Pay Per Click Advertising: Should You Use It?

Whether you knew it or not, you have most likely clicked on Google’s paid advertisements at some point. These ads are strategically placed to entice visitors like you into clicking on them in hopes of finding the most relevant information related to your search. Google’s paid advertising system generates billions of ad revenue dollars for Google and its publishers for one main reason….it works.

As a business or individual looking to gain exposure for yourself online, knowing whether or not it will work for you ahead of time could save you hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing dollars. That said, we are going to help you determine if you should be using pay per click advertising to market your website by outlining some pre-qualifiers and also giving you real life examples of how pay per click advertising can really help a business grow.

Should You Use Pay Per Click Advertising?

As a marketing agency, we are frequently asked about pay per click advertising and whether or not it is a necessary marketing tactic. Most of the time, our answer is YES, they should be utilizing a smart pay per click advertising campaign. However, there are cases where PPC advertising campaigns may not be suitable for a business. Here is a list of some of those criteria that may rule a business out as needing Pay Per Click in its online marketing arsenal:

• You don’t need to drive traffic to your website as quickly as possible
• You don’t need to test the conversion performance of specific landing pages on your website
• You don’t have a seasonal marketing campaign that needs exposure at very specific times only
• You don’t have a hyper-local business that would benefit from highly geo-targeted advertisements
• You already know exactly which key phrases to optimize your website around
• You don’t need to multivariate or a/b test landing pages
• You have a budget of less than $250 – $500 per month to spend on online marketing
• Your website gets enough consistent, relevant traffic already

If you’re an Internet Marketing geek like most of us here, then you’re probably starting to sense the sarcasm. Seriously though, we can’t think of many businesses that would not benefit, in some way, from using Pay Per Click advertising. Don’t believe us? Check out these success stories of other businesses that have used pay per click to successfully to grow their businesses.

Pay Per Click Success Stories

Of course, results can and do vary, but if a pay per click campaign is properly setup, managed and optimized, then pay per click can be one of the most cost effective forms of online marketing. It works simply by allowing the advertiser to only pay for clicks that are relevant to the keywords and phrases the advertiser is bidding on and the search engine user is utilizing. When you stop paying for / bidding on key phrases the ads come down. When you bid higher than your competitors and optimize your account for the highest possible quality score, then your ads go and stay up – as high as possible.

The following three success stories are from real life businesses that have been using Google AdWords to drive relevant traffic to their websites and thus, have seen outstanding results that have helped their businesses flourish.

Business: First Crush Restaurant
Industry: Food & Beverage
Website: www.firstcrush.com
Results: Increased website traffic by 400% using Google AdWords

Business: Twiddy
Industry: Vacation Rentals & Real Estate
Website: www.twiddy.com
Results: Increased percentage of bookings made online by 50% in the past year

Business: Carolina Rustica
Industry: Retail: Custom furniture
Website: www.carolinarustica.com
Results: Increased conversion rates by 20% and online sales by 50%

Getting Started with Pay Per Click Marketing

The sponsored ads within the search engines, mainly Google, can really do wonders when it comes to driving relevant traffic to your website as quickly and consistently as possible. Hopefully you can see the clear benefit to using pay per click advertising from the real-life examples provided above.

If so, then we would like to help you get started. The best place to start is by speaking with a professional Paid Search Marketing Management Company, like us (shameless plug). A 30-60 minute consultation with a trained, experienced pay per click expert can provide the following benefits:

• Allow you to budget / plan accordingly by providing you with an estimated / recommended monthly ad spend
• Help you pinpoint which key phrases may best represent your business
• Assist you in determining what your best calls to action are to boost your campaign’s conversion rates
• Advise you on where to drive traffic on your website or a separate landing page for optimal results

Although we encourage as many people as possible to do what they can on their own, pay per click advertising is one of those things that we actually recommend a hired professional to be used for. Just as we would not throw all of our money into the stock market and start blindly trading stocks without using an experienced broker, we wouldn’t recommend that you throw your valuable marketing dollars into paid search marketing without the advice or hands-on help from a trained PPC specialist.

Put us to work for you! We have been working with paid search marketing campaigns since they first became available many years back and have since worked on over 5,000 accounts. Bottom line, we know what we’re doing and we can deliver the following for you:

• Increased relevant, quality traffic to your site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis
• Decreased cost per click on your current paid search marketing campaign (if you’re already running one)
• Increased conversion rates from your website visitors that come through the sponsored results
• Increased brand visibility in the search engines
• Results that you can track down to the penny

Whether you are convinced or not that you need pay per click marketing, we encourage you to take advantage of our Web Marketing Strategists. You will be surprised at how much you can learn about your business and marketing with a simple 20-30 minute consultation with one of our experts.