Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising may or may not be a new term for you, but you owe it to your business to learn more about it. With costs on the rise for PPC ads on popular sites like Facebook and Google, it’s one way to drive traffic to your site and increase profits.
In just the second quarter of 2011, costs for PPC ads on Facebook rose by 22% – so there must be some uptick in the demand for this internet marketing model.
What are the advantages of this specific type of advertising?
-
For one thing, PPC advertising is flexible. You start it up when you want, it takes almost no time at all (15 minutes in some cases), and you turn it off when you want.
-
Because of its flexibility, PPC advertising is ideal for businesses that are on the upstart when it comes to online advertising – if you don’t want to invest much time or money to start improving how you interface with clients and prospects, this is one way to do it.
-
PPC advertising helps you learn how to tweak your website for optimum results by allowing you to test and analyze the amounts and kinds of traffic you’re getting.
-
PPC helps control costs to only that which benefits you – you only pay when someone clicks the ad. It’s a good way to ensure that the money you’re spending is truly generating traffic.
Does PPC advertising have any downfalls? Definitely.
-
It costs to be a “VIP.” Just because you employ PPC advertising, doesn’t mean you won’t be in stiff competition to get highly visible spots and top billing in the sea of other companies you’re competing against. Prepare to pay more than you may expect in order to be more visible.
-
PPC works best in tandem with other forms of advertising – and to be honest, it works best when combined with other kinds of advertising, like search engine optimization.
-
It’s easy to think you can slide by with absolutely minimal effort when it comes to PPC advertising. Even with something as user-friendly as PPC, you still need to have a plan for how you will track if this form of advertising will really be worth your while when it comes to getting a return on your investment.
-
PPC advertising is, overall, somewhat more susceptible to abuse via click fraud, but Google and many other providers have instituted systems that safeguard advertisers from abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt websites and developers.
Sources:
