Pay-per-click? Pros and Cons

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Pay Per Click advertising?

Have you ever wondered if pay-per-click (PPC) is the right solution for your business to generate leads?

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can and often is one of the most powerful assets in marketing strategies. Having said that, it can be one of the biggest budget burners if it is not implemented correctly.

The performance of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising does depend on how much time, energy, and resources (budget) you have to dedicate to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Because of this, we are going to walk about the various advantages and disadvantages of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

There is a valid reason why pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is so popular. When it is implemented correctly, this form of marketing can boost brand awareness, increase reach, and attract new customers.

Advantages of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

1. Cost-Effective

If you are interested in maximising your return on ad spend (ROAS), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be an effective platform to achieve this.

Unlike the traditional and somewhat outdated print advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to choose the set up your campaigns so you are only charged when someone clicks on your ads. Instead of just renting some digital real estate, you will be able to link the cost of your pay-per-click (PPC) ad directly to the number of visitors you drive to your site. Having that concrete link between the amount you spend on an add, and the potential leads you can generate is what makes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such an attractive option.

2. Fast Results

If you are also working on optimising your content for search engine optimisation, you will already be aware that SEO can be a painfully slow method of driving organic traffic to your site, even though it is an effective method and one worth investing in.

Having said that, to work efficiently, there is progress to be made while you are waiting for your SEO changes to bear results. As that process continues, you will still want to capture all those potential visitors searching your relevant keywords.

And that is where pay-per-click (PPC) advertising comes in. Unlike SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a fast way of getting your website in front of your target audience.

3. Easy to Tweak

This is probably one of our favourite and most used advantage. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to make small adjustments to your campaigns to maximise their effectiveness

As time progresses, you will get loads of data on how your pay-per-click (PPC) ads are performing. You can then use this data to make the necessary changes.

With other forms of advertising such as print advertising, email marketing, or even SEO, you will not get the same level of flexibility. This means, once you are committed to a campaign, you will need to wait to see if it has worked or not before you can use the performance metrics to plan for any future campaigns.

Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising means that there is none of that waiting. You can constantly test, evaluate and tweak campaigns to improve performance. When done correctly, this ensures you website gets the most traffic possible and your campaigns perform at a higher level.

4. Highly Targeted

Another of our favourites. Getting your pay-per-click (PPC) ads in front of the right audience is critical to the success of your campaigns. If this stage is not done correctly, you will be wasting your budget targeting an audience that does not match your criteria or that has no interest in your offering. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising provides the ability to target each ad to a specific audience.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising does not only allow you to target certain keywords, but also tailoring your ads by demographic, interests, geographical location, etc. This allows you to run your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to only the right audience that matches your criteria resulting in a higher quality of leads generated.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising does not only allow you to target certain keywords, but also tailoring your ads by demographic, interests, geographical location, etc.

To take things further, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to set up re-marketing campaigns to essentially nudge people who have interacted in the past, back to your site. This does help you retain existing clients and attract new ones who need a bit of persuasion before they are ready to commit to your services.

Disadvantages of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Based on the above, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising does sound like the dream solution. However, there are some disadvantages to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Let's dive right into some of them:

1. Very Competitive

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is successful, which means it has created it's own problem. When done correctly, it is so successful and popular which leads to more competition for popular keywords.

As a result, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising costs can build up fast. It requires constant monitoring to ensure you are getting the return you need from your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising efforts.

This does become a bigger issue if you have a very limited budget as you will not be able to target the keywords you would like. Bidding wars for the popular keywords will drive up the price beyond the reach of smaller companies.

2. Savvy Audience

As the online audience become increasingly digitally aware, some people may deliberately avoid clicking on the ads at the top of the page or in the side bar because they are aware that the website has bought that space, rather than being the most relevant result on that page for their search query.

3. Takes Time to Find a Golden Formula

Rome wasn't built in a day, important work takes time, fool's haste is no speed, haste makes waste, takes longer to build chicken coop than it does a skyscraper. You get my drift..

There is a fundamental difference between being able to do something and being able to do it well.

Developing a successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign takes time. Your data needs to be constantly analysed, monitored, tweaked. Like many other skills, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising takes time and experience to learn.

That's it, for now... We do hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, it may benefit you to check out our other posts.

As always, you can contact us if you have questions or if you require our services. We build bespoke lead generation campaigns for our clients in the financial services sector and value long term relationships instead of one month 'dips'.