Why you should plan for PPC in 2015?

In our last blog “Turning your PPC investment into Success Story”, we have explained the basic of successful PPC campaigns. If you have already planned to invest in PPC, you may get some useful tips.

In this blog, I want to give you some competitive insights on why PPC is more preferable over other platforms like SEO and social media and the factors that encourage marketers for pay per click advertising.

Let’s quickly discuss the few alternatives of PPC and see what advantages you have with pay per click.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Gone are the days when we used to build backlinks in bulk, copy writes some content from other websites and publish it with the sole purpose of acquiring backlinks to our website.

With the current aspect of SEO, Copywriting content and using it with a bunch of common sites doesn’t  work anymore. You need to employ smarter methods and need to be very patient to achieve results through SEO.

The worst part is, after all your hard work in earning links and content production, the algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda ruin all your efforts and put your website back in the same positions or even in the worst position.

Last year, Google released 20+ updates to put strict restrictions on any methods that used to provide quick results.

Imagine the situation when you have hired great content writers, invest money in link building, everything worked as planned and you have achieved the top position in search results for your website as well, but suddenly, there is an update in algorithm and all your efforts got worthless and all your achievements got banished.

What Next, more investment in Panda and Penguin recovery??? If you are an entrepreneur who understands the language of ROI, you would immediately stop investing more money in SEO.

As a full service Digital Agency, we are not saying SEO doesn’t work now days or you shouldn’t invest money in SEO. All we are saying that depending solely on SEO to grow your business is not an ideal decision.

On the other hand, PPC provides you more control on what you want to spend and accurate predictability on clicks and conversions. So, instead of relying on SEO and hoping for the best results in the long term, it is far better to divide some budget for PPC to achieve predictability and precision on ROI.

Social Media

In the last few years, social media has emerged as one of the potential platforms to earn customers’ loyalty and to increase engagement with your customer in a fun way. But due to excessive marketing, the entire purpose of social media marketing is being violated by marketers.

The goal of social media is to increase engagement and earn customer loyalty towards your brand which ultimately increases customer’s lifetime value. And for that, you need to give a strong reason to your customers to connect with your brand socially.

So, instead of going crazy for social media promotion and tweeting or posting content that your target audience ignores, it is better to put best efforts in an activity that your customers are interested to engage in.

When you go for paid Facebook advertising or promoted post, it costs too much and there isn’t any proven method to measure ROI.

If you really want to get benefits of Social media, share something useful that adds value to your audience knowledge or whatever you share should be beneficial to them or their friends. It may not have direct impact on sales, but it will definitely help in creating word of mouth advertising for your brand.

Use social media as a platform for communicating with your customers. Listen to the complaint and other stuff by your genuine customers and try to increase the brand value by providing solutions to their issues. Increasing brand loyalty is another form of marketing that helps to grow your brand on long term bases.

Few things where PPC really wins the battle

More control over keywords

With pay per click, you have complete control on your advertising cost. You can target the keywords that you want to advertise and keywords not to. You can also conclude the highest performing keywords in a short span of time compared to SEO.

You also have complete control on Geo location you want to target. With the evolution of Google Maps, It becomes easier to target audience, which is near by your business location. This has given a great advantage to local businesses.

Complete data transparency

With PPC, you have complete data transparency.  You can see keywords which drive clicks, which keywords converted and which wasted your money. So, if tired with “NOT SET” or NOT PROVIDED” keywords in your Google Analytic, it’s time to have transparency on your marketing spend.

Evaluation of Ad format & Measurement technique

Gone are the days when we were habituate to simple text ads only. Evolutions like display advertising with the rich media format, product listing ads with shopping campaigns and Remarketing has changed the face of pay per click marketing.

Now, it becomes possible to target audience, which matters most to your business based on their behavior. Measurement techniques have also evolved and provided more transparency. Now, it is possible to track the outcome of each and every visit on your website.

Advance Call tracking, eCommerce conversion tracking and custom event tracking have helped marketers to understand the precise ROI of their paid advertising campaigns.

And the best part is, it is continuously evolving. Google Adword has been continuously introducing new cool features that you can’t ignore as marketers.

Campaign experiments, importing offline conversions to online, multi-channel funnel reports and cross device tracking has given an edge for marketers to measure the ROI more accurately.

Customers have become smarter. Now, they use multiple devices; do research on multiple platforms and purchase item after their own research instead of just believing in what’s written on the website.

To keep your brand value and sales figure intact, it is necessary to target audience on multiple channels they use in their normal life and use of pay per click seems necessary to test your success with all these platforms in short span of time.

As full service digital marketing agency, we see pay per click advertising as necessity of today’s business. We are ready to take our share of customers through PPC in 2015, are you?