SEO vs. PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a digital Marketing technique in which you pay search engines every time someone clicks on your website. On the other hand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing your website to rank for the keywords related to your products so your website ranks higher in SERP. In SEO results take time but are organic so are better and far-reaching, as they say, all good things take time. On the other hand, PPC delivers you instant results but the benefits are short-lived as your traffic declines the moment you stop funding your paid promotion campaigns. However, both SEO and PPC should be part of your digital marketing campaign for best results.
Google Adwords as a PPC
Google Adwords should be your first choice for PPC as Google is the most popular search engine claiming 80% of the internet users. Google Adwords it is highly efficient, targeted and transparent. You can customize it according to your needs and it has many benefits which I am going to discuss below.
1. Creating Brand Awareness
Before the internet gained its popularity for eCommerce, the major brand awareness was either created through paid advertisement in print and electronic media, billboards and word of mouth. Now that most of the businesses have shifted towards online marketing and trend of online shopping is growing faster than ever it only makes sense to be known in the world of e-commerce and getting the attention of your potential online customers.
2. Faster Than SEO
We have discussed above that Google Adwords gives instant results. It is because you start to appear on the top of SERP for the keyword you are running the advertisement for. It means better exposure and more traffic immediately, in contrast to SEO which can take months to get ranked on the top of the first page of Google search results.
3. Much More Targeted
Unlike SEO or other ways of advertisement like television and print media, you can customize your advertising campaign to reach to a very specific number of people with well defined demographic characteristics. For example, if you are a real estate company your prospective customer will never be teenagers, so you can choose to display your ads to the age groups who are more likely to buy a property and rent residential buildings. You can also fine tune your ads for the timing of the day you want to display your ads for. Say if you are selling wardrobe items for teenagers who are at school during day time and more likely to shop during the evening you can opt to advertise only during evening hours. You can also choose to advertise more frequently over the weekends when your potential clients spend more time online.
4. Combining Google Adwords and Google Analytics
In today’s world data is perhaps the most valuable entity and data on customer behavior can make all the difference for eCommerce websites. Adding the accounts of Combining Google Adwords and Google Analytics can provide you a beautiful data about which customer clicked on your advertisement and what they did once they landed on your website, which made a purchase, who just scrolled through the pages and who left immediately. This will help you generate a list of potential customers which is highly refined and precise. Such information is very beneficial in designing email marketing and remarketing campaigns.
5. Transparency in Results
Not only Google ads are super efficient in reaching to your targeted audience they are also very transparent about the reports generated for the results. You can easily figure out where your traffic is coming and which thing is working best for you. If you were an advertisement in the local newspaper or on television it would have been really hard to tell which and how many of your customers were visiting you due to the advertisement and thus it was not possible to get a clear idea on Return OF Investment. With Google Ads, you can easily get the exact calculations about ROI. You can get very efficient numbers on cost per click of your advertisement and if you have your Google analytics is attached to your Google Adsense account you can figure out how many of those clicks actually converted into a sale. So it will be very easy for you to understand how much exactly you are profiting from the Google ads. Suppose, you ran a campaign costing you $100 which yielded 10,000 impressions and 5000 clicks and out of those you made 100 sales, each sale giving you a net profit of $30. It means by investing $100 you were able to get a profit of $3000, which is not bad. Also to have information this precise is golden.
6. Reach them in MailBox
Google also gives you the option of displaying your ads in the Gmail inbox of your potential customers. It is a very effective and relatively cheaper option. It is an efficient way for remarketing to the potential customers who visited your website but left without making a purchase. Plus it is always easier to make a sale to customers who have had made a purchase previously.
7. Test and Take The Winner Home
It is also possible to design different advertisement campaigns and set them up for a month with a smaller budget and test which ad performs better. You can design two to four camping’s to test different variables like colors of the image or the text and set smaller budgets for each one. At the end of the month whichever camping performed best is the winner and you can set it up with a larger budget and ditch the others.
