Here are five reasons why PPC marketing is worthwhile:
You only pay when an interested person clicks. One of the reasons PPC is so straightforward is because you know exactly where your dollars are going, and you only pay when an interested party clicks on the ad. This is different than traditional advertising offline, where you spend X amount of dollars and hope your target market actually engages with the ad, but you never really know.
You set your budget to control costs. Speaking of budgets, with pay-per-click, you set the budget to your needs. You can put a cap on what you spend daily, and it’s flexible for you to change at any time. That doesn’t mean you can expect to see huge results with a limited budget, of course; it all depends on how competitive the keyword and industry are. (You can learn more about setting budget in Google AdWords, or check out a post I wrote on how much you should spend on PPC.)
You can reach your target consumer at the right time with the right ad. Want to target a person in a specific place at a specific time of day with a specific ad? No problem. With PPC’s location targeting and delivery options along with device-specific preferences (like mobile), you can deliver very specific messages to your target consumer at prime time when they are close by.
Unlike organic search, PPC can show results very quickly. We all know how important organic search traffic is for long-term website marketing; however, it has a longer cycle to prove ROI. PPC can show results fast. You can start a PPC campaign on Monday and literally start seeing results in terms of traffic and conversions the next day (depending on a variety of factors, obviously).
PPC data can inform your other marketing channels. Does your search engine optimization (SEO) team want to know if a particular keyword or set of keywords is converting well? PPC can tell them. You can also test the waters with new products or offerings using PPC in order to gauge demand and get an early look at its reception. You can even use PPC to promote oddball events or things that wouldn’t be appropriate for other forms of advertising. This article by Jim Yu also gives good information on how PPC can inform SEO in other ways.