You need web traffic to sell your products or services, grow your audience, or gain affiliate and ad revenue. And if you’re a small business, you likely also have a small advertising budget.

Pay-per-click advertising is an effective marketing tool to balance your budget and quickly increase your web traffic. The benefits of PPC are often significant for small business owners.

PPC is a type of digital ad that appears online as pop-ups, banners, and other formats. Instead of paying a set amount for your ad, you only pay if someone clicks on the ad.

PPC ads are based on keywords, which you bid on as part of setting up your campaign. Your ad will show up when someone searches for a specific keyword.

Keep reading to understand the benefits of using a PPC advertising strategy. 

1. Targeted Audience

Unlike a traditional ad that might show up for everyone, a PPC ad only shows up when someone searches for the keyword you’ve bid on and won. You know if someone sees your ad, it’s someone who is at least somewhat interested in your business.

You can also control when and where the ads appear. This gives you greater targeting capability based on who you’re trying to reach. When you know your target audience well, you can set up your campaign to maximize your exposure to the most likely buyers.

Putting your ad in front of your target audience increases the chances of getting a click-through. You’re also more likely to convert with a sale or other desired outcome since the person should be interested in your business.

Targeting your audience also works well if you have a local business. When someone does a local search, they’ll find your ad.

2. Flexible Budget Options

Small businesses average about 1% of their revenues for advertising expenses. If your business is in the early stages or doesn’t bring in much revenue, that advertising budget can be small. That means you need to maximize how you spend it to get the best results.

When you set up a PPC campaign, you decide how much you pay per click. This makes it an option for all businesses no matter what the PPC budget.

You can also set a spending limit on the campaign. That limit helps you stick to your budget and gives you greater control over your ad spending. Using analytics to check your ROI, you can decide if you want to increase your spending on your PPC ads.

3. Copy-Testing Strategy

Are you working on perfecting your ad copy for all platforms? PPC ads are an ideal way to test out different approaches.

PPC campaigns are easy to change, which means you can quickly test out different headlines, colors, graphics, and copy. Run each option for a set amount of time to test it. Review the analytics for your PPC campaign to see which option works the best.

Use that data to refine all of your advertising. You might change up other types of ads or your marketing copy on your website to match the results.

4. Fast Way to Grow Traffic

Building organic traffic takes time as you develop your SEO and grow your audience. You have to rank up in the search results to get any significant traffic.

PPC ads go up immediately, which means you can get traffic much faster. As soon as you set up your campaign, you can start getting clicks through to your target URLs. That increased traffic can help you get more business, gain more exposure, and move up in the search results.

5. Increased Brand Awareness

As a small business, you’re probably not widely known beyond your existing audience. People who aren’t aware of your company won’t search for you by name. But they may search for related keywords, which brings up your PPC ads in their feeds.

When your ads start showing up for people, they start to recognize your logo and name. Even if they don’t click the first time, they may become curious when they keep seeing you pop up in the results.

6. Keeps You Competitive

PPC ads accounted for $10.1 billion in spending from 7 million advertisers in 2017. That means there’s a good chance at least some of your competition is using PPC advertising to gain new customers.

If you’re not using this strategy, you’re missing out on potential traffic. Staying competitive and using similar strategies as your competitors can help you get your share of the customers.

7. Measurable Outcomes

Not all marketing strategies are easy to analyze with data. Using PPC gives you access to concrete data to thoroughly analyze the results. You can run reports to see how many people clicked your ads, which helps you evaluate their effectiveness. 

You can also monitor your costs. Knowing the number of clicks and advertising spend helps you calculate your profits and ROI from your PPC campaign. This tells you if you should continue what you’re doing or change the way you run your PPC campaign.

8. Doesn’t Require Organic SEO

Google receives over 3.5 billion searches daily with an average of 40,000 queries per second. No matter what your niche, someone is likely searching for what you offer. But if you’re not on the first page of search results, and ideally toward the top of the results, you may never be discovered by those searchers.  

Using small business PPC strategies can earn you a spot at the top of search results, even if your site’s organic SEO doesn’t land you there. This can be especially helpful if you’re in a competitive niche where it’s very difficult to rank on the first page for your targeted keywords.

You shouldn’t ignore your website’s SEO just because you use PPC. Combining strong SEO and PPC can help improve your ranking faster than either one alone. But you can gain more traffic to your website even if you’re still working on your SEO.

9. More Control

You’re in charge of your spending and ad design when you use PPC advertising. It’s a more controlled way to get the word out about your business. You can change your budget at any time or switch up your target audience, which makes PPC advertising a very fluid option with endless adaptability.

10. Potential for High ROI

Using PPC advertising can give you a high ROI for your advertising dollars. Since you control how much you pay for each click, you can position yourself for a good return on investment.

Say you pay $2 per click and you get one out of 10 people to actually make a purchase from the click. If you make a profit of $120 off that sale, you still come out ahead by $100.

Enjoy the Benefits of PPC

Understanding the benefits of PPC advertising helps you determine if it’s the best strategy for your small business. This budget-friendly option gives you more control and helps you reach your target audience quickly.

Are you unsure of how to handle your small business PPC campaign? Take advantage of our Google AdWords management service to take the work out of PPC.

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