Tips and Reasons

Pay per click advertising has developed into one of the most powerful online advertising tools today. The increase of search queries at Google, Yahoo! and Live, translates to more traffic (potential customers and clients). These major search engines offer you paid advertising programs where you can have your own advertisements placed along with the organic search results for keywords you specify. They are:

* Google AdWords
* Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture)
* Microsoft adCenter

I have compiled a few reasons why you should start using PPC advertising to promote your business.

1.) Highly Targeted

The major reason why this advertising model is successful is that it targets those users who are proactively looking for what you have to offer. Suppose you sell green umbrellas and have a website for it too. You can display your ad to someone searching for ‘buy green umbrellas’ on Google. This ensures that only those people who are genuinely interested in your product will see your ad and visit your website.

The best part is, you pay only for clicks you receive and not charged if no one clicks on the ads. Compare this to print advertising where you pay for the ads irrespective of the impact. Your ad in a newspaper might have gone unnoticed and generated no leads or sales, but you still have to pay for it.

2.) Wider Audience

Those businesses who advertise on print, TV and radio, and feel that they have reached the limit of advertising on these platforms can consider venturing into the online advertising world. There are thousands of people out there for whom the internet is the only or major source of information. By exploring this advertising model, businesses can generate more leads and sales.

Every month, there are approximately 31 billion searches on Google alone. Many of them are people searching for products or services to buy.

3.) Cost Effective Advertising

PPC advertising programs offer a charge of as low as $0.01 per click. Of course, the more you pay, the more importance your ad will get when its ranked. However, its not only the money that gives you a higher rank. Your keyword relevance, website quality, etc. also matter.

The first time I tried one (AdWords) was in 2006. I started advertising my dad’s business. I spent 32 Indian Rupees ($0.67) on AdWords advertising and got him revenue worth 8,000 Indian Rupees ($165.28). Its not just me but thousands of businesses who have had an extremely positive return on investment (ROI) in online advertising.

4.) Controllable Budget

With all these programs, you have the power to choose how much you are willing to spend. You can specify a daily or a monthly budget and a maximum cost per click. This ensures that your costs remain under control. This is suitable for small as well as large scale businesses, or even people promoting their personal blogs or websites.

5.) Measurable Results

These programs offer conversion tracking mechanisms. You can also use an external tracking software to measure how your PPC campaign has performed. Simply speaking, you can easily know how many clicks converted to sales, leads or sign ups among the total number of clicks your ad received. You can also know which keywords work best for you and use similar variations.

In other forms of advertising, it is difficult to track sales that have generated as a result of those advertising efforts. It is only if you proactively ask your customers how they heard of you, will you come to know. Or probably by studying sales patterns before and after your offline advertising.

PPC advertising makes this simple and just a click away.

6.) Easy to Edit and Manage

Its is fairly simple to manage a PPC advertising campaign online. Anybody who is considered web savvy can easily learn and manage an account. No technical knowledge is required to create or change an existing campaign.

However, effective online advertising requires 1) some degree of knowledge of how that particular advertising product works and 2) the time to do research on what best works for your industry.

7.) Ads Run Almost Instantly

You don’t have to wait weeks or days before your ad campaign can run. Like I said, it is simple to create and takes as little as 15 minutes to have your ads running. It wont take you more than 5 minutes to come up with a creative ad copy. Creating a TV ad takes days or even weeks and requires a lot of resources and money just to get the ad ready, leave alone the cost of showing the ad on TV. Even designing a print ad takes a few hours, if not days.

8.) Amazing Flexibility

These programs give you the power to run the ads when you want them to run. You can also pause them whenever you like. You can edit your ad copy in less than a minute, and can add and remove keywords at any time. You can even schedule your ads to run during a specific time of the day. Lastly, as mentioned earlier, you have total control over the money you spend, and there are no long or short-term contracts.

—-

If you have not started using PPC advertising for your business, you are missing out on a lot of potential business opportunities.

Wishing you success,

YHK

Related posts:

1. Tip: Understanding ROI in Google AdWords One of the most important success metrics in Google AdWords...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.