Reaching your target audience may be a daunting task. Sure! Traditional advertising helps you reach a larger crowd. But the question is, are they really interested in your brand?
How would you know?

This is where PPC or pay-per-click campaigns come in handy!

What is a PPC campaign?

“PPC also known as pay-per-click is a type of internet marketing which involves paying the advertisers a fee every time an ad is clicked on.”

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, PPC advertising is an essential element of a comprehensive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy because it brings in immediate results. 

For instance, let’s assume that you run a restaurant. You place an ad on search engines such as Google or Bing, and everytime a person looks up for a product/service that you offer, your brand will appear above the organic results on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as shown below. 

Click here to learn more about Search engine result pages.

How to build a PPC campaign?

• Plan your goals - Do you want to increase conversions? Sales? Brand recognition?
• Identify where you want to advertise - You could run ads on search engines such as Google or bing using Google adwords, and Microsoft Advertising.
• Choose the keywords you want to bid on - The amount of money you are willing to pay for a single click.
• Set bids on different keywords and select a daily/monthly budget
• Direct the ad to a persuasive landing page on your website
• Keep a close eye and continue to improve your keywords based on what you learn or what’s trending.

PPC campaign metrics

• Profit and ROI (Return On Investment)
• Revenue
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Engagement and audience performance
• Click through rate
• Quality score

Advantages of pay-per-click advertising?

Below explained are some advantages of using PPC:
 

• Immediate results - Compared to SEO, PPC enables you to gain results faster. PPC is considered an extremely effective short-term tactic while SEO is quite beneficial in the long-run. According to Statista, almost a third of online consumers use the internet to search for local businesses on a daily basis. That’s a lot of potential traffic!
   
• Increased website traffic - PPC helps you pull in traffic for your website. Yea, it doesn’t directly contribute to your ranking, but it enables you to get a better ranking in the future. 
  How? 
  PPC increases the overall clicks your website gets on the search engine results page. This will lead to an increase in the user activity on your site and enable you to get higher organic rankings in the future when there is no PPC campaign in place.
   
• Greater brand recognition - The more your brand appears in the search results, the more people are likely to recognize you alongside your competitors. Not only will this help your brand increase recognition online, but also help you increase your overall revenue because consumers will visit your physical locations and make offline purchases as well.
   
• Real-time targeting - You can schedule your PPC campaigns to be delivered at certain hours, demographics, and locations or run ads through remarketing based on their past behaviours. The best thing about PPC is that you’ll be able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience while also reaching those who have already been exposed to your brand previously.
  Google’s Consumer Insights has reported a 900%+ increase in “near me tonight/today” searches in the past two years.
   
• Top spot in local search results - Let’s assume that you went out with your friends. You’re looking for a good restaurant to grab a snack. So you will search for something that goes along with “restaurants near me”. Right? 
  Just like that, when someone looks up for a place to get a product or service that you provide, near them, your brand will appear on the top as displayed below.

Conclusion

Pay Per Click is fast paced and quite effective in boosting conversion rates. However, it is not the only marketing strategy/tactic that you should be considering.
While PPC is extremely effective in the short-run, content and SEO is what you should focus on in the long-run.
But, PPC also goes in line with other marketing channels including SEO, which would enable you to increase your organic rankings as discussed earlier.

Therefore, it is evident that PPC is indeed important for your business!