Are you considering a paid online ads campaign for your business? Want to know more about PPC and if it’s right for you? Read on.

What exactly is PPC?
Pay per click advertising is paid advertising, where you pay for every click someone makes on your advert while they are browsing online.
In the old days, you would simply pay a fee to display an advert, say, on a billboard, or as a television advert. The amount you would pay would be regardless of who took notice of it. With PPC, it’s the opposite; the amount you pay corresponds with how many people notice your ad, by clicking it. Of course, people can notice your ad without clicking on it, and you don’t pay for that. You only pay for clicks.
You can run PPC campaigns, not just in the search engines like Google, but on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. You choose the amount you want to spend, the demographic of your audience and your ad appears, when browsers search using your chosen keywords, until your budget runs out.
Is PPC for me?
PPC advertising, while incredibly effective for many businesses, is not necessarily suitable for everyone. Whether it’s right for you will depend on where you are in your business and marketing journey, and where your target audience is looking for your products and services.
For instance, if your business is a new business, and you are at the start of your marketing, with no organic reach yet achieved with the search engines, you could benefit from a PPC campaign to give you an instant boost and get you noticed, to save time waiting for your organic reach to build up and get going. But you should have a long-term organic strategy too – to fall back on when your budget decreases.
Here are the PPC pros and cons:
PPC pro - get seen straight away
Visibility is immediate with a PPC campaign. Provided users type in one of your keywords, they will see you at the top of the search results; cue your opportunity to attract them with a great ad and once they click, convert that click to a lead.
PPC pro – a targeted campaign
Targeted ads will get you to where you need to be more effectively than mass media advertising. You can set the demographic of who you want to see your ads so the search engine/platform can send the right traffic your way. If you think about that, it will hit you what an opportunity that is – provided you know your target demographic.
PPC pro - data to track your results
You will have ample data at your fingertips to measure your performance and tweak to make improvements. If you don’t know what you’re doing here, get a PPC expert who does. It’s important to be able to measure the ROI (return on investment) in your paid ads campaign so you can strengthen your approach.
PPC pro - easy to budget
You have tight control over your budget and can set limits on your daily spend, so you never spend more than you intend, and you’re able to track your ROI. Plus, there’s very little minimum spend.
PPC con - not everyone likes paid ads
It’s true, some browsers will ignore sponsored ads, clearly marked as such. And social media posts will say ‘sponsored’ on their tag. Still, your ad will be seen whether clicked on or not and you don’t pay unless it’s clicked.
PPC con - not a long-term strategy by itself
PPC is usually too expensive to have as a long-term strategy. You’ll need content marketing strategies too so that you can be climbing up the search results organically when the paid-for ads stop.
PPC con - bidding wars over keywords
If another company wants the same keyword/s as you, it’s easy to get drawn into a bidding war. But it’s important to remember that your goal is to attract traffic, not beat a competitor.
PPC con - you pay for EVERY click
Accidental clicks, clicks by competitors and those who aren’t interested all cost you. You need to make sure your ad and landing page is as targeted as possible to make those clicks count.
Next steps
PPC campaigns can be extremely successful, you just need to do a few things first. Most importantly, don’t go into it haphazardly and without a strategy.
We advise you to, firstly, define your target audience and their demographic. Set budgets, based on the lifetime value of a customer. And meticulously plan the ad and landing page, and any other sales funnel, content to be as relevant and targeted as possible.
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