Why is PPC so important to your digital marketing plans?

PPC can sometimes be seen as a bit of a dirty word among those new to digital marketing. It can be seen as a dirty word by those who have experience in the sector as well, but it shouldn’t be that way. Like all digital marketing tools, it has its place within your marketing strategy, and depending on your goals it can be a particularly effective tool.

Part of your SEM Strategy

For PPC to be most effective it needs to be a part of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy, alongside Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). An effective SEM strategy helps to create effective, quality, optimised landing pages for both organic and paid searches, generating better results for both PPC and SEO campaigns.

This means when you are thinking about a PPC (or SEO) campaign always ensure you are thinking about the SEM structure as a whole.

Why should you be using PPC?

PPC campaigns provide success within three well-defined goal sets: Awareness; Conversion; and Engagement. Understanding what you and your business are looking to achieve with PPC (or any marketing campaign) is the first step to success, so let’s take a look at how PPC – which can include Search, display, video, app can help with each goal:

By acknowledging your goals, you will be able to identify how PPC fits in with your digital marketing plans and its place in achieving your goals/targets.

What are the drawbacks of PPC?

As with all marketing tools there are pros and cons with using the tool, here are couple of the key negatives to be aware of:

Perception of PPC – Informed audiences may shy away from clicking PPC placements on Google. The ads are clearly defined as adverts or sponsored when displayed which may create a perception (or mis-conception) of your listing causing some people to not click on the listing.

The cost implication – One of the P’s of PPC is ‘pay’, so cost is obviously a downside to PPC (or any advertising) and, to be fair, there are companies out there who have wasted vast sums of cash on ill-advised badly managed campaigns in the past. It is possible for costs, if left unmanaged, to be an issue for some businesses.

They can be badly managed – As alluded to in my previous point, management of PPC campaigns is important and necessary to make sure they are performing effectively. Whether the campaigns are managed internally or externally via an agency it is important that the campaign is managed correctly from day one, implementing changes when needed in terms to the campaign content and budget allocation.

What are the benefits of PPC?

Although there are multiple key benefits based around Awareness, Conversion and Engagement, such as getting to the first page of Google quickly with the right message, there is one advantage that outweighs most negatives and other positives alike – measurable return on investment (ROI).

As you are only paying per click, you can assign a direct cost of each visit to your website and calculate the cost of achieving your defined PPC campaign goals. ROI is key when measuring the success of campaigns and no ROI is more specific and measurable then that of PPC campaigns.

If you know each click costs 0.12p or £5.85, you know that when that figure is spent the person is one step closer to achieving the goal you have set out.

The effectiveness of conversion now becomes an internal challenge, but the lead generation aspect of the marketing plan has been tackled in a measurable fashion by PPC (alongside a structured SEM plan).

So, why is PPC so important to digital marketing plans?

Hopefully you can see from the above, but PPC is important because it is another tool at your disposal - and not just another tool, but one with a proven track record of success that has immense measurability in terms of ROI.