There are many compelling benefits of PPC advertising. Whether you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the value of Google AdWords (or Bing Ads), there’s a powerful case to be made.
For starters, PPC:
Offers quick entry.
Results are easy to measurable and track.
Works well with other marketing channels.
Provides a wealth of useful data
PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most businesses and brands. If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing, you’re likely losing out on valuable traffic and revenue.
Need to make the case for PPC advertising? Here are just seven powerful benefits of using PPC.
1. PPC Contributes to Business Goals
This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.
Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.
In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads.
PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path that your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer. Regardless of the set of identified goals, PPC campaigns can be set up effectively.
2. PPC Is Measurable & Trackable
A major benefit of PPC advertising run through AdWords is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the AdWords tool in combination with Google Analytics.
You’ll see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals).
There’s no mystery to your PPC performance. Stats are readily available and show how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they are driving for your budget.
In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture isn’t as clear for attribution of the budget to direct results.
When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and track it all the way to conversion using Google Analytics, you’re able to clearly see what you spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals. No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like that.
3. Quick Entry
Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors on jumping into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same type of positioning and traffic that AdWords offers within minutes of launch.
When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who are already aware of your brand, and you aren’t limited to your existing followers or customer lists.
PPC lets you quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and customers.
Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform — from the research to campaign build out, to writing ads. You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking and any desired landing pages.
4. You’re in Control
While there are several nuances regarding default campaign settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for how you reach potential customers. This starts with the keywords or placements you choose to target and how restrictive you want to be.
You also have a lot of budget flexibility if you want to start small. You can can set your own ad budget and bids, and choose what you’re willing to spend (though you have to pay at least close to a market rate to play in most cases).
If you’re seeing positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop your ad spend right away. This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when necessary or desired.
Google’s AdWords auction and the algorithm involved has the final say as to where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.
The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and to optimize while your ads are running, and to try new tests every day if you wish. There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment that you see in other mediums, and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to let it finish out a contracted media cycle.
5. PPC Works Well With Other Marketing Channels
Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now. With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, AdWords is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content investment.
PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience — the people using Google to find information, services, or products. The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from AdWords can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for where to prioritize SEO efforts.
On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and business end goals are not siloed.
AdWords remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on specific rules or audiences you select.
There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing activities. PPC can also be directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and conversion. If you can shift away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, it can be a big win.
6. Incredible Targeting Options
Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in AdWords to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.
This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors, or focusing on specific audience demographics on the display network.
By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of AdWords is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.
Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience as well as those that have been exposed to your brand. You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.
7. A Wealth of Marketing Data
While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly available in Google AdWords, the value of information gained goes beyond just PPC performance.
Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.
Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to find where your audience is.
You can also cross-reference where your competition is through third-party tools like SpyFu, KeywordSpy, and iSpionage to build a solid profile of what you’re up against and what market share you can gain.
Is Your Boss or Client Still on the Fence?
Run your own projection to show the risk of AdWords compared to other organic and paid sources of traffic you’re currently utilizing.
By looking at what the cost will be for media, management of the campaign, and any content that must be created, you can put that cost up against what you’re currently spending for similar management and development activities in organic search, email, social, and offline marketing channels.
Additionally, you can take some simple inputs including your current or projected conversion rate and project with the keyword and display planner tools to see what traffic is out there. From there, you can look at what the projection is if you were to increase by certain amounts of traffic, putting the cost of that traffic against the investment required to get it.
Summary
PPC advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable channel for tons of B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other companies seeking quick, quality traffic and conversions.
Considering all the benefits PPC offers, there’s little risk in testing it out to see where it can move the needle and to gain a wealth of valuable data you can use to inform you other marketing and optimization efforts.