Why Paid Search Advertising Works

While the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model has been around for 10+ years, there’s new businesses sprouting up everyday. Many of those people are new to business and are struggling with how to drum up business with online marketing. And sadly, most of these people don’t know there is a better way, because either A) they think it’s just SEO or B) they just haven’t a clue. So this post is for those people. PPC offers many benefits that are not available to other ad channels.

Pay-per-click, simply put, is paying for ad clicks to your website. Many people start on Google search – and for good reason. It’s intent driven (see our post on Why Your Business Starts With Search). So let’s take Google for example. If I type in a search into Google, I get shown ads at the top:

Every time someone clicks on those ads I get charged. Won’t spend too much time on this concept, but new business owner should know that there are many channels that offer a PPC model for advertising – Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, Bing, and the list goes on, some more profitable than others based on your specific business.

The amazing thing is that breaking even with PPC is very easy, and I will tell you why, but first I would like to compare it to other media, so you understand how it is possible.

In traditional media like a billboard or radio, you can’t measure exposure, you also can’t measure conversions. If you paid $10k for a radio campaign, you wouldn’t know that it is costing you $80 per lead or $120 per sale for example. With PPC you can measure exactly how much it cost you to acquire leads and sales. This means you know right away the mileage on every dollar spent. It makes it easy to break even, but not only that, it also makes it easy to scale and spend more when you see the returns are there and worth every penny. Putting it simply, if you know for every $5 spent you make $10, you can comfortably spend those $5s.

But it gets much better than that because you can optimize your spend down to very fine detail. With most ad platforms, you can optimize based on location, on hour of day, of day of week, of what users did on your site, what keywords people are using to find you, and many other factors to optimize your spend vs. return.

You can also test messaging of your ads. A better message means better click-through and conversion rates, and that means you spend less as time goes by. You do that by split-testing multiple messages that you run at the same time. In a few weeks, whichever message converts best you keep, and you split-test with a new message. With a billboard or radio, on the other hand, you get only one shot. You put the billboard up, and you hope you have the right message. Taking it down and putting another one involves a lot of costs. Traditional media does not have the flexibility that digital has.

Often with PPC you can see results the very same day that you start your campaign. Try that with SEO or any other marketing channel, it can take months to see any results whatsoever. The drawback of other channels is that you don’t have as much data to optimize, it’s take a lot longer, and it’s often catching users that are not as close to making a purchase. And that means new customer acquisition becomes reliant on good exposure, which would cost additional money as well. Other marketing channels are slow. PPC is fast.

This is why PPC is so advantageous, and it is these advantages that make it so cheap in comparison to other ad channels. But it gets even better than that. I am sure as a business owner you are looking to expand to many other locations. Well, you can measure demand by what people are searching for on search platforms like Google and Bing. If an industry, product, or product category has a lot of search terms there is demand or curiosity. This can help you save a lot of money down the road when you are looking to open a new store location. It is essentially how we help other companies find soft spots in the market for more revenue and profitability.

If I were to start a new business, I would start with PPC. It has raised the bar so much that it’s becoming almost a matter of necessity to get going. And people catch on, so competition will eventually make it harder to see returns so quick when everyone is on board and everyone’s competing for the same keywords. I am not saying this platform won’t be viable down the road, but I am saying that this is a good time to get on board. It is not early, but it also not late to create impact right away. So with this small intro, I hope you got an idea of what we are about, and understand how we can help your business gain traction. If that is something you are looking for get in contact with us soon to make the most of it.