If you want to improve exposure to your target audience and drive more traffic to your website you should seriously consider a Pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign. PPC is an effective way to reach the top positions in Google without spending a lot of time and money to try and achieve the same results organically. This is an attractive option for small businesses struggling to achieve these goals.
PPC is an appealing marketing choice because the results can be incredibly effective. PPC gives you the power to deliver ads to a highly targeted audience who are actively searching for your type of product or services.
Before spending your marketing dollars, ask yourselves these questions to see if PPC is the ideal advertising choice for your business.
How Much Does a New Customer Cost?
Every time someone clicks on your ad, you are spending marketing dollars. You need to determine not only how much profit the item you are advertising will give you if the potential customer purchases after entering your site, but also determine how much a faithful customer is worth to your business in terms of repeat sales.
If your business sells monthly service subscriptions or products that are ordered on a repeat basis then you can spend more to obtain new customers.
Profit Margins – What’s Yours?
PPC is a good advertising choice for big ticket items because a higher profit margin gives you a strong ROI and helps to absorb the PPC costs for that sale. For lower priced products or services that sell for $100 or less it is much harder to absorb the PPC cost and may actually end up costing you more for advertising that the profit you made for the sale.
If you do sell lower priced items, PPC can still work, but you’ll need to spend your PPC dollars wisely by targeting less competitive keywords with lower bid amounts.
Do You Sell a Wide Range of Products?
More products means more flexibility in your choice of keywords and can greatly reduce the cost-per-click rate if you select less generic and less expensive keywords.
When you choose descriptive, long-tail keywords in your ads, you ads will cost less and also be a very close match to the customer’s search criteria. For instance, if you sell cashmere cardigans in four different colors and four different sizes, the cost-per-click for the keyword “Med black cashmere cardigan” will be much lower than the more generic keyword “cardigan”. Long-tail keywords have been known to bring a higher rate of paying customers to a site.
Do you Sell Unique Products or Services?
Do you have a unique product or service? One that’s found only locally or not readily available in department stores or malls? Then PPC can be a really excellent advertising choice. Why? First, people like unique products and often turn to the Internet to find them. Secondly, the cost per click for niche keywords is typically less expensive than common marketing keywords, providing the potential for a higher ROI.
When you implement a PPC the right way, it can bring a steady number of pre-qualified leads to your website, which will ideally transfer into high rates of sales. While lots of visits to your site is wonderful news, what really matters is the growth of sales.
Bottom line – do your number crunching at the beginning and early phases of your PPC campaign and monitor the campaign closely. It’s easy to make mistakes with poorly designed campaigns and blow your marketing budget. Instead, plan ahead, monitor careful, and track results to give you the best return on your PPC investment.