10 Benefits of PPC Advertising Campaigns
Are you looking for a scalable, cost-effective way to get new customers? Are you trying to fast-track your company’s growth? Pay-per-click marketing is one of the best ways to quickly funnel qualified traffic to your website and start getting results today.
Pay per click is one of the most tried and true forms of online marketing there is. Google AdWords was released 20 years ago and it keeps getting more and more sophisticated every year. It’s also one of the most popular forms of marketing with companies spending over $100 billion on it every year.
Paid marketing can have a huge impact on your business. Many companies leverage it to kickstart their growth in the early days of their operation. Some even use it as the backbone of their traffic and revenue generation streams.
There isn’t just one reason why it’s so popular. We’ve distilled it down to 10 to help you learn how to take advantage of the benefits of PPC advertising.
Advantages of PPC Advertising Campaigns
- Quickly send targeted traffic to your website
- Control how much traffic you get
- You only have to pay for the clicks
- Narrow the targeting to your ideal customer
- Choose from a variety of campaign and goal types
- Carefully craft and curate the user’s experience with your brand
- Re-target visitors that didn’t convert on their initial visit
- Only show your ads in specific geographics
- Quickly test new variations to improve your site’s UX
- End-to-end tracking to clearly define your KPIs and ROI
1. Quickly send targeted traffic to your website
There are plenty of great ways to grow your business, but one of the benefits of PPC marketing is how quickly you can funnel high-quality traffic to your website.
SEO can get you a ton of traffic, but it can take months to get traction. Social media is feast or famine for referral traffic. However, with pay per click, you can create a targeted PPC campaign in under an hour and start getting qualified traffic that same day.
You don’t need to know the intricacies of content marketing, SEO, or spend weeks or months building a community.
All you need is to do some keyword research, build a campaign, put in your billing info, and you’re off to the races!
2. Control how much traffic you get
It’s hard to scale a business with unpredictable traffic and revenue generation.
Wondering where your next sale is coming from is incredibly stressful and, let’s be honest, you don’t need another thing to be worrying about. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.
Pay-per-click advertising will bring stability to your operations by sending a steady flow of traffic your way. You control how much or how little you get by setting your daily budget.
To get a good idea of what to expect for your daily traffic, simply take the daily budget of your campaign, divide it by your average cost per click (CPC), and the result is the average amount of traffic you can expect each day.
Using this figure with other KPIs like your conversion rate, order close rate, average order value (AOV), and lifetime customer value (LCV) will remove the uncertainty from your revenue projections.
3. You only have to pay for the clicks
The beauty of pay-per-click marketing is that you only pay for the clicks.
You don’t get charged anything if someone searches for a keyword you’re bidding on but doesn’t click on your ad. While most people would look at this as a failure, it’s actually free brand exposure!
This is one of the hidden perks of PPC campaigns. It helps you maintain a forward brand presence for relevant search queries. You didn’t get the click this time, but it may help you capture it next time or possibly score an organic search from that same person later on down the line.
The really great part of this is that its free exposure next to your direct competitors.
This keeps your brand at the top of your potential customers’ minds if your competitor isn’t able to provide a solution to their problem. And the more your ads show up in those searches, the more recognizable your brand becomes.
4. Narrow the targeting to your ideal customer
We’re only looking for the people that are looking for us.
Everyone else? Doesn’t matter.
The goal of marketing, and more specifically PPC, is to show the right person the right product at the right time. To be the solution they need when they need it.
By doing keyword research, you can find the words and phrases your potential customers are most likely to use when searching for your products or services. Bidding on just these keywords makes sure that your ads are only seen, and clicked on, by this select group of people.
This drastically improves the likelihood of converting them from a prospect into a customer.
You’re also able to target your ads based on geographic location, their interests, demographic data, and a ton of other data points. This is one of the advantages PPC advertising has over other forms of marketing.
5. Choose from a variety of campaign and goal types
PPC isn’t about generating just leads or sales anymore. YouTube video ads, brand awareness campaigns, app downloads, there are a TON of PPC campaign types to choose from to promote your business.
Types of Pay Per Click Campaign Goals
- Sales: Use your campaign to drive sales on your website, over the phone, in your app, or at a physical location.
- Leads: Get users to take action and submit their information in return for a callback, download, or sign up for a webinar.
- Website traffic: Send highly targeted traffic to specific landing pages on your website.
- Product consideration: Get your product catalog in front of new potential customers.
- Brand awareness & reach: Expand your audience by putting your brand in the spotlight.
- App promotion: Fuel more app downloads and interactions with your app.
PPC Advertising Campaign Types
- Search: The traditional ads that are shown on Google.com, or on their search partners’ websites, when you perform a search query.
