Pay Per Click Gets Your Phone Ringing Fast

Most business owners have heard of Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, but aren’t sure how it works or how it might apply to their businesses. Granted, the concept is a bit confusing at first. In many ways, however, it is hands-down one of the most cost-effective advertising strategies you can pursue in your business, so you really can’t afford not to use it. No matter what your business or your budget, you can make Pay Per Click advertising work for you, driving relevant traffic to your website and bringing you prospects who are ready to buy. Below, we’ll explore how this works and how it can benefit you.

What Is Pay Per Click?

Even if you’re a complete novice, you have already seen Pay Per Click advertising at work. Head to Google right now and type in a search term, say “homeowners insurance.” You should see a list of results pop up, the top several of which have a little yellow “AD” box to the left of the link. The businesses that these ads represent have entered “bids” for these spots, choosing an amount they are willing to pay for each relevant keyword. When you entered the search term, Google sorted through its bids and chose which relevant ads to display.

The concept of Pay Per Click advertising is in the name: you only pay for advertising when people click. That means that although you can enter a search term and see ads pop up with no cost to the business, once you click, that business is charged. Similarly, when you bid on spots, you will not be charged until a searcher actually clicks through to your site … at which point, hopefully a large enough percentage of them will like your product or service enough to buy.

How Do Pay Per Click Ads Bring You Business?

While Pay Per Click ads won’t result in a sale every time, a well-crafted ad campaign will do so often enough to make up for what you’re paying, especially considering that your products or services are bound to cost significantly more than the amount you’re bidding for a single click.

Because you are rewarded for the relevance and usefulness of your ads to users, it literally pays to ensure that your ads are targeted to the keywords and fulfill customer expectations when they click through to your site. Otherwise, not only do you lose out on business after you’ve paid for Google to send them to your site, but the search engine may not perceive as much relevance in your ads and not choose them as often. (Of course, Google isn’t the only search engine using this model, but most work similarly.)

Don’t Searchers Avoid Advertisements?

Actually, nope. They don’t. In fact, when people are actively looking to buy, they are grateful to find quality product and service suppliers that can meet their needs. The secret is to target your advertising to what they’re already looking for … and since they searched for it in the first place, you can be sure they’re looking for it. In fact, because the system rewards relevance, PPC advertising actually helps users by sorting through the available pool and finding the best option for that search. Again, that makes it crucial for you to target your ad campaigns correctly, otherwise you’ll spend money to no end.

Launching Your PPC Campaign

Alarmed yet? Don’t be. Setting up an effective PPC campaign is difficult, with many options we can’t cover here, but it isn’t impossible. Once you get a seamless PPC process going, you can repeat it and tweak it over and over again to maximize the results you get. The learning curve is steep, however, which is why MarketBlazer offers PPC services to get you going and start building your business today.