I’m not going to sit here and tell you why you need to invest in PPC advertising. The last thing you want is someone unfamiliar with your business trying push services at you for their own personal gain. So I’ll leave it to you, the person most qualified for your business to make the decision. My hope is that you’ll consider the following advantages that a Pay Per Click advertising medium can offer.

How soon do you need traffic to your website?

Getting your website to show on the first page of Google search results takes time (it could be three to six months, or more). This is especially true depending on the keywords you are trying to rank for and how competitive those are (in other words, how many other websites are trying to rank for these same terms). So if it’s important to your business to bring in the amount of traffic that a top rank on Google would provide, what are your options? What can you do in the mean time, alongside your SEO efforts, to get this traffic?

You could have ads showing on the first page of Google in a matter of hours through PPC advertising platforms such as Google Adwords.

How difficult is it for you to accurately measure the success of your current advertising mediums?

Think about your current advertising mediums. How effective are they at producing new business? How do you track which of these advertising channels produce customers? Television, radio, and print are frustratingly difficult when it comes time to measure their impact on your business. Trough PPC ad platforms like Adwords, you’ll have access to real-time information on how potential customers are interacting with your ads.  See which wording gets your customers interest and which ad wording is a bust. PPC data can offer insights into your target market you can leverage in any other advertising you’re doing.

Do you want to reach your target market more efficiently?

Through which advertising channels do you currently reach out to your target market: direct mailers, or local radio and T.V. commercials? Not that these are completely ineffective (or can’t be a success), but they take a “shotgun” approach to advertising- your message is thrown out to the masses with the hope that it will actually hit its target.

Why not target individuals who are actually looking for what you can provide, or who would most likely purchase this product or service? This is possible through ad platforms like Adwords and Facebook advertising.

Through an Adwords search campaign you’re able to target potential customers by what they type into the Google search bar. For example let’s say you sell fishing tackle online. A local angler is looking to re-stalk his trout lures for a much anticipated fishing trip and searches “buy trout lures” to see what deals he can find online.

If you happen to be advertising on this keyword, this would be an opportunity for you to connect with a customer who wants what you have to offer.

With Facebook advertising you can actually target users by certain demographics such as location, age, gender, and what they’re interested in.

So why not take the focused “rifle” approach to advertising? It’s your decision.

Do you want more control over your advertising budget?

A benefit that these PPC ad platforms have is the ability to effectively set and manage an advertising budget. The capability of these platforms to track and show real-time data, allows for business owners like you to make smart decisions on where and how your budget is allocated.

If we go back to the tackle shop example, let’s say you have two search campaigns in Adwords, one targeting local users and the other is targeting users across the nation. Currently your budget is split 50/50 between the two. In looking at the data you see that your local campaign is converting more (producing more sales). With just a few clicks of your mouse you can allocate more of your budget to the local campaign therefore putting your hard earned cash to better use quickly.

Do you want to lessen the impact of future Google Algorithm updates?

I’m NOT saying that running an Adwords PPC campaign alongside your current SEO efforts will lessen the impact that these algorithm updates will have on your rankings. What I AM saying is, diversify. If running a PPC campaign is cost effective and can bring in traffic to your website to produce revenue, why not pursue it? If your rankings slip, especially off the first page of SERPS (search engine results pages), wouldn’t it be nice to have PPC ads running to lessen the blow from this loss of traffic?

Do you want to be more visible on search engine results pages?

Take a look at the following image, what do you notice?

If you’re thinking there are a lot of competitors advertising on the search query “buy fishing gear” you are correct.  Yet, there’s something else at work here. If you take another look you’ll notice a certain sporting goods company is not only showing up in the first ad position but also in the top two organic search results.

Talk about SERPS real estate! This goes to show that having a PPC ad campaign would be an excellent complement to your other internet marketing efforts in increasing the traffic to your website.

Paul Hartley

Senior Account Manager at Get Found First