Is PPC Right for Your Online Business?
At the start of your business, you probably set out on a shoestring budget. Getting up and running was the most important thing.
The first few clients came through friends and family or previous business contacts, but soon enough that well dried up.
So, it’s time to get serious about promoting your brand and the products or services it provides customers.
There are different ways to promote an online business. One of the most popular is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
But is it right for your venture at this present time and age?
What Is PPC Advertising?
Pay-per-click advertising is where adverts (graphical banners, text adverts or combinations of both) are shown on a website or a mobile app.
Instead of paying each time an advert is displayed to an internet user, with PPC, the payment relates to the number of times the ad is clicked.
Therefore, the user must interact with the advert by clicking (or tapping on it from a mobile device) for it to count.
Due to the interactive element between the user and the ad, it’s possible to measure how impactful the ad was with the target audience by looking at the click-through rate.
Different wordings within a text advert can be tweaked based on early responses to alter the success of an ad campaign.
Is It Worth It?
PPC advertising provides the opportunity to capture a larger audience than either organic search or platform sales can provide.
Some of your potential customers inevitably will never come across your brand or product/service unless you reach out to them.
This category of potential buyers are the ones to pursue with PPC advertising.
Whether running ad campaigns for PPC ads yourself or hiring a PPC agency or specialist, the important point is to not overspend.
You should already know how much potential profit a given product offers. When spending on advertising and being charged per ad click, you should take into account how many ads clicks it takes on average to get that next sale.
Pay too much and you have an unprofitable ad campaign. i.e. you spent so much to get a sale that ultimately turned out to be a loss.
Can or Should You Manage Ad Campaigns Alone?
If you feel that you wish to give PPC a whirl, then why not? As long as you spend a modest amount, it can be a great learning experience.
However, it will also make clear how difficult it is to be successful at it too.
If you’re unclear whether you’re performing well or not because you lack benchmarks, you can always request an audit from a PPC agency.
They can compare your performance to similar in-house ad campaigns to see whether a professional PPC agency could improve upon what you’re already achieving.
PPC agencies offer a variety of pricing structures, including a portion of the total ad spend or a performance-based model.
They’re also used to dealing with businesses that are either completely new or have a limited experience of pay-per-click advertising in generating profitable sales.
Is PPC Advertising the Only Promotion Available?
There are other methods of promotion for an online business.
Certainly, link building and guest posting are two effective methods in driving up the ranking of your site for targeted search terms and subsequently increasing traffic.
However, they’re very slow to have any effect and lack the immediacy of PPC ads.
Offering discount coupons and other short-term promotions can entice new customers to try out the online site when they’re less familiar with it. They certainly have a time and place too.
For the immediacy of driving traffic to the site and hopefully getting many new sales, it’s hard to beat paid PPC traffic.
An advert can be posted today, and new visitors usually start arriving within hours.
It’s also a great way to market test interest in proposed products or pre-sell before manufacturing too.