Pay Per Click Online Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising can be a cost or an investment

Maybe the first thing to get out of the way when talking any sort of advertising, including PPC (pay per click advertising), is that you’ll need money to advertise. Unless you have friends in high places, don’t count on any freebies here. You might be shocked by the amount of money really big companies pour into advertising. With so many commercials looking like they didn’t go through too many editor reviews, you have to wonder if they spent all the money on getting networks to stream their advertisements without anything left in the well to actually produce the thing, but that’s neither here nor there.

So here you are – you have a little cash on the side and you’d like to use it to promote your local business products or services. That’s as sensible of an idea as they come, but you have to be realistic about the downsides: you’ll be lucky if half the people clicking on your ads end up using your product or services. Heck, many companies are happy with as little as a 1 percent conversion rate. It all depends on what you’re offering, how much you’ll stand to earn from it, and what your marketing strategy is.

We’ll go over the two big cahunas of pay per click online advertising – Google and Facebook. If you could get unlimited advertising on either of these big boys, you’d be set for life. The reality is that the large amount of people seeing your ads will act as a double-edge sword: yes, word is getting out and people are coming on your site, but they might also be leaving without buying anything. A store doesn’t suffer from customers just coming in for a look – not the same with online businesses. Both of these giants charge on a per-click or per-view basis and don’t tend to care about your actual conversions. This can drain your advertising budget faster than you can say “Bling!” if you’re not careful.

Are you confident that your business offers value to people, and that there is a good amount of folks out there that need your products of services? If so, read on and see what the two tech titans can do for your business bank account.

Can’t go wrong with pay per click Google ads, huh?

Since Google is the bigger of the two companies (frighteningly big, if you’re a tin foil enthusiast), we’ll start with it. Now, anyone with a day spent studying online marketing and product selling knows that you wanna be on Google’s good side if you want people to know of you.

The effectiveness of Google AdWords is hard to dispute – with the right campaign, people will have little choice but to see your business being advertised as the very first result, even above the guy with the best SEO. Bypassing all those months of search engine optimization sounds good, huh? Well, yes and no. Let’s see some points to be made about using Google ads:

• Far too many people think of pay per click Google ads as a way to avoid having to work on SEO, which is crazy. You’ll actually need to put in a lot of work into creating a good campaign – figuring out the very best way to use the limited space you have, figuring the right audience, monitoring conversions to know what’s working and what isn’t, and so on. It’s far from a free pass.
• Google ads are always a short-term solution. Like a car will only run for as long as it has enough gas (I know, I know, Elon Musk would like to have a word with me), your Google AdWords campaign will only run for as long as you have the budget. After that, you better hope you make use of the traffic you received.
• Some types of businesses are a lot less expensive to advertise with pay per click on Google than others. Lawyers can pay as much as $100 for a single click, whereas smaller, niche businesses can run a successful campaign off of that money.

What about Facebook pay per click ads and its billion+ users?

Yes, it’s true that there’s no shortage of people on Facebook. This also means that you’ll have a hard time finding a niche that DOESN’T have a targeted audience on the site. Still, why use it over Google, and is it even worth it?

• Facebook can be a nice alternative to Google advertising. Sure, you can run an expensive pay per click campaign on the world’s favorite social media site, but most people running low on ‘ad money’ will turn to Facebook, and will generally have good results.
• That being said, Facebook also suffers from a similar monetizing scheme that Google ads do – we always warn our clients that each AdWords click will cost them money, but Facebook can charge per impression, depending on the type of campaign you decide to run. This mode of operation can be faulty and is far more suited for some types of businesses than others.

Pretty much every targeted audience is represented, so your choices to reach them are unlimited – Facebook also has an nice ease of use interface. We can help you get the best out of your campaign, with unlimited targeting choices consisting of location, gender and age, page likes, you’re bound to get some great targeted advertising for your audience.