Brooks Digital Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

Pay Per Click Advantages

Pretty much instant exposure – even in competitive markets – as long as you have bid high enough and have got a good quality score for your page (actually creating a page that lowers the bid price and converts well into sales is an area where many novices fall down).

Campaign control - Google provides tools that make your advertising campaign easy to track the conversion ratios and monitor budgets.

Targeted – You can use the keyword matching options to target specifically e.g. ‘Tennis shoes or you can target the phrase e.g. ‘Red Tennis shoes’ or ‘Tennis shoes red’ or you can broadly match to a keyword so ‘Discount shoes for tennis’. You can also exclude words using the negative keyword option.

Pay per click is great for testing the market with new products and services. By posting an advert for your latest idea leading to a ‘squeeze page‘ you can collect data and gauge the interest over a few days and avoid potentially costly market flops.

Pay Per Click Disadvantages

Continuous investment – Pay per click is like just renting space and when you stop paying for your listing it disappears and click prices can fluctuate and in many markets are likely to rise.

Not as trusted as the main listings – Users are 60-80% more likely to click on the organic listing (underneath the top advertising slots) meaning less exposure. However a point to note is if you are getting a lot of clicks for your ad it is a good idea to check out the organic competition to see if there is an opportunity to get an organic listing as your ad copy could be well worthwhile deploying there too.

Profit margin can be small or non-existent – Keywords can be very expensive and outweigh the returns in very competitive markets so you have to be very careful how you select them. It is critical that you quickly discover the ‘buying keywords’ early on and optimise your pages for them.

Organic SEO Advantages

Long term value – Organic listings can be cheaper to attain in less competitive markets but very difficult to achieve in competitive markets, however once attained maintenance can be lower. The graphic shows the initial investment to be higher but as time goes by performance increases and investment lowers.

Graphic supplied courtesy of Elliance.com

Better click thru rate - SEO is responsible for around 60-80% of the clicks available (in most markets – not all) since users tend to prefer to visit the web sites found at the top in the main organic listings.

Element of stability – Organic listings once attained can be cheaper to maintain and don’t disappear overnight once the funds dry up!

SEO activity benefits your entire web presence – Organic SEO focuses on building reputation through links and content on the web site and at web properties where you have posted content such as blogs, article directories and forums. Investing in your web presence will have satisfying long term rewards.

Organic SEO Disadvantages

Need lots of patience! – It can often take many months to get top ranked for mid/high competition keywords

Less control – Changes in the search engine algorithms, although usually not too volatile, can destabilise rankings without warning.

Resource heavy - Organic SEO can take up more marketing resources initially due to it being a content based strategy

Conclusions

Unsurprisingly both methods are highly effective, especially when compared to offline channels however, the key is to select the the right approach for your business. I often advocate an SEO campaign backed up by pay per click.

The reason for this is that with SEO we only target a handful of keywords and these are often the cream in terms of volume. This leaves us sort of invisible (I say sort of because our well written SEO copy will have long tail phrases salted within it) for a huge swathe of long tail keywords that receive fewer searches but are often higher converting.

A pay per click campaign targeting broad match versions of our main keywords will work towards hoovering up any potential customers that use these long tail phrases where our main organic listing page do not show up. Sweet!

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