Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) has some incredible benefits for any business and is a valuable way to drive targeted traffic that leads to sales.
You can benefit from PPC advertising whether you’re a new brand starting out or an industry powerhouse looking to experiment with new sales channels.
The main benefits of PPC advertising are that the setup is super fast, it’s easily measurable, and relatively affordable.
And while these reasons are pretty compelling on their own, there are plenty of other benefits of using PPC advertising. In this article, we’ll introduce the ten most compelling ones.
10 Top PPC Benefits You May Be Missing Out On
1) Instant results
The biggest benefit of PPC advertising is how quickly it generates results.
You can sign up for an account on Facebook or Google and start pushing traffic to your website in hours. If your funnel is properly set up, you could be making sales within a day!
No other form of advertising comes close to generating results this fast.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and social media strategies take time to build authority and an audience. While traditional forms of advertising like print, radio, billboards, or television take time to create and publish ads.
See our guide on SEO vs PPC for more inspiration.
Top PPC Tip 👇
Don’t neglect other forms of advertising just because the results are more long-term. Creating an SEO strategy, implementing content marketing, or building brand awareness on social media can lessen your reliance on PPC in the future.
2) Targeted traffic
Getting fast traffic is great, but it’s not good if you can’t reach the right people. Luckily PPC ads are also highly targeted.
You can be very specific about who sees your ads and you can put them in front of the people who are most likely to buy your products and services.
You can target people based on their:
- Interests: A gaming ecommerce store can target people who like computer games.
- Location: A realtor can target people who live nearby.
- Biographical information: A baby clothes brand can target new parents.
- The keywords they search for: An email marketing tool can target people searching for these platforms.
Why is this important? Targeting the people most likely to buy your goods and services increases your chance of making sales and decreases your chances of wasting ad spend on uninterested parties.
The move away from third-party cookies means that targeting options aren’t as granular as they once were.
But it’s still possible to target warm leads using data from first-party cookies, contextual marketing, and keyword targeting.
3) Low start-up costs
PPC is great for people new to digital marketing because the setup costs are so low. You don’t need a large budget to get started like you would with traditional forms of advertising.
Here is a look at some of the minimum costs of a PPC campaign:
- Facebook advertisers that are charged for impressions can start at just $1 per day.
- There is no minimum amount with Google Ads. Although the company recommends starting at $10 per day.
- Snapchat campaigns start at just $5 per day.
- Reddit requires just $5 per day.
The low cost means it is easy to start experimenting with ads. You can try a few different platforms and play around with ad types to see what works before committing to a higher budget.
As long as you set a maximum budget, the tools won’t overcharge you.
To get a clear idea of what Google ads specifically might cost your business, see our Google ads pricing guide.
4) Easy to start
There are two factors that make creating a PPC advertising campaign so accessible. The first is the low costs. The second is that setting up a campaign and starting advertising is incredibly easy.
All the major platforms have easy-to-use onboarding processes that guide you through the setup process.
They’ll help you create your ads, choose your targeting options, and define your campaign’s goals.
They also have powerful options you can use to automate campaigns. These settings allow you to define parameters, set goals and budgets, then upload advertising materials.
These tools will run your campaigns based on these criteria. And the tool will constantly test and optimize your campaign to get the best results.
Top PPC Tip 👇
Don’t rely on automation entirely. These tools are helpful, but you should still check back to ensure they effectively push you toward your goals.
Also, while tools can help with targeting, they’re less useful when it comes to creating ad assets or building an effective post-click funnel. You have to optimize these parts of your campaign yourself.
5) Measurable
PPC has incredible tools to track campaign performance. You can see everything from how many people view an ad to the cost-per-click, to how much it costs to generate a conversion.
With this data, you get insight into the campaign. Now you can double down on profitable activities and stop wasting money on aspects of the campaign that don’t work.
Top PPC Tip 👇
With PPC, you can see the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. You can see exactly how much you spend on ads and how much this generates in sales.
If you can then factor in things like operating costs and profit per sale, you can run ads in a way that guarantees you don’t lose money.
Check out our article on Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for more information.
It also makes it easy to test different things. Because you get instant performance feedback, you can put a small budget into a test campaign. This lets you calculate the campaign’s effectiveness before spending more.
You can use other tools to get metrics about all parts of your campaign.
