Incorporating Facebook paid ads and/or Google Adwords into your business’ marketing efforts is a great way to augment and reinforce growing your business and capturing online search market share.
Overall, organic search rankings/listings have been proven to do better than Google Adwords paid advertising, but that’s not to say that using paid ads in search isn’t profitable. As a matter of fact, when used in conjunction, a brand or company can attract more clicks and potential customers by utilizing both, simultaneously.
Depending on the targeted keyword, geographic/local related area, as well as competition, there are some instances where paid ads can garner a larger share of the potential clicks as the first position of organic search. Nothing is “set in stone”, naturally, and testing these scenarios is always the best approach.
Paid ads allow the advertiser the benefit of only paying for the ad when it is clicked on. This provides more assurance that the prospective client/customer is already interested and has engaged with the ad, so the outcome is more positive than say an offline advertising strategy, such as print, where the advertiser is hoping to attract a lead that may not be “hot” or looking for that particular product and/or service.
Allowing the advertiser the flexibility of budgeting their ad spend in real time, is one aspect that makes Google Adwords a popular and effective marketing approach. Ad campaigns can be set up with a prepaid budgeted amount.
Targeting your market with accuracy is another benefit of paid ads: the platform allows you to set the time of day or night you want your ad to run, as well as specifying the device (mobile or laptop) with which your targeted lead may be using. For example, running a paid ad between 12 noon and 7pm , it may be more beneficial to specify that you want your ad to target mobile devices/mobile users.
Pay per click ads also allow the luxury of immediate placement on the search results page versus the time needed for an organic search optimized marketing strategy to actually rank and take position. If timing is an issue, PPC is a great way to stay ahead and on schedule with your marketing efforts.
Paid advertising can also give your marketing team needed feedback on the targeted keywords which have been chosen. Conversion factors give important signals & tell whether a particular keyword or set of keywords are really as responsive as first thought to be.
To summarize, pay per click is probably the most distilled (or one of the most) forms of digital/online marketing. It boils down to numbers :ad spend and return on investment.
With PPC, it’s easier to track and see exactly which campaign is working at optimum, and hopefully, in a clear sense, why. It’s best approached as an “investment” form of marketing: your whole ad budget should NOT be spent all at once, it should be tested proportionally.
Positive returns deserve more investment, bad returns should be stopped, and the sooner the better. This the way companies have scaled from a small business, to a growing company. Paid Google Adwords is an excellent vehicle for this type of growth plan.