Many small businesses know that PPC advertising can be a great way to add a reliable source of revenue for their businesses. However, there are many myths about PPC that hold potential advertisers back from getting started.
Here are some of the most common ones and an accurate analysis of what’s going on behind the stories regarding PPC Marketing.
Myth #1: It’s Too Expensive
There’s no doubt that PPC marketing can be expensive. But it can return an incredible ROI if you build your campaign properly. Some of the common reasons why advertisers fail with PPC is because they make common mistakes that skyrocket their costs.
Learning the PPC fundamentals and executing them properly is essential to making a campaign profitable.
Another reason why PPC tends to be expensive for advertisers is that they haven’t thought out their marketing strategy through. Advanced marketers are using PPC to generate leads at affordable costs or make profits from the back end. They use strategies like up-selling, cross-selling and CRM data to maximize their lifetime customer value.
For example, if a company knows that their lifetime customer value over a year is $100 and they are acquiring customers for $20, they can afford to be at a loss in the front end profits. The lesson here is that you need to know your numbers and figure out how to maximize your lifetime customer value. This is what often decides whether a PPC succeeds or fails.
Myth #2: It’s Too Technical (Yes, it is!)
PPC platforms like Google Adwords used to be a simple platform where you could launch ads with simple targeting options. But it has gotten very technical due to all the restrictions and options that have been added over the years. So there’s definitely an agreement there when small business owners claim that it’s very hard to learn how to use.
Many small business owners simply give up on PPC marketing and Google Adwords because they just can’t figure it out.
But this barrier to entry can give you an advantage over other advertisers. If you invest the time, money and resources into mastering Adwords and other platforms like Bing, you’ll be able to edge out your competition. You’ll be able to build campaigns that push out weaker advertisers and use your knowledge to prevent new ones from trying to compete with you.
There are many PPC marketing advertisers but very few are using things like dayparting, retargeting and landing page optimization correctly. What you want to do is take one step at a time and master it before you move on to the next step. For example, when you master how to organize your ad group, move into optimizing your landing pages for maximum performance. Then look into figuring out how to maximize retargeting and so forth.
Myth #3: It’s Too Competitive
With Google Adwords reducing their ad inventory to three spots per search result, it has prevented advertisers from smaller budgets from competing for many keywords. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s too competitive. In fact, it has pushed out many weak advertisers and made the top three ads, even more, stronger due to fewer distractions from competing ads.
Some advertisers in the three slots are trying to compete based on the price of their bid alone. Don’t think that you have to compete if an advertiser is in the top spot by bidding for a price you can’t afford. A second or third ad listing in Google Adwords can be just as profitable or even more profitable than the first listing. It’s all about knowing your numbers and having a campaign that performs well.
You can also get an advantage by using the right tools to analyze your competitors. You’ll see how long ads have been running, what ads are being used and what landing pages ads are pointing to. This bird’s eye view will help you identify opportunities that you would normally have never seen.
Myth #4: There’s No New Keywords to Be Found
Proper keyword research can make or break a Pay Per Click marketing campaign. Unfortunately, most advertisers do not do enough research with the Adwords Keyword Planner. They also don’t go beyond the Adwords Keyword Planner when it’s a tool designed to inform advertisers and not provide complete data. To conduct great keyword research, advertisers need to be creative, thorough and use multiple tools (including third-party tools) to get strong keyword research data.
There are still many long tail (low competitive, lower search volume) keywords to be found. In fact, 15% of Google’s searches are unique on a daily basis. There are also many keywords that you will not have thought of by using your keyword data from an existing SEO campaign (see below).
Myth #5: SEO Is Cheaper and Better
One of the biggest myths about SEO is that it’s a free alternative to PPC marketing but many small businesses soon learn that nothing comes for free in the business world. If you’re not spending money, you’re spending valuable time or resources. There are many associated costs of SEO like outsourcing, investing in the right tools, building a team and more.
The biggest barrier, however, is the fact it can take anywhere from five months to a year to see results. It’s all dependent on how competitive the market is. The greatest benefit of the challenge of PPC has always been instantaneous access to traffic. If you cannot afford the long-term costs, it’s a smart idea to figure out which keywords convert using PPC and use that data to build an SEO campaign.
In fact, combining PPC and SEO is incredibly effective for many other reasons. You can get more keyword data, retarget your visitors from your SEO campaign and use winning ad copy from PPC to use as your title in your SEO campaign.
Many smart marketers use the relationship between the two to gain advantages in both channels. Because they know that the 2 can work together when you start with PPC and build with SEO.
As you can see, there’s still a big opportunity for small businesses and companies to grow using PPC. Don’t be blinded by all the PPC marketing myths. Make the investment if you want to be one of the few advertisers that are winning on the channel.
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