Benefits of PPC advertising
PPC Providers such as Google and Yahoo generally state that PPC advertising offers the following benefits:
- PPC Advertising is Immediate or very fast to implement
- PPC Advertising is Measurable
- PPC Advertising is Cost Effective
- PPC Advertising is for Businesses of all size
Are these realistic benefits?
Cornish WebServices give below an independent viewpoint on the above claimed benefits of PPC. We do not use PPC advertising to promote any of our services, but this is only because we also provide SEO services and believe that no company offering SEO services should need to use PPC to boost its own sales!
PPC Advertising is Immediate
Pay per Click is very much quicker to implement than most other forms of advertising. It is very fast to respond to changing market demand or changes in company situation and campaign budgets can be increased / decreased or paused almost instantly.
Some PPC Campaigns are faster to set up than others - Google AdWords in particular is easy to get started within 10 minutes. Yahoo Search (Overture) takes longer - typically 3 or more days.
PPC can be turned off or reduced quickly if the numbers of orders and enquiries receieved is too high. We have frequently done this for some of our clients.
PPC Advertising is Measurable
The Internet makes it very easy to measure and quantify the actual benefit of the PPC advertising campaign as a whole, but also each part of the campaign. This is usually done by adding tracking code to the website but there are other methods as well if this is not possible. Cornish WebServices utilise both methods to continuously monitor and improve the performance of different client campaigns.
This type of advertising is called pay per click and it is very easy to measure"click through rates" or "Cost per Click" and this give an idea of how many visitors arrive at a client website. But cost per click is not the most useful measure of a campaign success. Some website visitors are more useful than others. A more useful measure is number of relevant visitors or cost per sale or cost per conversion. PPC advertising makes is very easy to calculate the cost per sale through this form of advertising.
PPC Advertising is Cost Effective
Maybe.
In the short term, PPC Advertising is usually one of the more cost effective forms of advertising on the Internet, especially where industry bid prices are low. But in some market segments, fierce competition has driven bid prices to such a high level that the cost of generating a sale is more than the profit from that sale.
In most industries it appears that natural listings get a better click through rate than sponsored (PPC) listings and in our experience natural search engine optimisation usually offers a better return in the longer term.
PPC Advertising offers potential for smaller business
Pay per Click Advertising enables small and medium sized enterprises to compete very successfully against the large national / multinational companies. PPC creates a level playing field for small businesses, and by careful choice of PPC parameters your ad can show above those of large business or multi- nationals.
Is PPC Advertising Best for your website?
Maybe.
But the fact that PPC advertising is so quick to setup and change, and the fact that is is easy to get measurable results means that you can easily quantify whether this is a good advertising route for your website.
Cornish WebServices have extensive experience in both B2B and B2C type markets (mainly English language based in both the UK and non UK markets). We also provide natural search engine optimisation services and often offer a combination of services where we gradually decrease PPC spend as the client website gains top rankings. Read more about our PPC management experience and company history in managing PPC campaigns, and information on our typical PPC clients.
Contact us for a realistic assessment of the benefits of PPC (pay per click) advertising for your business. We only use qualified Google AdWords Professionals to handle client budgets. We were probably the 1st UK PPC management company to do, and are still one of a very small number that do not allow 'unqualified staff' to manage client PPC campaigns.