Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows companies to promote their offerings on social media platforms, other businesses’ websites, and search engines, where they only have to pay when the ad is clicked on by a potential consumer. A powerful medium for advertising, it is estimated that every dollar spent on pay-per-click advertising yields twice the return in sales. Google, having gained $134 billion in advertisement revenue in 2019, takes the highest revenue share in this form of advertising, with Facebook in second place. Its advertising platform, Google Ads, is very often the go-to for people starting out in PPC.
How Does it Work?
With traditional advertising, the budget is fixed, and the results are uncertain and hard to measure. With PPC advertising, as an advertiser, you only pay once the ad is seen, which means that your ad does not get wasted. The pricing per click is also relative in nature, with auctions determining the space each advertiser will get (space at the top of web assets are considered the most valuable) and how frequently their ads will be shown, according to the dollar value of their bids.
Keywords are crucial in these ads as Google searches for them in the body of the ad. Ads containing user-focused keywords with the highest bids are ranked highly by Google’s algorithm. However, ads with the highest bids are not automatically considered the best performing — the quality of the ads is also another important ranking factor.
The Benefits of PPC Advertising
Timeliness
The biggest advantage of PPC advertising is speed — it shows ads to the relevant people in a timely way, producing fast results. The targeting feature, in fact, makes it easy to deliver ads to the right audience at a suitable time.
Boosted Brand Recognition
Brands that appear persistently in various communications media gain better recognition in an audience’s mind. PPC allows companies to become prominent in various digital channels.
Geo-Targeting
PPC allows for deep targeting to focus on consumers in a particular city or area. Even though your business may be in a neighbouring area, you can set your target area to the one next to yours if you wish to get more business there.
Get Featured in “Near Me” Ads
In 2020, searches of “near me” went up by 28 per cent. Relying on geo-targeting, Google Ads can allow you to appear in searches whenever consumers look for businesses close to them.
Retargeting
Research by WordStream suggests that only 4.4 per cent of ad viewers will actually buy the offering advertised. This dismal statistic throws the efficacy of this medium into question. However, 95 per cent of viewers who do not convert serve as leads who can be retargeted (and converted into customers) with ads better serving their interests.
So, overall PPC advertising, when leveraged properly along with other marketing tools in a company’s arsenal, can potentially become a powerful force that helps businesses gain customers, while also assisting in brand building.
Arslan Ahmed | Staff Writer
