Why Pay Per Click Services Are Still Relevant to Small Business In 2020

A lot of people assume searchers don’t click on ads in the search results because they don’t like being advertised to. But a recent survey shows that 75 percent of the people that click on pay-per-click ads in the search results think those ads make it easier to find what they’re looking for.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads still work like crazy to find new leads and customers for your business. If you’re not using PPC or you’re debating whether it’s worth the effort, don’t get fooled by “common” knowledge.

Let’s look at why pay per click services are as relevant as ever in 2020.

Good advertising doesn’t only work for the company running the ads, it benefits the customers as well. If your business can help someone solve a problem, it’s not an intrusion – it’s helping them improve their life in some way.

PPC advertising lets you get your products and services in front of the people who need them most, exactly when they’re looking for a solution. Your ads get shown to people when they search for a related keyword or phrase. As long as you choose relevant search terms when you create your ads, you’re only going to be advertising to people who you can help.

If your product solves a problem for the searcher when they’re looking for that solution, it’s a win for them. If you get a new customer as a result of the ad, it’s a win for you. And if the searcher and you are both happy with the result you get from the ad, it’s a win for the advertising network as well.

Many businesses think of pay per click programs as a cost. Instead of paying for traffic, why not focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and aim for free traffic?

This is the wrong way to look at it. PPC advertising isn’t a cost, it’s an investment. And like any other investment, you can measure your return (ROI) to gauge how well it’s performing. If you can generate $2 in revenue for every $1 you spend on advertising, wouldn’t you want to do that every day?

SEO isn’t really “free” anyway. Instead of paying for clicks, you pay to create content, build links to your website, and various other factors that SEO needs. You might pay for these things with dollars or you might pay for them with your own time but either way, there’s a cost.

When compared to SEO, pay per click is more measurable and you’ll see the results much faster.

One of the biggest advantages of pay per click advertising is how quickly you can see results from your ads. You’ll have data almost immediately that shows you how many people are clicking on your ads, your conversion rates, the cost per lead or sale, and various other metrics.

You’ll know right away if your ads are profitable or not, and you can make changes to improve those results (or drop losing ads altogether).

SEO takes weeks or even months to see results so you’ll spend a lot of time working to get your pages ranked before you know if they’re even going to work for you.

You can outsource a lot of the work you have to do with pay-per-click advertising to a PPC management company or it can be automated using technology. This lets you focus on what your business is best at and leave the PPC management in the hands of experts.

Another powerful benefit of PPC services is a technology known as remarketing. Remarketing lets you show ads only to certain people, such as someone who has visited a page on your website but hasn’t bought anything yet or someone who “liked” a particular page on Facebook.

If you’ve ever looked at a product on a site like Amazon and suddenly started seeing ads for the same or similar products on other websites, you’ve seen remarketing in action. You see those ads because the advertiser can target you based on the product(s) you viewed on their website.

You can use this to make special offers to people who haven’t bought yet, to invite people to finish the checkout process they abandoned halfway through, or any number of other follow-up offers. Being able to target people with this kind of detail improves your conversion rate even more than a typical PPC ad.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the two biggest pay-per-click networks but more sites are adding the ability to get paid per click all the time. On top of the “big 2”, you can run PPC ads on:

• Reddit
• Amazon
• Pinterest
• Quora

Each of these sites reaches a different demographic so you can target your audience in the places they’re most likely to be.

We’ve already touched on how much quicker you can get data with PPC, compared to SEO, but it’s not only faster – it’s more thorough. Pay per click advertising lets you track visitors from the time they click your ad, right through to the conversion to a lead or sale.

You can even track them through various steps in your marketing funnel. The final conversion could come days or weeks after the click but it can still get tied back to that first action.

This is much harder to do with SEO and other traffic sources because you don’t get as much data about those early steps in the process. Google doesn’t share click metrics for the organic search results so you’re missing a key piece of the puzzle.

Pay per click services should be part of every company’s advertising strategy. It doesn’t have to be the only way you reach new customers but the speed, flexibility, and reach are hard to beat.

And it’s the perfect way to test new ideas before spending a lot of time and effort rolling them out. If they work, invest the time and effort in search engine optimization and you can have the best of both worlds. If they don’t work, drop them and move on to the next test.

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