Are you wondering if pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is right for your business?
PPC advertising can be one of your marketing strategy’s most powerful assets. But it can also be one of the biggest budget wasters.
Everything depends on how much time, energy, and resources (i.e. budget) you have to dedicate to PPC advertising.
That’s why, in today’s post, we’re going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click advertising.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive straight into the list beginning with the advantages of PPC.
Advantages of PPC Advertising
There’s a reason that PPC advertising is so popular. When done right, this form of digital marketing can boost your brand awareness, increase your reach, and attract new customers.
Some of the advantages of PPC include:
1. Cost-Effective
We’re all interested in maximizing our return on ad spend (ROAS). And PPC advertising can be an effective platform for achieving that.
Unlike traditional print advertising, with PPC you can choose to set up your campaigns so that you are only charged when someone clicks on your ad. Instead of just renting some digital real estate, you’ll be able to link the cost of your adverts directly to the number of visitors you drive to your site.
Of course, you still have to convert them once they get there.
But having that concrete link between the amount you spend, and the potential leads you generate makes PPC an attractive option for many digital marketers.
2. Fast Results
If you’re also working on optimizing your content for search engines, you’ll know that SEO can be a painfully slow method of driving organic traffic.
Don’t get me wrong, it is an effective one and well worth investing in.
But while you’re waiting for your efforts to bear results, you still want to capture all those potential visitors searching on your relevant keywords.
That’s where PPC comes in. Unlike SEO, it’s a fast way of getting your website in front of a wider audience.
Where SEO can take many months to gain traction, you’ll usually start seeing and tracking results from your PPC campaigns within a few weeks.
And unlike some forms of digital marketing, like social media or email marketing, you don’t need to spend time building your audience first. It’s already there, ready and waiting for you.
3. Easy to Tweak
Another major advantage of PPC is that you can easily make small adjustments to your campaigns to maximize their effectiveness.
You’ll get plenty of data on how your ads are performing. And you can use this data to make changes, assess each campaign source individually, test new ideas, and build a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
With print advertising, email marketing, or even SEO, you just don’t have this level of flexibility. Once you are committed to a campaign, you need to wait to see if it has worked or not before you can use the performance metrics to plan future projects.
With PPC, there is none of that waiting. You can constantly test, evaluate, tweak, and retest to get the most out of each campaign–ensuring your website gets the most traffic possible.
4. Highly Targeted
Getting your ads in front of the right audience is vital to the success of your campaigns. And a major advantage of PPC advertising is the ability it gives you to target each ad to a specific audience.
As well as choosing your keywords, you can target your ads depending on your desired audience. By tailoring your campaigns by demographic, interests, or geographical location, you’ll get your content in front of the people most likely to become customers.
Integrating trackable URLs for the purpose of campaign tracking will also provide valuable information regarding the tracking source.
Plus, you can even set up remarketing campaigns to nudge people who have interacted with your company in the past back to your site. This helps you to retain existing customers and attract new ones who need a little more persuasion before they are ready to buy.
With such targeted ads, you can develop copy that speaks directly to the interests of your selected audience–that means your ads are more likely to have a high click-through rate (CTR).
And that means your ads are more likely to have a high click-through-rate (CTR).
5. Easy to Set Up
Attracting organic search traffic requires investment in creating optimized content and improving the technical performance of your website. PPC ads, on the other hand, are quick and easy to set up.
Granted, there is still a small learning curve as you get to grips with how each platform works and what gives you the best results. But it is far easier to get started with PPC than to drive visitors to your website via organic searches.
For companies looking to build their digital presence and extend their reach fast, PPC can be a simple way to attract new audiences.
Disadvantages of PPC Advertising
So far, PPC sounds like a digital marketer’s dream. But, like any platform, there are some disadvantages to PPC advertising too. Let’s take a look at some of them:
1. Very Competitive
In some ways, PPC advertising is a victim of its own success. It is such a popular marketing method that competition for popular keywords can be fierce.
Unfortunately, that means that the costs of PPC advertising can build up fast. It requires constant monitoring to ensure you are getting the return you need from your PPC efforts.
And if your budget is limited, you may find that you aren’t able to target the keywords you’d like. Bidding wars for popular keywords can drive the price up beyond the reach of smaller companies.
2. Savvy Audiences
As online audiences become increasingly digitally aware, there’s a trend for people to treat PPC adverts with a degree of cynicism.
This is especially the case with PPC adverts on search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google.
While it certainly isn’t true of every user, some people will deliberately avoid clicking on the ads at the top of the page or in the sidebar because they know that the website has bought that space, rather than being the most relevant result for their search query.
3. Needs Follow-Through
Unfortunately, coming up with a successful PPC strategy is only half the battle. Once you get people to your site, you still need to provide them with a compelling reason to buy.
That means you’ll need to spend time building landing pages, enticing people onto your mailing list, and developing engaging user journeys to encourage them to convert.
PPC isn’t a standalone activity. It needs to be part of a fully thought-through strategy.
4. Takes Time to Find a Winning Formula
I’ve said that PPC is an easy form of digital marketing to get started with, and this is true. Most platforms are simple to learn.
But there’s a fundamental difference between being able to do something and being able to do it well.
Coming up with a successful PPC campaign takes time. You need to do your keyword research, identify the right audiences, review Google Analytics data, and constantly monitor and tweak campaigns.
Like any other form of digital marketing, PPC is a skill that takes time to learn. And even an experienced PPC advertiser may need some trial and error to find a strategy that works for your particular brand.
Tracking Your PPC Success
One of the biggest problems people have with running successful PPC campaigns is that they turn things on auto-pilot and hope for the best.
Rather than setting aside a few minutes each day to check how their ads are performing, they’ll create a new ad, start running it, and set it on the backburner… until they see their ad spend.
As a result, many companies–both large and small–waste tons of money every year on ads that could’ve been more effective.
So what’s the best way to make sure you’re getting the best return on investment from your ads? By tracking the results with daily or weekly marketing reports.
And for that, there’s no better tool than Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch makes it easy to create marketing reports that will guide your PPC strategy. With a drag and drop builder (and custom dashboard), you can create multiple reports, including daily or weekly marketing reports in a matter of minutes.
Then, once your report is created, you can select when you’ll send the report and to whom.
But the best part is that the report sharing process is 100% frictionless. Rather than sending your marketing reports by PDF attachment or in a 3rd-party URL (to a user dashboard), all the information goes directly to your recipients’ inbox.
This allows you to get the data you need fast so you can decide how to tweak your ads for continued success.
Plus, you can add KPIs from your other marketing channels like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook, Instagram, Mailchimp, and more.
This allows you to create comprehensive marketing reports with all the KPIs you need for a larger ROI.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to get started with your 100% FREE Metrics Watch trial (no credit card required):
Start Your Risk Free Metrics Watch Trial Today!And that’s it for now! We hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have even more information on how you can create marketing reports that drive more profits for your business or your clients.