Once a business or a company has a professional website developed and set up, the next challenge is to get website traffic. Of course there are many ways of doing this but Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is probably the quickest way to get you started.
What is PPC?
Essentially, PPC marketing is a form of advertising where companies agree to pay a predetermined sum for each unique Internet user that clicks on one of their ads. Generally speaking, PPC adverts are the ones you see at the top and right hand side of the main search results page. Although there are now numerous PPC programs, Google’s AdWords and Yahoo Search Engine Marketing remain the most popular.
Benefits of PPC Marketing
Primarily, the main benefits of advertising with PPC are speed, targeting and return-on-investment tracking, also referred to as ROI. For the most part, PPC adverts will become active on a search engine within 24 hours. Furthermore, by only bidding for certain keywords, you can ensure that your advert will only be displayed when someone performs a search using the keywords you’ve bid on. Likewise, you can also opt for your ads only to be displayed to users in a specific geographical area. This of course is essential for those advertising a service which is only available locally. Last but not least, you have the ability to track performance. In other words, you can check to see how much you’re spending on PPC advertising, how much you’re earning from it and even which keywords are performing the best. Of course, those keywords which are not getting any hits need to be changed.
Proper keyword analysis is fundamental to all Internet marketers, both before and during a PPC campaign. Failure to do this properly can cost you a lot of money on advertising, not to mention a lot of potential customers. Even the actual PPC companies recognise this and provide complimentary tools which are capable of suggesting the ultimate keywords with regards to the product or service you’re marketing. Having said all that, effective bid management is perhaps equally as important because after all, your bid amount has a direct impact on the position of your add. The higher your bid, the further up your ad will be placed.
PPC vs. Organic Search Engine Marketing
Contrary to what many people may believe, PPC and organic search engine marketing can go together perfectly. Just to clarify matters, organic search engine marketing refers to the results which show up on the main part of the page when a user has carried out a search. Below are some criteria which one could consider with regards to PPC vs. organic search engine marketing:
- The costs involved with PPC advertising can be astronomical, hence the importance of setting up a daily budget
- The results of organic search engine marketing are far longer lasting than PPC results
- The organic approach takes considerably longer to produce results but it only costs a fraction of the price
- Research suggests that search engines favour organic SEO over PPC
- Studies also show that users trust organic SEO more than they trust PPC
- Users in general are becoming more familiar with PPC ad placements, thus resulting in fewer clicks that qualify
As can be seen, both organic and PPC have their own advantages and disadvantages so ideally one should try and use both if it’s justified. Generally speaking, PPC is a good way to get your campaign started in a hurry. Once your organic search engine marketing has had adequate time to produce results, you can then start scaling back with your PPC campaign.
Which method of traffic generation do you use; PPC, organic search engine marketing, or both? Please post your comments below.
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Nice article.
The comparison made between Pay per click and Organic approach in the later part of the article is quite impressive.
Thanks for sharing this great information.
Hi, thanks for the helpful post. I like to take a balanced approach that uses PPC and SEO, and it’s good to know the benefits and limitations of either.
I totally agree with your approach to using both PPC and organic SEO. Traffic generation from multiple sources is the ideal method. If one of the source is not doing well, the other one can accommodate as a backup.
Thanks for the helpful explanation. It certainly makes things a little easier to understand. I have to say this is an article I will be recommending to a few other people.
Thank you very much for spreading the word about this article. It is much appreciated.
This is a good introduction to SEM. I’m glad you took the time to tell people that it can get very expensive. I saw one customer who decided to do it on their own and ran up a $2200 bill on his first day.
That’s a great example of how it can be quite risky if you’re taking the PPC marketing route. I hope that person got his return on investment (ROI) back, assuming he knows what he’s doing.
If you’re going to take any kind of risk, make sure it’s calculated risk. If you go in without a well-planned PPC campaign, you’re going to end up wasting your time and money. When I say “well-planned” I am talking about performing proper keyword, market, and competition research.
Th recommendations from this article are very relevant and applicable to current scenario. Google lately made changes to policies which affected affiliate marketers’ advertising on Google Adwords as well as Canadian online pharmacies who have been completely banned from advertising. So businesses who had invested time in spreading their risk by having a PPC+ SEO strategy are reaping the benefits.