What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of PPC (Pay per Click) advertising?
While there are absolutely profit to both SEO and Pay per Click advertising (otherwise known as PPC). You should be well educated before choosing one over the other. In a few cases, PPC proves to be the most realistic option and in a lot cases SEO does. Education is the key in deciding properly. So here are the advantages and disadvantages of PPC and SEO.
For PPC or pay-per-click, an advertiser (such as you) would create an ad to be displayed in search engine results or other sites in a sponsored section. You would only pay if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site, very simple. So the advantages are
1. Only actual visitors are paid for.
2. They can be set up and visible in minutes
3. They can be tested, paused and deleted just as fast as they were created.
4. You can delete unproductive keywords.
5. If a keyword is too difficult to rank for with SEO, you may have a chance with PPC
6. No worries about search engine algorithms or getting sandboxed by search engines.
The above mentioned are the advantages of PPC advertising over SEO. This is great for those who are knowledgeable in how to properly run a PPC campaign so that they can avoid the common pitfalls. In many cases the disadvantages outweigh the advantages except for those who are skillful in running their campaigns.
The disadvantages in running PPC ads are:
1. Lack of education on PPC marketing can costs you thousands before you realize what you are doing wrong.
2. Subject to click fraud (competitors clicking on ad to drive up your cost).
3. 70% of searchers will NOT click on your sponsored ad.
5. Lower ROI (about 25% less effective than SEO)
6. Only works if it’s active, if you pause or terminate the ad, your traffic stops.
7. Needs consistent monitoring and management.
8. Rankings can change continuously (can be outbid by competition)
9. Costs are not stable (increasing competition, increase costs for positions)
10. Not effective for certain markets
Although PPC can be very valuable, it takes time to learn the fine points of this type of advertising. There are cases where PPC is meaningful but unless you are willing to learn, then it or pay experts to manage for you, then it may not be worth the risk. Although we are Orange County SEO experts, we sometimes get clients who ask us about managing their PPC campaigns also. We first advise them of their personal options and help them make an informed decision. So if you are planning to hire an outside company to manage your campaign, it’s important that you know exactly these things:
- The exact phrases they will advertise
- That they are constantly monitoring your ads and even making suggestions for them to be more effective
- They are allocating your expenses properly
- The keywords that are being advertised have a enough daily PPC traffic
- Your rate for click through
- Your rate of conversion
There is a big variation between PPC traffic and regular search engine traffic. As stated earlier, only 30% of the searches will even click on a PPC ad. That means each keyword will have considerably less traffic than organic search traffic. So phrases that you may target in an SEO campaign may not produce enough traffic if done in a PPC campaign to substantiate the time it takes to make a sale.
Knowing how to properly choose the right keywords, structure the ad and campaign, and manage the costs is necessary for successful PPC advertising. This is also great for trying what will possibly make a successful campaign for SEO, Orange County.
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