- Display: These are typically visually based ads that are shown online or in apps with a robust set of optimization criteria.
- Shopping: Send visitors directly to your product pages to streamline their buying process.
- Video: Show your video ad to a specific audience to generate interest in your product or services.
- Smart: Quickly spin up automated ads that require almost zero management and show on Google, Google Maps, and their search partner websites.
- Discovery: Get more sales and traffic with visually stunning ads that show on YouTube, Gmail, and Discover.
No matter what type of company you run, there’s a PPC campaign that can help you achieve your business goals.
One of our favorite types of campaigns to run are YouTube video ads. They’re almost the perfect ad type. People respond better to video ads than text ads. They’re great for educating your audience, spreading brand awareness, and showcasing your product.
AND the best part is that if the viewer skips your ad, it’s completely free!
It is, without a doubt, one of the most cost-effective ways to keep your business in your customers’ minds.
6. Carefully craft and curate the user’s experience with your brand
With most traffic, there’s no telling how users will interact with your website. You can give them cues and gently nudge them in certain directions, but there are no guarantees they’ll do or go where you want.
You don’t have to worry about that with your traffic from paid advertising. They go where you tell them and they only see what you show them. You control everything that goes on the pages they see and when they see it.
Are your visitors getting lost in your site navigation and not converting? Don’t include it!
Concerned that they might click on the wrong CTA? Only have one on the page!
Curating the content, page design/layout, and engagement flow keep them focused and pushes them closer and closer to converting.
This is why traffic from paid marketing campaigns converts at such a higher rate than other traffic streams.
7. Re-target visitors that didn’t convert on their initial visit
It doesn’t matter how great your targeting is or how well-designed your landing page is, you’re not going to convert everyone that clicks on your ads. Some of them are going to leave your site without taking action.
Normally this would be considered a lost opportunity, but not with re-marketing campaigns!
These paid advertising campaigns target people that have been to your site before and show them your ads online or in apps. Seeing your ad will remind them about your company and give you a second chance at getting them to take action.
Just because someone left your site doesn’t mean that they don’t want to do business with you. It just means that they got distracted, interrupted, or had to handle something.
Re-marketing allows you to bring them back into the fold and kickstart a new conversation.
8. Only show your ads in specific geographics
Getting the word out about your local business can be hard to do. Your competition probably has an enormous head start on you and already has the search results locked down tight. It’s going to take you months, if not years, to break into those coveted spots.
So what can you do to stand out now?
Spinning up local PPC campaigns will help your business leap-frog the competition and get in front of new potential customers.
Your campaigns can be configured to only show in specific geographic regions. That can be as broad as your entire home country or laser-targeted down to specific neighborhoods.
And you don’t need to show your ads to everyone. The only people who need to see your ads are the ones that are close enough to do business with you in the first place.
This is an invaluable tactic for brick-and-mortars and local contracting businesses that have a defined service area.
9. Quickly test new variations to improve your site’s UX
The overall goal of conversion rate optimization is to improve your site’s conversion rate. You identify potential pain points that are preventing your customers from converting and find ways to break them down.
This isn’t accomplished with a re-platform or making a bunch of changes at the same time. It’s making a lot of small, individual changes over a long period of time to make a big overall change in aggregate.
AB testing your changes with PPC traffic is a great way to achieve that with the versatile targeting options and on-demand traffic at your disposal.
You have complete control over how much traffic you get and where it goes. Comparing how users interact with your original page versus your new page will tell you whether or not the change you made is a good one.
And the more eyes you can get on a change to your site’s UX the more confident you can be in making that change.
10. End-to-end conversion tracking to clearly define your ROI
There are a handful of universal truths in this life; death, taxes, and online marketing has to be profitable.
The only way you can know whether it is or not is if you’re tracking your return on investment (ROI). To do that, you need to know where your traffic is coming from, what it’s produced, and what you’ve spent on it.
This can be a bit dicey when it comes to SEO and social media since there are a lot of variables in play, but that’s not the case with pay-per-click. Every aspect of PPC can be tracked and measured and that makes finding out your ROI incredibly easy.
Measuring and tracking this KPI will let you know if more optimization is needed or if it’s ready to be scaled out.
Recap
Some businesses are hesitant about investing in PPC, but the benefits of PPC advertising far outweigh the risks. All you need is an experienced team to manage your pay-per-click campaigns for you and you’ll start seeing results in no time.
We hope you found this article valuable and that it helped you better understand paid advertising.
Now we want to hear from you! Are you running PPC campaigns right now? Or are you still on the fence about it? If you are running them, how are they performing? Are you happy with what they’re producing?
Let us know in the comments section below!
