Pay Per Click Advertising, also referred to as PPC or paid search marketing is a great method of advertising your website online, allowing advertisers to drive targeted traffic to your site, generating sales and sales leads electronically.
The most popular PPC advertising platform is Google AdWords. Currently Google has roughly a 75% market share of the paid search industry. AdWords is separated into two sections, the search network and the display network.
The search network allows advertisers to advertise on Google search engine result pages. These adverts appear in the right hand column and in a small, pink/cream coloured box at the top of the search results. The key benefit to advertising on the AdWords search network is that users are searching for your product or service. Assuming your keywords are correct, users are actively looking to buy from you. Unlike other forms of marketing, you are simply fulfilling a demand. For this reason, PPC Advertising typically delivers far better conversion rates than traditional forms of marketing.
In the display network, adverts are displayed on hosts’ websites. These can be in text, banner or video format. This is a great method of building your brand online generating brand awareness. You can target specific demographics to ensure maximum value. This is a great method of brand development and also increasing the awareness of new products or services that would not normally be searched for.
PPC Advertising is a crucial part of digital marketing. PPC advertising allows advertisers to be at the top of the search engine result pages immediately bringing immediate returns. It also allows advertisers to track conversion rates for individual keywords making PPC Adverting the most effective method of keyword research. Keyword research is a crucial part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If SEO is done before the conversion data of a PPC advertising campaign is analysed, you will be guessing at the potential returns which is a recipe for success.
To make the most out of a PPC advertising campaign, you should have a specific offering that users can buy online or enquire about. This is straight forward for ecommerce sites, but less obvious for the service industries. In essence, for service industries, you want users to fill in an enquiry form online, thus entering the user into the sales pipeline. To achieve this you have to package up an offering that would be of value to the user. For example, for an accountancy firm, this would perhaps be an hour’s free tax consultancy advice. A sales meeting in effect!
Run properly, PPC advertising will generate substantial returns and form the basis of your Digital marketing campaign. From here, you can look to build on your Digital marketing by adding an SEO campaign and a social media and online PR campaign. SEO and social media campaign should be in addition to a PPC Advertising campaign rather than instead of. If a campaign is delivering a good return, it is sensible to continue with it.
In summary, PPC Advertising effectively generates sales and sales leads online and is an essential part of all Digital marketing campaigns.