If you’re questioning whether you should run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns for your ecommerce businesses, the real question is: “Can you afford not to?”
If you want to reach people specifically at the moment they search for your products, you’ll want to at the very least try PPC advertising.
PPC advertising can often deliver the quickest results. I’ve seen traffic and sales come in within hours of launching new campaigns. Your business can become an instant “player” in your vertical with strong, focused PPC campaigns.
You can also measure results immediately with conversion and revenue tracking. For instance, you can quickly see how much you have spent, and how much revenue your paid search campaigns are generating. You can see if you are meeting your goals for return on ad spend (ROAS) to determine whether your ads are generating a decent profit for your business.
You are in control of your PPC budgets, which means that you can immediately expand the reach of successful campaigns. When you see that a campaign is doing well and you are hitting your daily budget caps, you can simply raise that budget and allow more profitable traffic to flow into your website.
You can aggressively target a select group of potential customers by setting up a campaign that caters to their interests and including keywords relevant to your products.
PPC is a good way to quickly gauge how well — or how poorly — your products perform in the marketplace. You can even test the effectiveness of a new landing page, a new product price, or a new discount offer quickly with PPC campaigns.
By driving sizable traffic directly where you want it to go on your site, you can get immediate feedback on how these changes affect your bottom line revenue.
As more people turn to the internet to shop and get things done during these sheltered times, you need to get in front of as many future customers as you can. PPC is an excellent way to accomplish that goal.
Yes, search engine optimization (SEO) can also get you in front of searchers. And, true, there’s no advertising cost associated with SEO. But, quite frankly, you can’t rank highly in organic search for every keyword you need to for every product you offer.
And even if you do have strong organic rankings, you can still benefit from PPC: It drives incremental revenue from search results, rather than merely replacing traffic that would have been driven by organic search.
In some cases, PPC is the only way to be seen. Search engines show ads at the top of their search results pages, pushing organic listings farther down the page. Depending on the device being searched on, these ads can often be the only search results a user sees above the fold (the space shown on a device before having to scroll). Many users will click when they see an ad that calls out to exactly what they are looking for.
Even if your website has a strong organic presence, you can easily be missing out on hundreds — if not thousands or tens of thousands — of potentially very good customers if you don’t have a presence in that top section of the search results page.
Obviously, strong SEO is important. But it is a longer-term strategy.
PPC campaigns offer a highly-visible, trackable, and flexible way to drive well-qualified visitors. Your ecommerce site turns visitors into revenue. Use PPC to feed that machine with additional relevant traffic, to give you the chance to convert more searchers into paying customers.
