Image courtesy of Stramark
PPC stands for Pay-Per Click marketing. You pay a set amount of money for every click on your ad. PPC ads appear at the top of the search engine results pages and can immediately catch your target audience’s attention. It’s a great strategy for new businesses that need to establish their presence and bring attention to their brand.
Many marketers, especially SEO professionals, tend to disregard PPC because it draws paid traffic. Most marketers believe that organic traffic is more effective and has higher conversion rates. However, PPC can help where SEO can’t; and here are some reasons why you should consider it.
Quick Establishment
SEO takes time to implement and show results and many marketers will readily admit that it would take at least 12 months to be effective. PPC isn’t that slow or unpredictable and will give you results in a matter of months, if not weeks. That’s what makes it an ideal strategy for new business owners because it works more quickly than SEO. You can also expect reasonable amount of traffic and steady results.
Quick Results
One of the best aspects of PPC is that it can be set up quickly. Your ads can be created and published within a day and you’ll see impressions the moment it’s online. This helps in case you want to introduce new products for a season or declare sales and limited period discounts. You can’t do that through SEO as easily because that would require new content, backlinks, and other such SEO strategy.
Surpass Organic Rankings
It’s not easy to climb up the organic ranking ladder and find a place on top of the search engine results page. You might be able to rank high enough on the SERP to gain target audience attention on some keywords on organic search. However, in most cases the most profitable keywords are simply out of reach. For example, if you want to advertise your e-commerce website, you’ll find that the most popular and profitable keywords display links to well established websites like Amazon. PPC will help you find a place at the top of the SERP and immediately catch audience attention.
Retargeting
Retargeting is one of the most useful PPC tool available to you. These ads will target prospective customers who have already visited your website and expressed interest in your products. This strategy can increase your conversion rates by nearly 70% because it reminds your visitors of their interest.
Some marketers hesitate to use retargeting because it can be double edged sword and irritate prospective customers. However, if you set the right frequency for your ads, you would get good results from this strategy. Google AdWords offers several retargeting parameters and you should explore all of them thoroughly to implement this strategy effectively.
PPC is highly effective and a good marketing strategy. It would take some time to get good results and concrete ROI, but you will eventually see results. In a time when the Internet is such an integrated element of everyone’s lives, PPC is definitely a worthwhile marketing investment to make for every business.
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