What is PPC marketing, and what are its benefits?

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click which is a form of advertising that directs traffic to a website.

PPC is particularly effective because it allows businesses to skip over the organic search engine optimization (SEO) results to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), giving them a prime position. PPC also only costs the advertiser when someone clicks on their ads, which helps to keep costs down, and allows for superior data collection.

What are the benefits of PPC?

PPC is fast to set up

Compared to other forms of online marketing and SEO, PPC is far quicker to get up and running. Indeed, within a few minutes, your business could be sitting in the top spot in the SERPs and all you needed to do was choose the right keywords. Of course, this is in stark contrast to SEO where results take a great deal of time to come to fruition.

PPC reaches a wide audience

Unlike other forms of online marketing like organic social and emails, PPC ads are not limited to only the people whose contact details you already have. Instead, anyone using the keywords you have selected in Google may come across your ad, which makes it a great option for those businesses looking to expand their current market.

You can easily tell if PPC is working

When running your PPC marketing through Google Ads it's incredibly easy to track. This means that you can see what ads are working and which ones are not, something that allows you to quickly make changes to maximize their performance. Indeed, you can edit your ads, and quickly optimize them each day if you want. Thereby maximizing their opportunity to perform well.

PPC is scalable

Another major advantage to using PPC marketing is that it's scalable. This is because you can increase your spending, or pause it instantly, all without having the delays and the cost implications of other types of marketing and adverts that have to complete the media cycle once released.

PPC is affordable

One of the best things about PPC marketing is that you can start small, and ensure that you stick to your budget. Indeed, you have the control to set the amounts for your ad budget, as well as the cost of the bids you will make, something that is particularly helpful for SMEs that are working within a limited marketing budget.

PPC can help drive traffic to your other marketing efforts

In the age where content is still king, PPC is a highly effective way of not only driving traffic to a shop or site, but to specific pieces of content that are associated with particular goals such as signing up for a newsletter, following a brand on social media, or downloading a lead magnet.

PPC meshes so well with content marketing because it's delivered via Google. Then, as people use Google to find answers to their questions your business ad will appear, increasing your content position (and so the likelihood that it will be visited) on the SERPs. In essence, you can use PPC to enhance SEO for your content.