Digital marketing is undeniably crucial to independent businesses – small, medium, or large – as they seek to carve a place for themselves in an increasingly competitive online marketplace. Digital practices like SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing can all help elevate the standing and expand the audience of an independent business, but what about PPC?
Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC or CPC (cost-per-click), is implemented by around 65% of small-medium-sized businesses, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the ROI on an effective PPC bid management strategy can be 200% on average – paying back about £2 on every £1 spent.
At the same time, however, it appears few independent businesses are realising the full potential of their PPC campaigns. Almost three-quarters of companies interviewed about PPC reported that they had neither checked nor updated their pay-per-click ads in over a month.
With almost as many pros as there are cons to PPC advertising, it’s worth familiarising yourself with the potential advantages and limitations of PPC before deciding whether it could benefit your independent business.
Contents
- A Guide to PPC Advantages and Disadvantages for Independent Businesses
- What is PPC advertising in the context of independent business?
- PPC Pros and Cons
- Could PPC benefit your independent business?
What is PPC advertising in the context of independent business?
Pay-per-click advertising is a versatile marketing model whereby you write compelling ads linked to relevant pages on your website, and then attach these ads to corresponding keywords via a bidding war.
Each time a search engine user clicks on your ad – which will be displayed at the top of their SERPs provided you’ve won the bid for that keyword – you pay the amount you’ve bid to the publishing platform.
Below is a short list of the most popular PPC publishing platforms used by businesses of all sizes:
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Etsy Ads
- Yelp Ads
- Amazon Ads
- YouTube Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
For independent business owners and marketing employees, PPC can be a quick, cost-effective, and fully-customisable means of marketing to a very specifically targeted customer/client base.
Of course, running an effective PPC campaign for small independent businesses requires a lot of time, care, and resources if it is to be successful. The same goes for PPC campaigns run by larger enterprises.
Let’s take a look at 20 of the most important PPC advantages and disadvantages so that you can make an informed decision on whether pay-per-click advertising is right for you.
PPC Pros and Cons
13 advantages to pay-per-click advertising
When done properly, especially with the guidance and expertise of professional PPC managers, PPC advertising can seriously benefit independent businesses. Here’s how.
1) PPC can be truly cost effective
Compared to various other digital marketing strategies, PPC may be the most cost effective of the lot. Firstly, you only pay to advertise on your chosen platform (i.e., Google) when someone actively clicks on your ad. Moreover, with reported ROIs of 200% (£2 return on £1 spend) through Google Ads, pay-per-click advertising – when managed carefully – gets you the most bang for your buck. Or, as we like to say here at WebHummel, ‘the most honey for your hive!’
2) PPC tends to require a relatively small upfront investment
Unlike other more traditional marketing strategies – such as billboarding or TV advertising – the pay-per-click model requires a very small upfront investment. Depending on your PPC budget, you can effectively kickstart your campaign with just a few hundreds of pounds and, with a combination of luck and foreplanning, even see a return on your investment quite quickly.
3) PPC can deliver results quickly
The minute you start winning bids on keywords relevant to your business is the same minute your ads begin appearing to potential customers searching for a product or service on the internet. As such, PPC can start delivering results almost instantaneously. The trick is to continuously monitor those results in order to build upon them and maximise the potential of your ad campaign. Of course, you could always outsource PPC management to someone who knows exactly what they’re doing…
4) PPC campaigns can be easily customised in response to their results
One of the greatest advantages of PPC advertising is that you retain full control over your ads, their copy, the links they contain, your budget and your bids throughout the process. With full control, you can quickly optimise each individual bid and ad in response to their results – bolstering what worked and discarding what didn’t.
5) PPC advertising campaigns can be paused, changed, or stopped at any time
Whether or not PPC advertising works for your independent business depends a great deal on your capacity to learn, monitor, and execute budgetary decisions alongside your many other business commitments. For some, there comes a time when they need to quickly pause or altogether cancel one or more of their PPC campaigns. Thankfully, this is another advantage to PPC as a digital marketing model: you can pause, edit, and stop PPC at the drop of a hat.
6) PPC ads are fairly easy to set up
The process for getting a PPC ad campaign off the ground is relatively easy. Though getting PPC right can pose a greater challenge, actually starting shouldn’t prove too difficult. This is great news if you’re planning on going down the DIY route and need to start building an online presence for your business fast.
7) PPC’s highly-targeted nature drives quality organic traffic to your website
The beauty of pay-per-click advertising is that each separate ad can be very carefully and specifically targeted to a chosen demographic. For example, if you have a sportswear brand which you want to put in front of young women aged 18-25 living in a specific area – say London, Birmingham, or Glasgow – you can do just that. This is not something you can realistically achieve with the majority of traditional and offline marketing models.
8) The results of your PPC campaign(s) are easy to measure
By tracking the conversion rate of your PPC ad clicks – that’s the percentage of those clicks which lead to a conversion on your website: for example, a sale – you can quite easily measure the effectiveness of individual campaigns and advertisements. With these results in hand, it’s a much more straightforward process to tweak underperforming ads and bring them up to scratch.
9) You can tightly control your own budget with PPC
There’s no advertising agency nor marketing exec who can dictate to you how much to spend on PPC. Instead, you are fully in control of how much money you want to spend on PPC advertising per month, and can balance each month’s budget against your earnings if needs be. Of course, there are recommended PPC budgets which tend to prove more fruitful for small-medium independent businesses, but control over finances ultimately remains yours.
