certainly "why is PPC important?"
Make no mistake, PPC is vital.
However, before developing a PPC strategy or investing in a full-fledged ad campaign, it's critical to understand why PPC is vital for online business success. We'll explain why in this section!
The key advantage of this marketing strategy is that it is commonly regarded as one of the most successful forms of online advertising. It provides immediate results and consistent returns, and it is also one of the most common types of advertising. It increases a company's visibility on search engines like Google and Bing, and PPC visitors are significantly more likely to convert.
What exactly is PPC?
For organizations who aren't convinced of PPC's performance, you must first comprehend what PPC is before you can appreciate why you should employ PPC advertising as part of your marketing efforts. PPC (or "pay-per-click") is a digital advertising technique that is utilized on a variety of online platforms. Simply explained, it refers to advertisements in which businesses pay for each click on their ads, which can range from a few cents to a few dollars.
Search ads (PPC ads that seem like regular search results on platforms like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others), display ads (graphic/banner ads that appear on third-party partner websites), and social-media sponsored ads are the most frequent varieties (which operate much like display ads, within specific social media platforms). The way "PPC" works in all of these forms will differ from platform to platform, but the basic consistency is that all of these sorts of online advertising have the same underlying function of paying for each ad click.
Marketers frequently bid for important search phrases where their advertisements would appear in search results, or they pay for ads to appear in user feeds, videos, web pages, and other places.
Here's why adopting PPC advertising is critical for staying competitive.
It can produce results quickly and consistently.
This is likely the most compelling reason to use PPC. Unlike search engine optimization, which focuses on "organic" traffic growth, PPC advertising can provide advertisers with results almost immediately after their ads go up.
This is why PPC is useful for organizations that want to generate revenue rapidly or take advantage of a very short-term marketing window (such as for special events, product launches, holidays, seasonal sales, etc.). In reality, for wide advertising plans, PPC is critical as a basic component of a short- and long-term digital marketing strategy.
Advertisers set up their search advertising on Google or Bing through each platform's site; they set up their ad campaigns/ad groups, set up a budget, and define their ad specifications - once the ads are published, they can begin immediately appearing in search results and garnering clicks/conversions. However, it is crucial to highlight that PPC campaigns can achieve greater results if they provide sufficient feedback data on campaign success - this data can be utilized to finetune campaign scope, improve keyword targeting, focus on high-value audiences, and use bid methods more efficiently.
Visitors who arrive via PPC are more likely to convert.
According to Unbound data, 50% of visitors who arrive at a retailer's website via a paid search ad are more likely to convert than those who arrive via an organic link.
According to Formstack, PPC advertising is one of the top three drivers of on-page conversions. Another significant advantage is that PPC advertising immediately places brands at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), with more than 40% of clicks going to the top three paid ad slots on the page.
Another reason why PPC is vital for quick results is that for businesses willing to pay-to-play, it may be a quick way to get your brand/products in front of buyers and make income quickly.
PPC helps your company's revenue and goals.
Another reason why PPC is significant is that it directly adds to a company's core KPIs and can directly (and quantitatively) bring in income. That is, after all, the whole point!
Given that, as previously said, this type of advertising produces such speedy results, the fact that it also serves as a consistent source of solid cash makes it even more appealing. Why should you utilise PPC marketing when placing advertising on search engines, partner sites, and social media costs money? According to Google, businesses typically generate $2 in income for every $1 spent on Google Ads. That's a fantastic ROI of 2:1!
Most PPC platforms include KPIs as campaign goals, allowing firms to target specific business objectives:
Ads for search engines can be tailored to achieve a variety of results, including sales, leads, website traffic, brand awareness, app downloads, offline conversions, session duration, and much more.
Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all have similar goals such as brand awareness, product sales, video views, messages, app downloads, post interaction, and so on.
This is a big reason why PPC advertising is so vital for internet businesses. Major ad platforms are developed with the intention of assisting businesses in growing online through a variety of ad formats tailored to your individual needs.
PPC can help SEO performance.
Because there is a lot of overlap, search engine PPC and search engine optimization work well together. The significance of combining PPC with SEO is that firms will be targeting the same keywords, on the same platforms, for the same audiences.
Although there is no clear correlation between Google/Bing PPC campaigns and SEO rankings, firms who optimise both are more likely to boost SEO. PPC is vital for SEO since businesses who update their site and content for a higher Google Quality Score generally increase their SEO ranking as well.
If you conduct the same keyword research and keyword density, you are already halfway to accomplishing essential SEO and PPC strategies! Businesses that do both frequently believe, anecdotally, that PPC aids SEO. There are a few indirect reasons for this, which might make PPC advertising a valuable supplemental strategy:
Searchers who view a brand's ad are more inclined to click on the brand's organic listing.
PPC ads can help a company's brand recognition, making an SEO conversion more likely in the future.
Paid ad clicks can propel your pages to the top of Google's page one, resulting in increased sharing, mentions, and backlinks - all of which lead to higher SEO results.
There's another reason why PPC is vital, and that's data. Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising both give ad platforms with a lot of feedback on ad campaigns. Marketers can leverage data from keyword research, keyword performance, A/B ad tests, conversions, impression share, and other sources to fine-tune their SEO campaign.
Furthermore, because search PPC produces results much faster than SEO (weeks rather than months), it is possible to test keyword strategies in PPC and then utilize conversion rate and traffic statistics to establish whether comparable methods would work for long-term SEO.