There are many ways to advertise on the internet, and utilizing PPC (pay per click) marketing platforms is one of the best ways to promote one’s business on the worldwide web. You don’t have to pay for your ads until someone actually clicks them. Platforms such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads receive their traffic through large user bases, so there is a lot of money involved if one can find their niche in these markets.
However, PPC advertising may not be for everyone, so here are a few of the main pros and cons:
Pros:
1) Instant Results
With PPC marketing, once you pay for the traffic, you start receiving traffic. The issue that people have with alternative forms of internet marketing such as SEO (search engine optimization) is that it’s like watching paint dry due to the long process it requires to rank high. It’s not only until a website is ranking high on the search engines for a keyword that traffic starts coming in.
PPC’s instant results allows marketers to figure out which ads work and which do not.
2) Large Volume of Traffic
By advertising on platforms with lots of users such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, advertisers have a large pool of potential customers at their disposal. With free traffic sources, you are limited by the actual searches for certain keywords or the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Also, gaining large amounts of viewers of your ads with free traffic can take a lot of time.
That’s why if you have the money, PPC is the way to go for large amounts of traffic right away.
3) Easier Optimization
It is the marketer’s job to optimize advertisements – ad placement, ad copy, and images – as well as the landing pages on the business’ site. These small details need to be split tested, so getting large amounts of traffic quickly makes optimization a lot easier.
4) Easier Scaling Capabilities
Because of the easier optimization of advertising campaigns through PPC, then once a fully optimized campaign is developed, a marketer can easily transfer this same campaign to other advertising platforms such as media buys.
Cons:
1) Expensive to Start Out
PPC requires a decent budget for starting out. When you’re new to paid traffic, you’ll most likely have to lose money at first in order to gain information to successfully optimize your campaign for high return on investment. Also, in order to maintain the traffic of your campaigns, you need to keep paying for the traffic. Once you stop paying, the traffic stops.
2) Ad Platform Restrictions
Paid ad platforms are becoming a lot stricter in recent years in which kinds of products, services, and ads can be found on their ads spots. This is to prevent any spamming that could possibly tarnish their sites’ image. Unfortunately, even legitimate advertisements get declined by these platforms.
3) The Need to Constantly Watch Your Campaigns
Especially during the testing and optimizing stages, you need to keep watching your campaigns to ensure that things are running properly. This can be pretty stressful and can prevent you from working on other tasks at the same time.
So is PPC Right for You?
It depends on your budget and your marketing needs. If you want more long-term, set-and-forget traffic and have the time, free traffic sources through SEO might be your thing. However, if you have the budget, want instant results, and want to be able to laser target your audience, PPC might be right for you.
This guest column is by Eric Siu, a specialist at Wpromote, ppc management and search engine optimization company.
