Pay-per-click (PPC) has become the advertising platform for small business owners who are looking to promote their products and services. It lives up to its namesake by allowing advertisers to pay for each click on their ad. As long as you keep your earnings-per-click (EPC) higher than your cost-per-click (CPC), you’ll turn a profit. But there are other reasons to choose PPC marketing, some of which we’re going to discuss today.
Keyword Targeting
One of the greatest benefits of PPC marketing is the ability to target users based on the keywords for which they search. In other words, your ads will only display when a user searches for one of your specified keywords. If you run a home inspection business in Denver, for instance, you can target keywords like “home inspection Denver” or “home inspector Denver.” The highly relevant nature of these keywords should yield a strong response by your audience.
Metrics
PPC marketing also yields a plethora of helpful metrics to help optimize your campaigns for a higher return on investment (ROI). For instance, you can check to see which keywords are delivering the most sales/conversions and which ones are delivering the least. Using this information, you can increase bid prices on your “strong” keywords while subsequently lowering bid prices on your “weak” keywords.
Budget Control
The problem with purchasing banners and similar bulk ad space on websites is that you typically have little-to-no control over your budget. Thankfully, this isn’t a problem with PPC marketing, as it provides advertisers with full control over their spending. All of the leading PPC platforms allow advertisers to set their daily spending limit. After spending this amount in a single day, their ads will temporarily stop showing to prevent the advertiser’s budget from going over.
Split-Test
Of course, PPC also allows advertisers to split-test multiple landing pages and ad copy. Just because your PPC campaign is profitable doesn’t necessarily mean that it is fully optimized. On the contrary, there’s always room for improvement, regardless of well it’s performing. Split-testing two or more ads and/or landing pages can yield a huge improvement in your ROI. After allowing them to run simultaneously for a given length of time, ditch the losing ad copy and/or landing page and replace it with a new one.
Instant Results
This alone should be reason enough to invest in PPC marketing. Optimizing a website to rank high in the search results for a particular keyword can take months — and there’s no guarantee that it will even work. But with PPC marketing, you can achieve a top search ranking (paid, not organic) within minutes of having your ad approved. So if you’re looking to dominate the search results for your target keyword and don’t have the luxury of waiting months for SEO to work, consider using PPC.