For example, while your PPC platform tells you how ads perform, you can use tools like Google Analytics to provide more information about how people behave on your website.
Or if you're doing ecommerce ppc, you can connect your storefront on platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce. This will let you link ads to online sales.
You can even track how your online campaigns lead to offline purchases.
Both Facebook and Google have features that let you upload information collected at sale into their systems. With this data they can assign conversions to particular ad clicks or views.
These offline tracking methods aren’t as accurate as online tracking, but they still provide essential insight into your campaigns.
6) No long-term contracts
Another factor that makes PPC attractive is that there are no long-term contracts. It’s easy to stop running ads if you decide they aren’t pushing you towards your goals in the first week.
This significantly reduces the risks associated with running ads. Your costs will never spiral out of control.
It also allows you to generate traffic to publicize specific events, products, or promotions. You could run ads to promote a short-term discount when people are most likely to buy, and then stop once you finish the campaign.
7) Competitor analysis
One of our favorite parts of PPC is running competitor analysis.
Third-party PPC tools such as SEMRush and SpyFu provide granular data into any business’s PPC strategy. You can see information such as the ads they use, the keywords they bid on, and even budget estimates.
With this information, you can make informed guesses about the types of PPC strategies that work and then use these in your campaigns.
Some useful features on these tools include:
- Keyword overlap: See which keywords multiple competitors are bidding on. This can highlight profitable terms.
- Budget history: See what times of the year your competitors invest heavily in ads. Plan your budget accordingly.
- Competitor research: Find other businesses that bid on similar terms to you or your competitors.
All these features make it possible to learn from competitors with experience running campaigns in your industry. You can use the data to create profitable PPC campaigns of your own.
8) Take traffic from competitors
Another great thing about PPC ads is that you can use them to take traffic from competitors directly.
Imagine you’re a CRM platform. Salesforce currently ranks number one for the term “CRM platform.” The company’s website authority means it will be hard for any company to knock it off the top spot.
But, it is possible for other CRM brands to leapfrog Salesforce by running a PPC ad on this term. This can directly take sales away from the number one ranking site and towards other platforms.
You can even bid on branded keywords. For example, whenever someone searches for the term Salesforce, they also see adverts for the CRM competitor Monday.com.
You can run a similar strategy on YouTube. It’s possible to select the videos you want to run ads on—if a competitor has success with a particular video, you can piggyback on this by running ads on the video.
9) Increase brand awareness
PPC isn’t just for generating conversions. You can use these marketing strategies higher up the funnel to generate brand recognition.
For example, running ads on YouTube can get your brand in front of a huge number of people, significantly raising awareness among your target audience.
10) Reach new audiences
The final PPC benefit is the huge number of available options. These make it possible to reach people on new platforms where you don’t currently have an audience.
Imagine you have a great SEO strategy that brings in traffic from Google. You can reduce your reliance on Google traffic by using PPC ads to reach an audience on another platform.
You can easily do this by running ads on whichever platform you choose. This also helps you when a new platform emerges.
For example, TikTok has grown rapidly over the last few years. If you didn’t catch the initial organic wave, you can simply buy ads on the platform to reach this audience and test whether it is a good fit for your brand.
Top PPC Platforms 👇
There are a large number of PPC platforms to choose from.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have by far the largest share of the online ad business in the U.S. These platforms allow you to advertise on the many properties owned by these companies.
Google Ads lets you run campaigns on all Google properties, including Search, Google Play, YouTube, Display, Maps, and Discover. Facebook Ads lets you run campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Amazon lets you run campaigns on Amazon and Kindle.
But there are plenty of other options you can choose to run ads. These include social sites like Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as search engines, like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo.
Sounds Good! But What’s Next?
If you’re sold on the benefits of PPC marketing, the next steps are to choose a platform and start advertising.
For many people, Google Ads or Facebook are the best places to start. But if you want to reach a particular audience you may want to choose another platform.
For example, B2B companies may find success with LinkedIn, while visual B2C brands may choose Instagram or TikTok.
You can then start testing your campaigns. Start off with a small daily budget and keep a close eye on campaign performance.
As you get more confident in your ability to generate a positive ROAS, start to increase the amount you spend.
At this point, it can also be worth testing out some other channels. Just follow the same process again by starting out small and seeing what works.