Advertising spend but yet more traffic and sales?
As a search engine marketing company, we believe in the power of an holistic view to driving traffic to your website.
There are numerous challenges to getting traffic to your existing website and today, I will be sharing with you on one the under-utilised ways you can quickly get more traffic to your website especially if you have a particular product or service you want to push out.
Search Engine Optimization is one good way to get traffic but oh my God it takes time, the competition is stiff except if the landscape is still fresh like the Nigerian Google SERP and you usually have no control of what happens within the organic search landscape.
This is because when it comes to SEO, it is a level playing field and with Google’s over 200 criteria it totally impossible to determine what is going to happen next.
Understanding the algorithm factors Google uses and been able to take advantage of it all, comes with a lot of practice, patience and professionalism.
This is where an alternative method of driving traffic to your website comes in.
What is PPC?
PPC or Pay per Click is an online marketing model that exploits the ability of “make your advertising budget” work for you.
When you look at any medium especially Google, there are usually two sets of results. The paid listing and the non-paid listing.
The paid listing depends on how much money you have to get your website listed there. As a result, it is a good channel to use if you want to drive instant sales for a particular service or product you are offering.
There are different models when it comes to PPC and depending on the platform of choice, you can go with image advert or search advertising.
Image advertisement is usually referred to as display advertisement. When using display advertisement, you are designing a paid campaign that depends on putting up image as an advertising component.
Display advert works better with Google partner networks i.e. blogs and other website that offers to let Google advertise on their websites
When using search advertisement, here you are directly displaying your result on the search engine landscape.
When should you use PPC?
PPC comes as a good alternative to getting more traffic to a particular product or service.
PPC should generally be used when
• You want brand awareness- Let us imagine you have a new service you want to push to the market. The best option is to use PPC to drive brand awareness for this
• The competition is stiff- In organic listing, the competition might sometime be so crazy, it will take a long time to get to the first page of the SERP. As a business, you cannot afford to wait that long before you being to make sales for your business. In this scenario, PPC is a good marketing channel to use in jump starting your sales.
• You want to stiff the competition out- PPC can also be a good method to stiff the competition. By buying up advert estate, you give your competition less visibility on the SERP layout
How to get started with PPC?
With some many advantages that PPC offers, it might be templating to want to jump right in and begin to use it to grow your business.
Do not make such a mistake.
PPC is an advertising models that deals with your raw cash. It is easy to blow away your advertising spend if you do not pay attention to the basics.
With SEO you can make mistakes, correct them and adjust along the way. After all SEO is a long marathon but with PPC, you are in for short sprints that demands high level of competence, speed and agility.
If you have wrongly setup your campaign, not only are you losing out on your money, you will also be losing out on data that can help you make better campaigns.
Steps to getting up a PPC Campaign
1. You need a Gmail account – To use Google AdWords, all you need is a Gmail account. With one Gmail account, you can sign up for other Google products. Click here to setup your Google AdWords account
2. You need to identify your goal- One major reason most PPC fail and in general online marketing campaigns is when you have not clearly defined your goal. You need to know what you want to achieve with your campaign. Is it brand awareness? Is it to sell X amount of products using this channel?
3. You need to know what success means for your campaign – How do you determine if your campaign is failing or not. What metrics is guiding you? By identifying your goal, you can setup metrics that helps you to know when you are meeting your goal or not.
How to make money from your PPC campaign
A lot of people thinks that PPC is expensive and therefore run away from it. I do not advertise that you run to using PPC for everything you want to do.
This is why you must first identify your goal whenever you want to run a PPC campaign but once you setup your first campaign, you will need to make sure that you make profit out of it.
The only way to make profit out of your PPC campaigns is to reduce your cost. In order to reduce your cost, you must increase your quality score while keeping other factors constant.
One major mistake people make is setting up their PPC campaign and forgetting about it.
Once you have your campaign running, you must regularly monitor it so that you are able to use the data been collected to help you improve your campaign.
If you do not have the time, it is better to outsource your campaign to a Google partner, who will help you manage your campaign and ensure that it is more profitable for your business.
Conclusion
The brand or business that wins online is the business that knows how to combine the available marketing channels to grow their business.
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