PPC (Pay Per Click) is a form of online advertising in which advertisers will not pay a fixed amount for ads, but pay only when users click the links associated with their advertisements. The most prominent place to put your PPC ad is on Google, Facebook and also other social media platforms like Twitter. This means you have to decide how much you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on search results and at the same time “bid” against other people who wants the same space for their own ads. So with this in mind, naturally if your keyword is popular and there are a lot of competition you can expect to pay a lot more per click unless you use methods like long tail keywords.
Advantages
Attract real visitors: PPC advertising allows quick access as soon as you sign up to use Google’s PPC service (Google Adwords). Once you have set up your PPC campaign and it has been authorised by Google you will start seeing results almost immediately.
Always in control: You can fully monitor ads, keywords and other marketing strategies and ensure they are perfectly optimised at all time. At anytime you feel the keywords are not working, you are free to adjust them and monitor their progress live.
Unaffected by your actual ranking: PPC ensures that you skip your actual ranking factors and get to the top. What this means is that if your website is new or you don’t have very good ranking you can skip everything and go straight to the first page of the keyword results.
Advertisements appear very naturally: Besides from the faded “sponsored result” tag hidden in the corner, your ad will appear very natural within the result. Which means you will most likely get by as a first result thus helping you achieve more from your PPC campaign.
Accurate targeting: You can target your desired target group very accurately due to the ability to be able to choose keywords that your customers may be looking for. For example, if you are selling web design services the keyword “web designers for hire” will naturally attract the right kind of potential customers.
Disadvantages
Can be costly: PPC can be very expensive especially if it doesn’t work or not done properly. The big issue here is that as a small company you have a very limited budget and that budget should be used wisely to achieve results. If a PPC campaign is not done properly and is poorly optimised, it could lead to costly mistakes.
PPC advertising can be complicated: There is no doubt that to be able to get the best result you should have a lot of previous experience in PPC or have spent hours read up on the best strategy for you. If you lack these experiences you will likely not achieve the best result a professional can get. Which is why most companies choose to hire PPC specialist or agencies to help advise and execute their PPC marketing campaigns.
Optimise and then optimise again…and again: Any professional PPC expert will tell you that you will need to optimise again and again to get the best result. This is a very time-consuming process and if you do not have the right experience you may not know how to optimise in the best way possible. Optimisation is not limited to the campaign itself, it can include landing page optimisation (which is even more important than the actually PPC campaign), CTA placement, content optimisation and so on.
Summary
At the end of the day, PPC advertising is the best method of getting potential customers to your page. Combined with experience and professional help you can achieve the maximum result. As a small business who is looking for a more DIY solution, you can expect to not receive the same result, but you can more or less get a good result and hopefully get a positive return on your marketing investment.