The Advantages and Disadvantages of Pay-Per-Click

Pros and cons of pay-per-click

Interested in the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click? We can help you decide whether it is right for you. Many marketers consider PPC to be one of the best cost-effective methods to drive customers to a website, but there are pros and cons to consider.

Do you want to promote your business better online? Stupid question, right, but many online businesses don’t consider using pay-per-click when it could be game-changing.

If you have some negative opinions about PPC marketing, allow me to clear up the mysteries behind this online advertising method. We look at the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click so that you can more easily decide if it is something you should be doing in your business.

The advantages of pay-per-click advertising

Being aware of all the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click before you begin your campaign will equip you to produce better results. I will first look at the reasons why you should choose PPC marketing for your business.

Retarget your potential customers

Many of the people that visit your website, unfortunately, aren’t going to complete a purchase. These visitors would have been interested in what you offer, but something put them off. They still represent a great chance to make sales even though they didn’t purchase on the initial visit. While you could just give up on these customers, there is a more profitable option.

Now maybe they didn’t think the product was suitable for them, or the price was too much. But perhaps the reason they didn’t buy was something minor, and with just a little more encouragement they could turn into a customer. Whatever the reason, a second attempt at converting these leads could be extremely profitable. In fact, data suggests that retargeted customers are 70% more likely to purchase.

PPC does offer you a great way to recapture these interested customers. Retargeting or remarketing to these visitors offers higher conversions than finding new customers ever could. If the visitor wasn’t completely convinced that they need what you are selling, retargeting allows you another opportunity to appeal to these potential customers.

PPC advertising can target your previous visitors on search engines, or display advertising.

Track your conversions

PPC gives you a better understanding of what works. You will easily be able to see what keywords, landing pages, and ads are really converting. A Google Ads or Facebook Ads tracking pixel will clearly show you what part of your marketing is really working.

While it can be difficult with SEO and other forms of marketing, tracking is made easy with PPC. You can simply add a tracking code on your website to track your PPC results.

Your PPC campaign will create a lot of data to help you understand how well it is working and indicate things to do for improvement. Metrics like CTR help show how well your ad copy performs, for example.

What is CTR? CTR stands for click-through rate and indicates the number of clicks compared to how many times the ad is displayed. Average CTR varies between industries, but a CTR above 2% is generally seen as good.

Faster results

PPC doesn’t require you to wait around for results as SEO does, instead, you could potentially have sales in a couple of minutes. You don’t have to wait for many months to see your ROI as you do with other marketing methods.

It is also quick and easy to begin PPC advertising. Creating an account with Google Ads doesn’t take long. Then just create the ads and bid on keyword phrases that are relevant to your ideal customer.

You also need to have a landing page that targets those customers searching for the terms you’re bidding on. If you tailor the landing page exactly to the needs of the person searching for that keyword, as a result, you’ll have better outcomes.

Once you’ve completed these stages, you just need to wait for people to start clicking your ad. The good thing about PPC is that you won’t need to wait for very long. If your ad is good enough, and your landing page right for those visitors, you could start to see sales quickly.

PPC offers clear results

When you invest in SEO, it’s difficult to quantify how much value you are actually receiving from the money you spend. But with PPC, you will get clearer and more measurable results.

PPC networks offer a lot of data, as a result, making it easy to understand how your marketing money is spent. Platforms like Google Ads offer you the power to see how your ads convert.

Return on investment is an important metric to make sure you are spending your marketing budget efficiently. How many people have seen your ad, and moreover, how many sales has this led to, is information available in PPC campaigns.

PPC isn’t as expensive as you might think

When looking at the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click, the cost might appear to be an obvious negative. While it is easy to assume that pay-per-click is more expensive than other forms of advertising, this isn’t the case. It can seem expensive because you are paying directly to show your ad, however, you only need to pay when you actually get a visitor.

Other advertising might charge a flat fee to display an ad with no guarantee that anyone clicks through. But with PPC, you get to decide how much you want to spend to get visitors to your landing page. You can vary your spending however you want, spending more when it is profitable to do so.

When are you charged with pay-per-click advertising? You normally have to fund your PPC accounts on a monthly basis. When someone clicks, it’s added to your next invoice. If no one clicks, you don’t pay.

How much will PPC cost? This very much depends on the size of the business. Small businesses average between $1,000 and $2,000 per month, with an average click costing between 1 and 4 dollars.

Target your customers better

If you are a local business, it makes no sense to advertise internationally, and with PPC you don’t have to. PPC offers you better control over who sees your ad, allowing you to make the most out of your advertising budget.

If your business is more global, similarly, you can contact international customers instead of confining yourself to a local audience. Pay-per-click marketing better helps you place your ads in front of the customers you want.

