Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising Is Profoundly Measurable

Having long ago paid my dues in a marketing world where we spent money – big money – based on the loudest (or highest paid) person’s opinion, I have learned to embrace any marketing tactic whose cost and contribution to sales I can measure. Pay-per-click advertising is as measurable as it comes. It is, in fact, as measurable as the closing efforts of your sales team.

2. Pay-Per-Click Is Highly Efficient

Assuming you’ve set your campaign up correctly, your pay-per-click ads on search engines appear right in front of people who are actively looking for you. At the moment they are thinking about it. When you have the very best chance of getting them to take action.

This saves you time and money for two reasons. One – you don’t have to waste effort grabbing someone’s attention away from whatever they’re doing. These people are already looking for you. You can jump right into the conversation. Two – because they’re looking for you they’re already a step or two – at least – into the buying process. You’re closer to the sale from the get go.

3. It Provides Nearly-Instant Feedback

Where other direct response marketing tactics – direct mail or print advertising – have a built-in lag factor between launch and response, reaction to pay-per-click advertising happens NOW. Depending on your market and the search volume it produces, you can know what’s working and what’s not working in a matter of hours. While others are waiting to see what works, you already know.

4. Pay-Per-Click is Cost Effective

Even with increasing online competition and the resulting increase in click costs, pay-per-click advertising can still deliver new leads and traffic to your website for a lower cost-per-conversion than any other marketing tactic I know of. That includes email marketing.

5. You Can Spend Even Less By Being Good

You’ve got to love a marketing medium that actually rewards you for being successful. Google, in particular, goes to great lengths to figure out which advertisers are getting the best response from its searchers and lets them pay a lower price for a higher ranking. Looked at from the other direction, if a PPC campaign is not performing in the eyes of Google, that advertiser will pay more than the competition for the same position on page one.

6. It’s Easy to get Better

Another benefit of the measurability of pay-per-click advertising is the ability to test pretty much everything. From keywords, to ads, to landing pages you can easily and consistently improve your results by constant testing.

7. It’s Controllable

Some marketing tactics require you to invest a lot of resources – both money and people – with no guarantees you’re going to get any leads or new business out of it. (Think trade shows). Not so with pay-per-click. The wise PPC marketer begins with a test campaign, tweaks that campaign to get the better and better results and learn while doing so; and then expands – or bails – accordingly.

Too Good to Be True?

Maybe. Pay-per-click advertising is awesome and good and delivers all of the fabulous benefits I mentioned above. But it ain’t perfect.  We’ll look at the downside in my next article.

Have you read our latest PPC report, Will Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work for Me? If not, go ahead and download your copy. It’s free.