SEO or PPC: Which Method is Best for Your Business - Part 1
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
Posted by Jenn Lowther
This will be the first in a series of three articles examining which online marketing initiative, organic SEO or PPC, will offer the best results for your online business requirements. (These are only two of the myriad of online marketing tools available, but they will be the focus of this series.) The likely answer to this question will be a combination of both, but this series aims to answer why and what benefits are associated with each to enable you to make an informed decision when moving forward with your overall marketing budget allocations.
You have an online business and you need to drive qualified traffic to your website in order to increase your ROI or KPI (key performance indicators), whatever forms these business indicators may take. The next step is deciding which Internet Marketing tool or combination of tools to utilize in order to achieve these specified goals. One major online marketing tool in your arsenal is PPC or pay per click advertising; this will be the focus of the article.
There are many benefits associated with using PPC advertising; the major benefits are outlined below.
Increased Traffic
Usually, the primary goal of any online marketing initiative is to increase traffic to your website. There are two main types of website traffic, targeted and untargeted. Untargeted traffic, are people who happen upon your website whilst not specifically searching for your product or service. Targeted traffic, on the other hand, are people who are specifically searching for either your business or people who are searching for the product or information that your website provides. This is the type of traffic that you want to draw to your website, as they are far more likely to convert (this can be many things, a download, a purchase, a lead…and is defined in your KPI).
A properly managed PPC campaign will provide your website with the later traffic type. Since you choose specifically which keywords to target in your campaign, you can ensure that the people who click on your ad are specifically searching for you, your product or the information that your website provides. Also, you only pay for people who actually navigate to your website, rather than pay for the number of people who view your advertisement.
Campaign Management
As with any marketing campaign, tracking of campaign ROI and other KPI is critical. PPC advertising offers quantitative measurements of these indicators that are unavailable in many other advertising mediums. In the initial setup of your PPC campaign, you can enable your campaign to measure each conversion the campaign makes, you are also able to specifically define what the conversions is, this is not limited to sales. This automatic tracking of campaign conversions, allows you to measure the exact ROI of the marketing initiative. This is simply not an option that is readily available in most marketing campaigns.
Advertising Timeline
This is can be one of the best benefits associated with PPC if it is utilized properly. Unlike SEO and most other forms of advertising both online and offline, which can take a long period of time to launch and begin to see the results, a PPC campaign can be conceived, planned, written, launched, and receiving results in less than a day. This highly compressed time frame allows companies the ability to seize opportunities that are not readily available with other marketing campaigns, due to the long planning and launch timelines. This is a particularly useful attribute with limited time sales or promotions, targeting developing events or news, major events (ie/ sporting events or elections), amongst many others.
This is also particularly beneficial to companies that not only have a sporadic need for instantaneous first page access to the SERP’s (search engine results page), but can be uniquely beneficial for companies that have seasonal or uneven demand trends within their business cycle. The ability to change your ad spend budget at will allows you to increase and decrease your advertising market penetration, with immediate results, in correspondence with the given level of demand.
Campaign Costs
The costs of running a PPC campaign can be precisely pegged at the onset of the campaign. Due to the billing format, you are able to choose exactly how much you wish to spend on ad clicks each day in a given search engine. This amount can be varied as you wish throughout the duration of the campaign, but this feature does allow you to accurately determine a budget at the inception of the campaign. The only costs that are associated with a PPC campaign are the amount you would like to spend on click traffic and, if you outsource the management of your campaign, a management fee that is determined prior to launching the campaign.
Unlike many other online pay for traffic or pay for impression advertising campaigns available, such as banner and email campaigns, there is no minimum spend required with PPC campaigns. You can pay as much or as little as you determine is optimal for your business goals.
In the short run, a PPC campaign is extremely cost efficient because there are no set up fees and you only pay for traffic as it comes in. This is particularly beneficial for companies that have a small advertising budget and need to get the maximum return on their small investment. Couple this with the fact that PPC has a lower CPA than most other marketing initiatives, makes PPC advertising an extremely option for smaller or extremely niched businesses.
Testing
Testing is perhaps the best and least utilized benefit associated with running a PPC campaign. The amount of data that you are able to collect and analyze is phenomenal. The easiest aspect to use and analyze is the ad testing functionality that is built into the search engines. You are able to use your ad variations to test which combination of headline and ad copy lead to the highest click through rates. Once you have narrowed the selection down to the best ad or two, you can continually tweak the ad copy to see which version has the best result. This data can be very useful for your on-page copy as well as your meta description tag, as this is basically the ad copy that is presented in the search engines and can greatly effect your organic listings click through rates.
You are also able to test your various landing page conversion rates by utilizing the a/b and multivariate testing functionality that is provided by the search engines. This allows you to tweak your on-page attributes to find the best combination to maximize your conversions and thus your ROI. This information is very useful for not only your PPC campaigns, but also your SEO campaigns and overall website conversion rates.
Finally, PPC campaigns give you a veritable gold mine of keyword and traffic data. This information can be leveraged in the planning stages of an SEO campaign. With this data, you are able to have an approximation of how often a term is searched, the click through rate, and most importantly, the conversion rate of a given keyword. This information can save you costly mistakes that can occur with an SEO campaign, as this information takes much longer to gather and analyze through and SEO campaign.
Branding
One of the added benefits of a PPC campaign is branding. A properly implemented PPC campaign will increase your brands visibility in the major search engines. By running PPC advertisements on keywords that relate specifically to your business, you can ensure that potential customers searching for information or products related to your field will find your company at the top of the search results.
If you are a large company, people expect to find your business in the search results. In this case, not dominating the SERP’s can tarnish your reputation in the eyes of your consumer, as not being there signals that other companies have greater relevance than yours for the given product searched, giving them the opportunity to take part of your market share. This is of increasing importance as greater percentages of people are using the internet as a primary method of sourcing product information and making product purchases. This gives other companies an opportunity to move in on your dominant market position and establish themselves as a leader in the field.
Conversely, if you are a small company, you can greatly increase your business’ exposure, and subsequently increase the value of your brand, by appearing in the results. By ensuring that your company is constantly visible, you substantially increase the chance that consumers will associate your business with the product or information they are looking for now and in the future.
There are many other benefits associated with a PPC campaign that have not been listed here, but this is a good start and should provide you with critical information when making your marketing budget allocation decisions. If you need more information regarding PPC campaigns or need a qualified company to manage your PPC campaigns for your, please contact Invoke today.