10) PPC can lend itself to enhanced awareness of your brand online
Winning a PPC bid places your ad at the very top of the search engine page results (SERPs). By choosing to bid on niche keywords relevant to your business and its intended clientele, you can ensure that your brand is consistently appearing to the right people. Whether or not these people decide to click on your PPC ad then becomes almost irrelevant. The work of enhancing online brand awareness among your ideal customer base has already begun.
11) PPC works well in combination with SEO and content marketing
When paired with a comprehensive understanding of SEO and a quality content marketing strategy, PPC is more likely to lead to quality traffic and quality conversions on your site. As such, we might say that a pro of PPC is that it completes the digital marketing triangle, thus optimising the effectiveness of each model.
12) PPC can be used to find niches and so stay ahead of the competition in your industry
Competition online is fierce, regardless of your industry. Making your brand stand out from the crowd is no easy feat. PPC in combination with astute keyword research, however, can be used to find new niches in the market for you to monopolise, thus thwarting competition and hopefully improving your staying power.
13) PPC is the only reliable way to achieve top SERPs rankings
No matter how good your SEO is, no matter how high quality your content or your website’s links are, only a successful PPC bid can secure the top position in SERPs rankings. A final advantage to great PPC is that it’s a relatively fast, affordable, and easy way to get your website featured at the top of a Google or Microsoft Edge results page.
6 cons and disadvantages to pay-per-click advertising
Of course, if PPC was a magic ticket to internet fame and fortune, everyone would be rich overnight.
Instead, achieving your business goals with PPC – let alone perfecting the art of pay-per-click advertising – takes serious dedication, investment of time and money, and patience whilst you tweak, react, repost and repeat the process.
Take a look at the limitations of PPC listed below, remembering that if they seem overwhelming to you, then you can always turn to a PPC professional for help.
1) PPC is already very competitive, and becoming increasingly so
The PPC industry is booming, with Google pulling in a whopping 96% of its revenue from Google Ads alone. This may be great news for Google, but perhaps not so much for the rest of us. PPC bidding is fiercely competitive, and as high-conversion keywords become valuable real estate, the capital required to acquire them in a PPC bid can start to skyrocket.
2) Increased internet literacy means a diminishing audience for PPC ads
PPC ads very closely resemble organically-generated links on a search engine results page, and placed at the top of the SERPs, many internet users won’t be able to distinguish them from unpaid results. However, an increasing digital literacy across the spectrum means that perhaps as many as 70-80% of users will actively ignore PPC ads in favour of more organic results. Given the number of people with internet access, this means there are still millions and millions of potential customers willing to click through paid ads; nevertheless, it is something to keep in mind.
3) PPC requires careful management and control
An effective PPC campaign requires your full attention. From proactive keyword research to reactive bid management, copywriting, and more, not every business has the resources to dedicate to PPC for it to be effective. In fact, this is why so many DIY pay-per-click campaigns quickly become prohibitively costly, without showing positive results. Without the proper time and know-how to divert to your PPC marketing drive, your best bet is to hand over the reins to a team of digital marketing professionals.
4) It can take time for PPC to show significant results or to deliver ROI
Whilst PPC is quick to set up and can show results quickly, it can also take time to find your groove, especially if your industry – law or accountancy, for example – is a highly competitive one. Moreover, though ROI through Google Ads averages £2 to every £1 spent, you may find that in order to perfect your PPC strategy requires a more significant investment of capital – thus delaying ROI – than you had hoped for. This is especially true for DIY campaigners without the requisite knowledge and experience.
5) Mastering PPC bid management requires a steep learning curve
Getting a PPC campaign right requires a great deal of skill. Simply bidding on the most popular keywords in your area and/or industry is not enough to bring success. Indeed, such a tactic is perhaps more likely to drain your budget quickly and without generating quality conversions. Instead, PPC can be hard to get to grips with and may prove too much work for independent business owners with enough on their plate already.
6) DIY pay-per-click advertising tends to yield poor and expensive results
We’ve already touched on this PPC limitation a few times, but it’s worth reiterating – DIY PPC campaigns can certainly prove effective if the manager of the campaign knows what they’re doing; but in the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, it is instead more likely that a DIY campaign would not be managed as efficiently as it could be, leading to poor yield and expensive results.
A more reliable approach to pay-per-click advertising is to outsource your campaign management to a team of ‘busy bees’ with a track record in delivering quality, budget-controlled results to PPC clients across myriad industries.
Could PPC benefit your independent business?
Without a doubt, PPC can seriously benefit independent businesses both large and small. An effective pay-per-click campaign puts your brand and website in front of your ideal customer in the same moment that they’re looking for a solution you provide. PPC can be tightly controlled, campaigns kept within a strict budget, and can help you to identify niches in the market your business can fill.
At the same time, conducting pay-per-click campaigns by yourself can be a riskier endeavour. Whilst we wouldn’t entirely discourage it, the steep learning curve involved – combined with a competitive search ad industry and the time it can take for PPC to yield results – means that without a dedicated PPC bid management team, your campaign could end up costing you a lot without much to show for it.
To ensure that your independent business benefits from the true potential of PPC, be sure to seek the support and guidance of PPC management specialists at beefound.agency. Explore our blog today for more insight into the world of digital marketing, or get in touch to find out what we could do for you.
