As with anything in life, it pays to have a mix of things in order to ensure balance. The same is true of marketing, and including PPC (Pay per Click), as part of a balanced plan of digital marketing can add to the overall efficacy of your promotional strategy.
Research has shown that companies from start-ups through to multi-national global enterprises invest a considerable proportion of their online marketing budgets in PPC. So what’s all the fuss about?
What is PPC?
PPC is a way in which advertisers pay to bring their products to the attention of people who may be interested in them. Choosing keywords that are relevant to the product, marketers develop adverts specifically tailored to the individuals searching for that keyword that will hopefully find their way to the eyes of people who are interested in the product. Get the clicks and convert them to sales
There are two ways in which advertisers can pay for the clicks their adverts receive. Most content websites – that is, websites such as blogs or magazines – have a flat fee for advertising space on their sites when visitors click through to the product. Search engines on the other hand often invite bids for particular keywords in their searches and advertising space is offered to the highest bidding advertisers for those keywords.
Why PPC?
As mentioned above, PPC can form an important element of a marketer’s overall digital marketing strategy to drive traffic to a website for a product or service. As part of an overall online marketing plan, PPC can add the benefit of bringing the right eyes to the product. Carefully selected relevant keywords mean that the people most likely to want to view or purchase the product on sale will find the advertising that meets their requirements.
The main benefit of PPC for marketers is payment for results. Rather than taking out a print advert, where returns on investment are difficult to measure, PPC allows advertisers to pay only for the clicks they receive. This makes investment spent in this way both valuable and highly effective.
Features of great PPC
In order to have the kind of impact marketers want – a click-through and ultimately a purchase – it’s important to focus on the design of PPC advertising. People who regularly browse the web have become somewhat immune to advertising on websites and tend to tune them out when viewing websites. In order to capture a potential buyer’s attention, PPC adverts must be eye-catching and grab the attention of the visitor to the site. Getting all-important eyes on your product
Once the marketer has the potential buyer’s attention, that attention needs to be converted into a click on the advert in order to make it worthwhile. Adverts need to have some kind of call to action – either a tease that promises more information or an offer the viewer can’t refuse – so they can’t resist clicking on the ad. It is also vitally important that the website at the other end of the advert is up to standard. If the promise of the ad isn’t fulfilled when the customer clicks through to the website, they’ll very quickly bounce off the site and return to what they were doing before they clicked. This is catastrophic for marketers as they have paid for the click only for it to lead nowhere.
About the author: Tom Shurville, director and owner of Distinctly Digital, the SEO and PPC agencybased in Rickmansworth. PPC is a useful part of the overall strategy for attracting the right people to see a marketer’s products online. Providing value for money for advertisers, it allows people to quickly access the products they need and marketers access to the right customers. Find Tom on Google+.
