Long ago, pay per click marketing was often stigmatized as a cash-grab. Many thought the idea of paying a search provider for incoming traffic via text and not visual ads was a dishonest method of profiteering. After all, search engines should provide unbiased results to prospective searchers, right? Well, it wasn’t long until businesses began to realize the advantages of pay per click marketing.
It’s a game of mathematics and statistics. If you’re familiar enough with your products and services, you’ll most likely know how much a lead is worth to you, and what the profits and costs of each sale are. This is where you can measure exactly how much you want to spend in your pay per click budget. For example, if you sell a product on your website and know that each sale costs you X amount of dollars, you can set your pay per click campaign bids and daily/monthly spend to not exceed that amount. Additionally, you can set your pay per click ads to direct exactly to that sales page when clicked on, versus non paid-advertising where most traffic will be directed to your homepage and therefore rely on the website visitor to navigate through the site and eventually end up on the page you want them to see. This, unfortunately, results in a larger exit rate (the more pages a visitor has to click on to get to the page they want to see, the more unlikely they are to see that page).
The biggest advantage pay per click marketing has over traditional SEO, especially for the sake of this blog, is its ability to bring in as much traffic as you want, as soon as you want. When launching a website and having it go live on the internet, it can take a while for the search engines to see that your site now exists. The fastest way for this to happen is to have outside sites link to the new site – it’s a matter of building an incoming network that directs search engines to a new presence – but this is a topic for another day. Still, even when search engines become aware of a new website, it can take up to a full year for them to properly index your site (rank your site properly in accordance with its SEO factors, in relation with the competition). This translates to very limited search traffic during this transition period…unless you supplement traffic with a pay per click marketing campaign. Until you start bringing in substantial amounts of organic/non-paid traffic, you can use a pay per click campaign to build awareness.
I typically recommend clients in such positions to start with conservative budgets and increase in accordance with ad and sales/lead performance. Eventually, a formula will be worked out so a precise amount of ad spend yields as much profit as possible, which may not necessarily mean having the ads appear in the top position. Again, it’s working out cost versus profit, and if you’re a business looking to start your own pay per click campaign and don’t have much experience with such endeavors, I highly recommend consulting a professional. The investment into such a service will definitely yield much more profit when compared with inexperienced administration on such a platform.
As usual, please contact us if you need help with any of your pay per click marketing needs.