Where to Start With PPC Advertising

PPC is short for pay-per-click advertising. While organic SEO (search engine optimization) tries to get visitors to your website by creating content that will show up on the search engines, PPC gets people to your website by paying for each time a person clicks on an ad.

It’s a proven strategy for getting customers, and it’s potentially a very lucrative method for you to expand your online business. So how do you get started? That’s easy. Just answer these three questions to start designing a successful PPC strategy for your business.

Is PPC Right for You?

PPC advertising offers many advantages. First, it can immediately bring traffic to your website. Organic SEO can take months, even years, to develop a constant stream of visitors, but with PPC you can essentially turn on a tap and get visitors. Plus, it has the potential to identify and target visitors at any stage of the buying process, including those who are ready to put their money down right now. SEO is more random, and tends to work better with people who are in the early, information-gathering stages of the process. PPC also comes with highly detailed data, letting you precisely measure your ROI and make informed decisions about the campaign. However, PPC does have disadvantages. Because it works fast, it has a steep learning curve, and the potential to lose a lot of money during the learning process. It also requires significant investment of both time and money. You need to design your ads to earn the right clicks to bring purchase-ready visitors to your website. And if you don’t do a good job at earning clicks, you might find your access to markets gets limited. Advertisers that perform poorly get charged more, have their ads demoted (shown less frequently), and can sometimes be banned from a platform. If you want to do PPC, but don’t know how to do it, it’s best to let someone else manage your campaign.

Who Do You Hope to Reach?

Next, it’s important to decide who you’re trying to reach with your PPC advertising. Think first of the demographics of your ideal customers. You don’t always need to have a customer profile, but it’s not a bad idea. At a minimum, you should be able to describe your ideal customer if asked. But also think about where in the buying process–like problem awareness, information gathering, narrowing alternatives, or purchase decision–you want to reach them. It’s tempting to try to always get people just when they’re ready to buy, but that’s not always the best strategy. First, it’s usually more expensive and more competitive to target PPC ads there. Second, you might make more sales if you target people earlier in the buying process and develop a relationship with them through your site. This is especially true for expensive products and services, where it’s important to develop customer trust before making a sale.

Where Do You Want to Reach Them?

As part of its targeting ability, PPC lets you choose exactly where you want to reach your potential customers. One option is paid search. In this type of PPC, you work with a search engine, giving them a list of keywords you want to appear for, and how much you’re willing to pay for a click from each of those keywords. Programmatic and display ads are two variations of ads that show up on certain sites based on criteria that you set up. You’ve seen these ads at the top or side of content, sometimes even embedded in the content. The difference between these types of PPC ads is essentially how detailed are the audience selection parameters. Social media advertising targets potential customers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Retargeting ads follow customers who have considered products or services like yours. Your ads will show up in these customers’ browsers for days or weeks after they visit a like product site, depending on the parameters you choose. You don’t have to choose just one place to target potential customers. But costs multiply quickly when you’re advertising across different locations, so it’s best to make sure you have an effective strategy for combining your advertising.

Let Us Start Your PPC Advertising Campaign

If you want to start a PPC advertising campaign that gets going quickly and yields near-immediate results, let VEA Technologies set up and run your campaign. We can talk to you about your goals and strategies, then design and implement a campaign that will achieve your goals. We can also integrate it with an SEO campaign that will benefit from your PPC and may eventually take over, bringing customers to your site for free. To learn more about our strategy recommendations for you, please contact VEA Technologies today.