Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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Pay per click (PPC) can have several benefits to your online marketing campaign. You should be aware of the possible advantages before using it in your own campaign. Below are some of the benefits:

  • It’s a form of advertising that anyone can do.

  • It gives advertisers a lot of control of their budgets and audiences.

  • It has a great amount of accountability in terms of where the sale occurred, how much it cost, and which keyword and ad triggered the sale.

If PPC advertising is done correctly, the results can be measured very accurately to give you an idea of where you can put your advertising next.

How to get measurable results

PPC allows you to purchase a spot in front of potential clients, and also allows you to test things quickly. If you’re redesigning an outdated site but aren’t sure which version of the Contact us page you want to use, you could set your campaign to send half of your visitors to one page and the others to another page. Then you can measure the response in easily interpretable results.

  • What keywords did people use to find your site?

  • How many people filled out the form on a landing page?

  • How many people called the firm directly?

  • How many people left the site after visiting the landing page?

With PPC, you can drive visitors to your pages quickly and often, rather than wait for visitors to appear naturally.

Spend your money wisely

PPC enables you to set daily budgets for an account or campaign and edit bids on a per-keyword basis. If you’re trying to determine which keywords to target for SEO purposes, you can use PPC to measure the success and popularity of those keywords for yourself and, at the same time, limit the amount spent on that experiment.

You can also set your budget to spend by time of day or geographic region and even turn your ads off when necessary, either automatically or manually. PPC gives you a lot of flexibility for managing both the amount spent and the frequency of your ads.

Find niches

Particularly if your company is in a highly competitive market, you can use PPC to find a niche that isn’t as competitive as others or that you can specialize in. Searchers give you a lot of information when they come to your site: what keywords brought them there, what pages they visited, how quickly they left, and what they bought or downloaded.

If your law firm is receiving conversions from the keyword phrase lawyers for landlords, you can build a specific ad group and ad around that keyword to target searches better — and at a better cost to you.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

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