Why you should be exploring pay per click marketing to promote your business online.

While there are numerous tactics for increasing the amount of traffic to your site, the fastest and most reliable method to generate new visitors is pay per click (PPC) marketing. Here are the 3 main reasons why, if you haven’t yet, you should at least be experimenting with pay per click marketing to promote your business online.

1. Pay per click marketing puts your business in front of customers actively seeking your product or service.

Search engines are capable of sending high quality traffic to your website for the simple reason that a visitor has qualified his/herself by having entering a very specific search query that relates to your business. You want to ensure your business can be found this way.

There are two ways for people to find your business through a search engine:
Organic results:  These are generally displayed in a wide column on the left hand side of the page. This is a listing of the web pages the engine determines are most relevant to your search based on its algorithm, which looks at things like page content and number of other credible pages that link to it. As each search engine has its own proprietary algorithm, no one knows exactly what the criteria are.

Sponsored results: These are generally displayed in a narrow column on the right hand side of the page, and occasionally at the top. These are paid text ads whose placement is determined by an auction. The auction not only considers what the advertiser will pay for the ad, but also its click-through rate, i.e., how often users click on the ad. Businesses can view the average cost for the terms they would like to submit a text ad for, and determine the maximum they are willing to pay for a click on that specific ad.
Sponsored results are what we are referring to when we talk about Pay Per Click marketing.

Over 50% of people now research purchases online
With so many people starting their buying process on a search engine everyone wants their site to turn up near the top of organic search results. However, as online competition increases it’s impossible to guarantee consistently high results, especially for common terms. In addition, search engines are becoming increasingly vigilant in discouraging practices that artificially influence organic results, such as some of the more dubious “Search Engine Optimization” practices  (many of which can actually get you banned from the search engine).

Whether or not your site has a presence on search engines’ organic results. Pay per click is a surefire way to ensure you show up results for relevant search terms.

2. Pay per click offers a guaranteed source of traffic.

Unless you are selling a very obscure product, you can essentially send as much traffic as you want through sponsored links on search engines. Since you are paying per click (thus the name) the only limitation is your budget. You should, however, be looking at your cost per click as well as your conversion rate to determine the actual value of your PPC efforts.

Determining your conversion rate
A conversion is what you define as the single action you want people to take once they have visited your site. In some cases it may be an actual sale online, in others it may be filling out a form or phoning for more information.

Determining your conversion rate can be done through free conversion tracking tools. This is a code you install on your pages that can be easily implemented by your web master. Conversion tracking allows you to measure your cost per lead or sale, which is a metric you can ultimately hold against the lifetime value of a customer or your average sale and profit margin.

With time and experience you can optimize your campaign to focus on ads that attract a higher quality of prospect, increasing your conversion and decreasing the cost per acquisition of a new customer.

3. Pay per click marketing generally offers better value than traditional media.

Ultimately the value of pay per click depends greatly on the industry and market you are in as well as your website’s ability to capitalize on the traffic you are sending. However, as a general rule, a well-executed pay per click campaign offers better value than traditional media because of the simple fact that media viewing habits have changed more quickly than marketers’ spending habits.

You are still ahead of the curve
Currently people spend on average about a third of their time consuming online digital media vs. other forms of media, yet online media spending makes up only about 10% of total media budgets.* While this figure is growing, it indicates an opportunity to early movers (yes, it’s still early days for the internet).

New data, new insights
Another way pay per click offers value is in terms of providing data and insight into the habits and preferences of your target audience. For instance, if you are a real estate lawyer who also purchases the key words “real estate consultant” you may observe that people who were actively searching for consultants were much more likely to convert to a customer than those seeking “real estate lawyer”. This could have a huge impact on the way you market yourself or position your business.

You should probably not invest in Pay per click marketing until:

• You’ve clearly defined your brand, your target audience and what unique benefit you offer.
• You have a website that does a good job of representing your brand promise.
• You are clear on what action you want people to take once they have visited your site (in industry parlance we call this a “conversion”) and have designed your website with that goal in mind.
• You have installed analytics software to track your conversions and monitor your campaigns results.

*Source: National Post