Real-time control

Making sure your advertising is working as you expect should produce more conversions. And with PPC, you can check what your advertising is doing and the results it is having in real-time.

• Are your ads performing as you expect?
• Is your ad copy bringing you the right visitors?
• Are your keywords performing?

If you discover that your PPC marketing isn’t working out the way you had anticipated, you can make changes straight away. When you have a problem with other types of advertising, it could be months before you even realize. And then you won’t have the option of doing anything to change the situation, wasting your ad spend.

Control the user experience

If you want to guarantee your visitors land on a particular page, PPC has an advantage over SEO. You have less control over the page your visitor sees when they come in through normal search engine results. PPC allows you to make sure visitors go straight to your landing page, giving you the best chance of converting them into a customer.

The disadvantages of pay-per-click advertising

As you can see, pay-per-click offers a lot of advantages. But like anything, there are some downsides. While these downsides don’t seem too bad, it’s best to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click before you begin, so you aren’t surprised by them later.

Adding complications

Learning new ways of doing things isn’t always fun, and there is a learning curve with PPC. While it isn’t all that complicated, knuckling down to learn new marketing techniques could put people off.

There is also the risk of losing money if you make a mistake. If these problems are holding you and your business back, you can use pay-per-click contractors or digital marketing agency to get you over this hurdle.

No free lunches

A lot of people are simply put off by the fact there’s a direct charge for this type of marketing. This is understandable, as any business has to control its spending to stay profitable, but it’s also important to spend money where it counts most. PPC can offer this, but SEO might look like better value.

There might be concerns about making mistakes as well as competitors clicking on your ads to exhaust your budget. If you do not have money to spare, these problems could potentially place your business in a lot of trouble. Bringing in some professionals for pay-per-click remarketing services is an option worth considering to avoid these downsides.

Even if you take the option to bring in a professional team, as a result, you’ll end up spending more. Though they could prevent expensive mistakes, it’s another invoice that you’ll have to pay at the end of the month. Though if you hire the right PPC professional, their experience could pay big dividends for your business.

Advertising blindness

While your ads might be placed in front of your ideal customers, they aren’t going to get as many clicks as you might expect. A lot of internet users have learned to ignore advertising, and many other users install browser extensions to hide them completely. At least 27% use ad blockers and this trend is increasing.

While this isn’t going to cost you anything with PPC, it does mean some potential customers are difficult to reach.

PPC advertising is temporary

When you have exhausted your budget, your campaign will be over, and your ads will no longer be seen. Other types of advertising, like guest posts, could remain on the website for years at no additional cost.

When you aren’t running a PPC campaign, your sales could almost completely dry up. If this is your main advertising method, your business income will drop a lot. When you have a smaller budget you might find it difficult to keep campaigns consistently running. This will be more of a problem if you are waiting to be paid, leading to unavoidable gaps in your PPC campaigns.

Conversions aren’t guaranteed

While you might imagine you’ve planned your PPC campaign perfectly, with a fantastic landing page, and great keywords, things can go wrong. Even if you’ve done everything by the book, you can never guarantee that your campaign spending will pay off.

Despite having a good budget to pay for clicks, PPC campaigns still present a risk. You could lose a lot of money without really being sure why you aren’t converting visitors to customers.

There’s many factors involved in the success of any campaign. Perhaps your ads aren’t attracting the right visitors, maybe there’s some problem with your product, or any number of other things could be wrong.

PPC campaigns could lose you money, but without any risk would the rewards really be worth it? If it is very easy and cheap to get customers, consequently you’ll have a lot of competition.

Dealing with pay-per-click contractors

If you seek help from PPC marketing experts, things won’t necessarily go the way you hope. It isn’t uncommon for these types of businesses to over-promise what they can do for a website. It’s very easy to promise big returns to win a client, but the actual results could be very disappointing.

When you first look at hiring a PPC firm, you need to be realistic about what they can achieve. If you get any hint that they are being too optimistic, it’s probably better to find a more realistic firm to work with.

Before signing up with a PPC expert, do some research and check for customer feedback on independent websites. You want to find a company that has been successfully doing this for years but also remains within your budget constraints.

Conclusion of advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click

Diving into PPC marketing offers advantages that could turn around the fortunes of many online businesses. But before you begin, you need to be clear on the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click and make sure they match your requirements.

While PPC offers a way to find targeted customers for your business, there are pitfalls. Now knowing the advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click you can avoid these pitfalls. Most importantly, if you research carefully and have realistic expectations, PPC could become your number 1 way of finding customers. In addition, the right digital marketing agency can also help you leverage pay-per-click advertising to become your greatest asset.