Are you struggling to get visitors to your website? Does Google seem dead-set against ranking your site in the search results? There is a better way.
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the fastest ways to get traffic to your website. And it’s not only for online businesses — it can work just as well for brick-and-mortar operations.
If you’re wondering if this type of advertising is right for you, this PPC guide will help. Let’s look at how PPC works.
What is PPC Advertising?
With PPC advertising, you pay a certain amount for every visitor that clicks on your ad. It doesn’t matter how many times your ad gets displayed, you only pay when someone clicks on it.
The ads you see at the top and side of Google’s search results or in the sidebar on Facebook are PPC ads. These platforms let you target specific keywords or user demographics so only the people who would be most interested see your ads.
An Introduction to PPC Basics
Google Ads is the most straightforward PPC advertising platform. To run an ad, you choose one or more keywords that trigger your ad to get displayed.
For example, a footwear company might target keywords like “running shoes” or “hiking boots” for its ads. Whenever someone searches for that keyword in Google, the ad gets shown alongside the organic results.
When you create your ad, you set a maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click. If you bid higher than other advertisers, your ad will appear above theirs in the results. The secret to a successful PPC ad campaign is to find the sweet spot between the amount you bid and the amount of revenue you get from each visitor that clicks your ad.
There are a lot of nuances to a successful PPC ad. You can learn more about PPC best practices in the article from The HOTH.
Benefits of PPC vs SEO Traffic Generation
A lot of digital marketers think SEO is the better option since you don’t have to pay anything for those clicks. While that’s true, PPC offers several benefits over SEO, including:
- Faster results
- Better tracking
- Easier to test different ads or content
It can take weeks or even months to see results from SEO. But you can get a PPC campaign set up and start generating traffic within a few minutes.
This lets you generate traffic quickly and test different strategies to see what works and what doesn’t. Once you identify the best option, you can roll that out as an SEO campaign that will generate traffic over the long term — with no cost per click.
PPC Should Be Part of a Larger Traffic Strategy
You’ll often see marketers arguing over the “best” way to get traffic online. We believe there is no single best way to get traffic — you should use a combination of strategies to capture as many visitors as possible.
Use PPC alongside SEO, content marketing, and other traffic generation methods to get the best results. Diversifying your traffic sources this way also reduces your risk if one method stops working as well.
Use This PPC Guide to Get Started
Hopefully, this PPC guide has given you a better idea of what PPC is and why it should be part of your traffic-getting strategy. It’s easy to get started with a small investment so what are you waiting for?
Browse through the Business section of our website for more helpful articles about digital marketing.
