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On a search engine’s results page there are two kinds of listings, organic and sponsored. Sponsored or paid listings are (somewhat) conspicuously identified at the top and/or right-hand side of the engine’s results pages. Organic listings occur naturally, while sponsored or paid listings are bid on by advertisers. Advertisers decide how much they are willing to pay for these ads, and they pay for the ads only when a visitor clicks on the ad …hence the name Pay Per Click (PPC).
Why should you be using PPC?
Well, because as our headline said… it’s one of the most significant and cost-effective advertising innovations, ever. If you haven’t at least experimented with Pay Per Click, you may literally be handing low-cost, high-quality leads to your competitors.
If your company is a B2C, or takes customer orders online, you probably already are using PPC, big-time. But B2B companies also have many reasons to at least experiment with PPC and determine what it can do for them. Here are some of those reasons…
Pay for result. One of the most compelling features of PPC – perhaps even more to CEOs than to marketers! – is the notion of paying only for leads that actually come to your web site. This is “narrowcasting” on steroids! Your ad is seen by only those with an already-expressed interest in your product or service (as evidenced by the keyword match); and you pay for only the subset of them who actually clicked on your ad.
Trackability , clear & objective ROI. Because PPC is all-electronic, everything that happens is explicitly measurable. The kind of measurement that you’d love to do with your offline programs – but probably don’t because of the difficulty and the extent of “hand-waving” involved – is completely trivial with PPC, and requires no hand-waving whatsoever. A click-through to your landing page comes about only in response to a specific keyword/phrase and ad, and all such events are captured and available for inspection and analysis.
Incredibly granular control/flexibility. With PPC, you can control…
your chosen keywords/phrases
- your maximum bid price for those keywords (and consequently your spot in the rank-ordered PPC listings)
- your ad copy
- the offer your ad presents to the searcher
- the contents of your landing page
You can vary all those levers systematically, experimenting until you achieve your ROI target across your entire campaign. Given that degree of control, the only way to lose your shirt with PPC advertising is to float an ad at a relatively high bid price and then ignore it …in which case you really have only yourself to blame. But with judicious attention to the controls provided, you’ll generally be able to make PPC pay its way for you quite nicely.
Setup ease. This can be a double-edged sword, since it may tend to encourage that just-noted “set-it-&-forget-it” mentality. But the exciting fact is that you can open an account with a search engine, select and price keywords, post an ad, and literally see visitors starting to hit your site …all within as little as 10 minutes!
By utilizing Pay Per Click you’ll be leveraging one of the very best deals in marketing …and almost certainly improving your company’s marketing ROI. |
