Hi, I’m Vi Wickam and this is Honest SEO Basics, brought to you by the Get Listed Program, Social Media Training.
Why would you buy Pay-Per-Click Advertising? It’s a very good question.
The question really amounts to what’s good about Pay-Per-Click Advertising and when does it make sense to buy Pay-Per-Click.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising has the advantage of being immediate. When I say immediate- it’s not immediate, immediate.
But when I create an ad-group and post it to Google, within 48 hours, and very often within a couple hours, the ad-group will be approved and will be showing on Google. So if I have money to spend on advertising with Google, or with Bing, I can have an immediate response.
Pay-Per-Click is an immediate response medium. So as soon as I buy a keyword, that ad will show. That’s one thing that is great about Pay-Per-Click and it gives you an immediate response.
That’s one reason to buy pay per click advertising- you want an immediate response. You want it to respond now. You don’t want to wait for search engine optimization, or content marketing, which is a long-term game that takes months and years of building up to get your money back.
You want to start making your money back now. If you want to start making your money back now, Google AdWords, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, or Bing Ads is something to consider. It’s something to consider investing in.
Another thing that Pay-Per-Click Advertising is great for testing landing pages, or testing ads against each other to see what actually resonates with your customers.
A great element to Pay-Per-Click Advertising is I can test 2 different titles against each other, or I can test 2 different landing pages against each other, to see which one converts better.
So, converting means, turning a visitor into a customer. Or converting someone who clicked on your ad into somebody that bought a product or became a lead for you. Pay-Per-Click allows me to do that instantaneously.
It allows me to generate traffic and see those side by side, and over a short period of time, if I have enough money to run the test, I can see which of these landing pages works better for that keyword. So testing is another great thing about Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
Another great thing about Pay-Per-Click Advertising is once you’ve done the testing- you’re going to have put in some time, you’re going to have put in some optimization effort on a weekly or monthly basis to weed out non-productive traffic, or keywords you didn’t want to be showing up that were, etc. etc.
You’re going to have to put in some money on the front end, some time on the front end, some effort on the front end to improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
But provided you do that, it is really awesome at producing a consistent return on your money.
We put in the time, we put in the effort, and now we’re at a point for every dollar we put into Google AdWords, or into Pay per click advertising mediums, we get 2 or 3 dollars in return as margin dollars. Because when we’re looking at return on investment, margin dollars are what matter.
Once we’ve got that return and we’re making positive return on our investment, then we’re at a point where Google can scale. And up to a certain level, we can scale those same results by increasing our budget.
So, say we get to the point where for $100 in, we get $200 out. We can look at AdWords and it will tell us, right now we’re buying 25% of the available traffic on those keywords.
Then we can say, well, this is returning a positive return on our investment- let’s ramp it up on spending $200. When we do that, we will see how well did that scale.
Now provided that we increased our budget and we didn’t increase our bids, we should have a similar rate of return on the money.
So the next month when we come and look and say, we spent $200, did we get $400 back… the odds are, at that point going from 25% of traffic to 50% of traffic, we probably got around the same rate of return, so we turn that $200 into $400 this month.
So that’s another realm of how scaling can be something that AdWords can be very good at- provided that we are paying attention to our return on our investment.
Another word you’ll hear thrown around is return on an “ad-spend”.
The thing that you really need to be cautious of is a lot of advertising companies will look at return in investment or return on ad-spend as just dollars out vs. dollars out.
You and I both know that as a business person, when you sell a product for $10 that you’re not making $10 in profit from. You’re probably making $3 or $4 at most in profit.
So if you’re returning $2 for every $1 you spend, you know that you might need the return for $5 for every $1 spent before you’re really in the positive- before you’re actually making margin dollars positive.
So positive margin dollars is a real way to look at return on investment and return on ad-spend. And that’s really an important metric for you as you look at AdWords.
Looking at pay-per-click advertising- I use AdWords sometimes synonymously with pay per click because it’s so the dominant pay per click advertising model. Usually I’ll set up AdWords, and then I’ll scale it into BingAds- once I’ve got the kinks worked out.
But as far as Google AdWords, as far as Pay-Per-Click Advertising goes, it’s great on returning a response immediately. It’s great at testing. And it’s great that once you get it worked out to get a positive return on investment, and you can scale it up… and you should scale it up carefully. Because you don’t want to waste your money and you don’t want to throw good money away.
Those are some things to think about with Google AdWords, with Pay-Per-Click Advertising. Those are some things that Pay-Per-Click Advertising is good at.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this, I hope you learned something! Let me know if you have questions in the comments below.
Have an awesome day! I’ll see you next time!
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