Why Should I Do Pay Per Click Marketing For My Business?

If you're a small business or service professional and you're not doing Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you're missing out on tons of qualified leads waiting to do business with you.

There are many reasons why small businesses don't do PPC advertising.  Maybe an SEO firm they work with discourages them from doing it, telling them it's a rip off having to pay for traffic.  Maybe they've tried it before, and either found it too confusing or nearly lost their shirts, and their wallets trying to figure out how to make it work.

Google Adwords is by far the largest PPC platform on the web, though there are others, like Microsoft Ad Center that also offer PPC marketing.  PPC marketing can be very confusing, you can mainly thank Google for creating such a complicated platform, though they are trying to make things easier for small businesses with better education and outreach efforts targeted directly to local businesses.

If you're currently not making PPC advertising a part of your online marketing mix, here are 5 reasons why you should seriously consider it.

PPC Advertising Puts You On Page One Of The Search Results Immediately

While everyone wants to rank at the top of the organic search engine rankings, it takes alot of time and work to get there. There is limited real estate for the top positions, and despite your best efforts, you may never get there.  If you're a new business or an existing one just getting started online, PPC marketing can get you in front of highly targeted customers in a matter of minutes.  Organic rankings on the other hand, usually take months, even years (if at all) to start ranking at the top of the search engines.  While there are several factors involved when it comes to ranking high in the PPC results, it's quite easy to rank on page one for your PPC ads, as long as you're budget allows it.

PPC Advertising Compliments Your SEO Efforts

If you're currently ranking at the top of the organic results for your “money” keyword, why should you pay for another top listing in the PPC results?  In a study conducted by Google on the effects PPC ads have on organic rankings, the study determined that 89% of PPC ads that were clicked, would NOT have been replaced by organic clicks for those same results.

If you have low organic rankings, PPC marketing is a no brainer, but even with high rankings, PPC marketing still is a perfect compliment to your organic ranking results.  Also, a study conducted by WordStream revealed that people conducting searches with high commercial intent (they really want to buy something), PPC ads outperformed organic lsitings by a margin of 2 to 1.  It makes sense, organic results often have a mix of products, research and educational content…while the PPC ads are only product/service ads directed specifically for the search term entered.  Highly targeted.

PPC Advertising Gives You Lots Of Great Market Data

If you are using analytics software on your website (you better be!), you'll know that the data is so detailed that it's scary.  If you can understand the data, you can make some really important marketing and business decisions based on it. Thinking of opening up your business to a new city?  Before you start the buildout, run some PPC ads and see how people are respond to your business.  Same with launching new products and services, run some test campaigns and get hard data on how the public receives it.  A hundred bucks on a test PPC campaign will give you better market data than spending thousands hiring a research firm.  The great thing with PPC is that you can test any keyword, term or product, regardless of how you're ranking organically.

PPC Advertising Beats Traditional Advertising….By a Longshot

When's the last time you ran a newspaper ad and were told to only pay them if you start receiving alot of calls from the ad.  Fat chance.  Same goes for direct mail, radio, TV, and every other form of traditional advertising.  You're taking a leap of faith when you hand over a check to these companies, hoping the hype they've been pushing on you is true.

With PPC marketing, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.  You can have thousands of impressions in the search results, but you only pay when someone takes action on your ad.  Even better than that, when someone clicks on your ad, you'll be able to see:

  • Where that person is located
  • What words they typed into the search box that triggered your ad
  • How much time they spent on your site
  • What pages they visited on your site
  • What type of device they were using (mobile, tablet, laptop)
  • And alot more……

You can't even get close to that kind of detailed data with other forms of advertising.  This type of data helps you to become much more efficient with your advertising dollars.  So….what kind of results are you getting from that 1/8 of a page newspaper ad you run every week?

Your Customers Are All Online!

When's the last time you picked up the Yellow Page book?  I mean, besides picking it up from your front stoop to place it in the recycling bin.  Unless your customer demographic is people over 70, the vast majority of your customers are spending most of their time online.  The first thing people do when they are thinking about buying something is to perform a search…..to find out more about a product, get reviews, and find the best price.  If you're not even at the stadium, how do you expect to play the game?

 

So there you have it…..5 really good reasons why you should be doing PPC advertising for your business.  The nice thing about PPC advertising is that you can set your daily/monthly budget in advance and not have to worry about going over it. Did you also know that you can start it for as little as a dollar a day?  Thant's alot cheaper than a newspaper ad.

Have questions about PPC advertising or just want to give me a virtual “High Five”?  Contact me here.

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.
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