There are many compelling benefits of PPC advertising. If you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the value of Google Ads (or Bing Ads), there’s a powerful case to be made.
To start with, PPC:
Provides quick entry.
Results are easy to measure and track.
Works well with other marketing channels.
Provides a wealth of useful data
PPC can have a significant – and positive – impact on most businesses and brands. If you’re not doing any PPC marketing, you’re probably missing out on valuable traffic and revenue.
Here are just seven powerful benefits of using PPC:
1. PPC Contributes to Business Objectives
This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a wide range of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a lead generation or e-commerce sale .
Almost any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end goals.
In the age of content marketing and thought architects email lists uk leadership, PPC can promote the middle of the funnel by nurturing and serving leads through advertising content downloads, driving newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing app downloads.
PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer. Regardless of the set of goals identified, PPC campaigns can be set up effectively.
2. PPC is measurable and trackable
A big benefit of PPC advertising run through Google Ads is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the Google Ads tool in combination with Google Analytics.
You'll see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the business goals you set).
There’s no mystery to PPC performance. The statistics are readily available and show you how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they’re generating for your budget.
In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture is not as clear when it comes to allocating budget to drive results.
When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and track it all the way to conversion using Google Analytics, you can clearly see what you spent and what you generated in terms of your end goals. No billboard or magazine ad can be attributed to sales like this.
3. Quick Entry
Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors in getting into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little optimization. This is often in stark contrast to starting SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same kind of rankings and traffic that Google Ads delivers within minutes of launching.
When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who already know your brand and not limited to your existing followers or customer lists.
PPC allows you to quickly cast a wide net to find new customers and prospects.
Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform—from research to campaign creation to ad creation. You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement from your development teams, and they’ll help you set up conversion tracking and landing pages of your choice.
4. You are in control
While there are a few nuances to the default campaign settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for reaching potential customers. This starts with the keywords or channels 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 set your own advertising budget and bids, and choose what you want to spend (although you'll 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 pause and immediately stop your ad spend. This is difficult to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when needed or desired.
The Google Ads auction and the algorithm involved have the final say on where your ads will be placed and what you will spend compared to your competitors. Aligning the relevance between your landing pages and keywords and ad copy can make or break your bottom line.
The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and optimize while your ads are running, and to retest every day if you want. There’s no long edit-to-deployment cycle like you see in other media, and if an ad doesn’t do well, you can pull it without having to let it finish 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 for most businesses now. With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, Google Ads is a mechanism that can drive visitors to content faster and improve the ROI of your content investment.
PPC and SEO work well together because impressions and traffic opportunities often reach the same audience—people who use Google to find information, services, or products. Google Ads impressions, clicks, and conversions performance data can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for where to prioritize SEO efforts.
On the other hand, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also inform PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and that the ultimate business goals are not separated.
Google Ads remarketing is a great way to keep website visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads are shown to people who have visited and left your site, and are based on specific rules or selected audiences.
There are other instances 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 move away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, that can be a big win.
6. Awesome Targeting Options
Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach to Google Ads to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.
This ranges from keyword targeting through text ads to serving ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors or focusing on specific audience demographics on the Display Network.
By testing and experimenting with a mix, you can ensure that the full scope of Google Ads is being leveraged and that you get the most impressions possible while remaining targeted to people in your potential target audience.
Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also look at what performs best and set expectations around cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition tolerances to compare different targeting methods against each other.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you’re able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience, as well as those who have been exposed to your brand. You have plenty of options for how wide of a net you want to cast.