Pros and Cons of How PPC Advertising works

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is becoming increasingly popular, with search engine giants like Google considering their PPC platforms key to their economic success. PPC advertising is inexpensive, accessible, easy to manage and less risky than spending huge amounts of money on a traditional media advertising campaign. However, horror stories about depleted PPC budgets and lack of conversions also abound. When well managed, PPC campaigns offer a great ROI potential, but a badly managed campaign can become a big waste of both time and money if measures are not taken to correct it.

PPC advertising has some clear benefits, made even more clear when compared with traditional offline advertising:

• You only pay for highly qualified traffic: due to the way PPC advertising works your ads are only displayed to people you have identified as target audience. Since you only pay for a click, you are only paying for somebody who has seen your ad and is interested in what you are offering.
• The campaign starts right away, and you can see results in just a few hours. No more waiting for a TV ad to schedule or a print magazine to be in the stores.
• High degree of control. A campaign can be updated, stopped or have its budget increased with a few clicks.
• High level of personalisation. You can display different ads to different demographics, making your message very specific. Coupled with optimised landing pages it can increase your conversion rate greatly.
• Your ads appear when your potential client is in the right mood. Choosing the right keywords means that you can target people who are actually looking to buy, as opposed to those just browsing around or researching.
• You decide how much to pay for an ad, and what the budget is for the campaign. Once the maximum number of clicks has been reached and the budget is depleted, the ads will stop appearing and the campaign will become inactive. This means that it is easy to calculate the exact cost per visitor to evaluate ROI.
• Robust anti-fraud mechanisms implemented by reputable PPC ad platforms means your ads are clicked by real people who are interested in your products rather than bots navigating through websites or pay per view traffic programs.

PPC advertising is not without faults, and it can also be expensive and time consuming:

• Targeting the wrong audience,the wrong keywords or using the wrong message can deem your PPC campaign useless, and at its worst, expensive.
• The bidding system means that a popular keyword can become very expensive. It can be challenging to strike a balance between spending as little money as possible and getting enough exposure.
• PPC campaigns require close monitoring to be most effective. Forget about just dropping your keyword list and looking at the results after the campaign is done.
• In most cases you have little control over the specific websites where you ads will be displayed.
• Unlike SEO, the moment the budget is gone the traffic is gone as well. PPC is not an investment.

PPC advertising is not the holy grail of advertising and has both benefits and cons. However, learning how to manage a PPC campaign to minimise the risks and increase the conversion rate is within reach of any business owner. If you do not know if PPC advertising will work for your company it is possible to give it a try with a limited budget and track the results before making an informed decision.