PPC

Paid Search (PPC) has higher conversion rates than organic

This is in a large part because we have far more direct control over several factors with regards to your PPC campaign in comparison to organic results in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages):

• Ad is created with your target market in mind, hence targeted Ads
• You can control your message
• A clear call to action
• Direct traffic, you control where in your site people go
• Higher conversion rates

With regards to “organic results” in the SERPs:

• The “rich snippet” is part of your meta description from your web page
• You cannot easily control your ranking (SERPS)
• The ad itself is not targeted
• No call to action
• Time, effort and resources are required to rank in the top 3

Advantages of PPC

Targeted

As with all forms of search engine marketing, the main benefit of PPC advertising is that it is targeted at people who are already looking for your products or services, meaning they are likely to be interested in your offering, thus creating a higher conversion rate.

Cost-efective

PPC advertising requires very little investment or time to set up compared to traditional marketing, making its use realistic for any size of business. As the cost of the advertising is controlled by how much companies are prepared to bid, in some places PPC is very cost-effective, although as competition increases, it will become less so.

Measurable

Conversion rates from PPC leads can be measured if a tracking code is added to a site, so that you are able to calculate the cost per sale and conversion rate that pay-per-click is giving you. This makes an effective PPC campaign very easy to justify compared to other forms of advertising. You can also monitor clickthrough rates (advert impressions vs adverts clicked) to measure the effectiveness of your advertising messages.

Immediate

All the major pay-per-click tools also allow you to control your budget and bid levels online, which means that you can easily alter your activity and spend in line with business objectives such as market penetration, sales promotions and catering for seasonal variations.

Intensive management required

Bidding against competitors, testing strategies and monitoring budgets all require significant management skills and time in order to provide the best results.

Not all clicks are equal

Making sure that the people who click on your ads are likely to generate a lead or sale is critical to the success of a pay-per-click campaign, and there are a number of pitfalls to watch out for. Bidding on very general keywords by an advertiser in a specialist sector of a market may well lead to a high level of clickthrough cost from unlikely customers. Targeting the right kind of user in your ad text is also important and it often pays to be specific in what you are offering. Once a user clicks through to your site, it must actually provide them with a relevant offering, providing a specific landing page and improving the user’s journey to a lead or sale on your actual site can be of great help here.

Multiple clicking by competitors

There is some concern that competitors may spend time clicking on your adverts in order to increase your costs. Google AdWords publish an FAQ stating that they use a number of methods to deal with this (likely to including monitoring of IP addresses and monitoring of click patterns). Whilst it is clear that the major providers are putting security measures in place, it is still possible to assume that you will still receive clicks from your competitors and this will need to be built into the cost of any PPC campaign.

How sustainable is it?

Pay-per-click is very much like traditional advertising in that as soon as you stop investing in it, you will lose any benefits immediately. In some areas the marketplace for keywords has become very competitive and will become more so, as new businesses start to use the medium, thus research into new cost effective keywords needs to maintained on a monthly basis as well at a pro-active SEO stratergy.