Benefits of PPC Marketing
Why do marketers need to invest money in PPC advertising? What are the benefits that accrue to marketers when they configure ads in the Google Search Network properly? There are many reasons why!
1. Immediacy – fast traffic generation method. Yes, there is going to be a review period for your ads, but it is typically still much faster than trying to rank organically.
2. Incredibly Cost Effective – Advertisers pay only for clicks: meaning you receive free impressions for no clicks. You define who sees your ads, when they see your ads and even what triggers your ads. The degree of control and specificity that you have is unparalleled! (Facebook Ads don’t even come close in this regard.)
3. Wide Exposure – especially to audiences with specific intent, because when someone visits the search engine, they normally do so with a specific intent in mind. You as a search advertiser should understand the customer journey and understand keywords that trigger specific intent. Take note that a large percentage of web sessions start at search.
4. Relevancy – Google Search Ads offer incredible relevancy because ads show up for targeted keywords and geography only. You as a search advertiser control almost every aspect on what triggers your ads, when they are triggered, what timing, and even what type of audiences including your current website visitors. It is an ideal channel even for retargeting.
5. Controllable – You have full control over the budget which is defined at the campaign level. You can define your budget based on a time period or specify a daily budget.
6. Measurable – Numerous reports on performance & ROI are available for you to drill down to where your conversions are taking place. You can find out the timing, the location, the age, the income, the specific query input by the searcher. You can access a suite of reports and tools to further optimise your campaigns to make them much more effective over time.
7. Higher Conversions – properly configured, Google Search Ads should result in much higher conversions when compared to other paid channels. Because when you set up correctly, your traffic is targeted & relevant. You may not always achieve a lower conversion cost when compared to other paid channels, but you get higher quality customers. The cost per conversion may be higher than e.g., Facebook ads, but the longer customer lifetime value from a Google Search Ads conversion means you can extract more revenues.
8. Target by Demographics – Not just target by age, gender.
Now Google Ads offers audience targeting by income (unlike Facebook Ads)!
9. Discover New Valuable Keywords – In SEO, search queries that lead to conversions are mostly not provided due to privacy. But with search ads, you get to see the search queries that convert including conversion rate and cost.
These newly found queries can then be optimised as keywords for your SEO strategy!
10. Test New Headlines and Descriptions for your SEO Strategy
The advantage of testing title tags and meta descriptions using search ads instead of organically is the speed at which you can see results. Your ad will be live immediately upon approval and you can test new headlines or descriptions and decide on the one which gets more clicks. You can then implement these high performing headlines and descriptions in your SEO strategy.
In conclusion, the Google Search Network can be a very powerful marketing weapon if you know what you are doing.
It is up to the search advertiser to determine how specific or generic a search term should be before it triggers a search ad, then closely monitor their Search Terms Report to identify search terms that are not relevant to their business and add those irrelevant terms as negative keywords. This is one the most important reports to ensure that you receive more relevant impressions and clicks to improve your conversions.