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How to Promote Your Small Businesses with PPC Advertising

More and more people choose the Internet to promote their small businesses through Internet marketing. At the same time, as a popular Internet marketing strategy, PPC advertising has become widely used and more and more marketers promote their products online through this way. Today, I will share 10 tips about PPC advertising with you. If you want to boost your sites or services, this article will be helpful to your online business.

1. Taking care of your brand
Being “no 1 on Google” carries a certain cache, though it does not take an internet marketer to know there is a big difference between being top for a competitive term and an obscure one. But by the same token, it is also true that paying to put your name, brand or site in front of internet eyeballs can sometimes look like an admission of failure or, worse, spammy and amateurish. To some extent it depends on the sector you are in and what your competition is like. If you need to inspire trust (like a funeral home or vet) then you might want to go easy on PPC.

2. Traffic quality is as important as volume
Most people never click on internet ads. Estimates vary but it seems that 70-85% rarely if ever respond to internet advertising so the traffic you do receive from PPC is obviously skewed to a certain segment of the population. This may not matter if you are getting profitable sales from acceptably priced traffic but it is at least worth considering if you find that you are attracting the wrong kind of visitor (such as non-buying ones) to your site.

3. Paying for fake clicks
One of the great advantages of PPC is that everyone clicking through has had their interest piqued by your ad and therefore is a potential customer. But what if you are paying for clicks made by competitors trying to undermine your campaign or online marketers generating phony clicks to make money? This is a growing problem and even though there are controls and protective measures that Google and others take, this can be an expensive pitfall for the unfortunate or unwary.

4. Don’t neglect the offline market
If you spend a large amount of your marketing budget on PPC you are missing a large part of your potential audience. We have already talked about the majority of surfers who do not click on paid results or banners, but what about “nonliners” who do not use the internet or do so but not when searching for your product or service? At least if your internet marketing strategy is mainly “organic” (non-paid) then you may have money left over for offline marketing.

5. PPC is harder than you think
If you think PPC is a lazy and easy way to make money online it isn’t. Anyone in the industry will tell you that attracting traffic is only part of the battle; you can quickly lose a lot of money paying for clicks through to bad internet sites or “landing pages” which do not convert clicks to profits. Try an experiment for yourself, typing in a relevant search term and clicking through the sponsored results. You will quite often be led to boring, low impact homepages with no sales pitch or “call to action” (in marketing speak), or pages with limited relevance to your search term or even to broken links. If you spend money on PPC you still have to invest time and thought in developing effective landing pages and arresting site content.

6. Rising PPC rates
If advertising your chosen keywords is expensive or at least going up in price, this does not necessarily mean that you are getting more valuable traffic for your money. More likely it means the competition is hotting up. If you build your business around paying for clicks it can be very painful when those clicks suddenly double or treble in price. Don’t become too reliant on this source of custom.

7. Beware the post-rush crash
An AdWords consultant once described PPC to me as like a “sugar rush”. He meant that the effects were indeed gratifyingly instantaneous and effective but not automatically lasting. There are ways of using PPC campaigns to build lasting results (e.g. building up email lists by offering visitors a newsletter or by offering programs or content which give them an incentive to return regularly) but most often PPC buyers are left with the option of keeping paying – even when click rates shoot up – or lose their lifeblood of traffic. Organic traffic building takes time but when done right the results are long-lasting and in fact self-reinforcing over time.

8. Budgets become moving targets
In theory PPC should be budget-friendly because you work out what sort of traffic volume you are looking for and have an idea of the cost per click but the reality is not so straightforward. For one thing until you have launched a campaign and had some experience of it you do not actually know the cost per click. Google has a Traffic Estimator which gives you a range of cost estimates for each keyword combination but this is not reliable. Also as we have seen the cost of PPC can rise and fall very suddenly making a mockery of your carefully constructed marketing budget.

9. Keyword research
A lot of site owners are put off the alternative to PPC – achieving high search engine rankings by link building, article marketing or other techniques – because it sounds too much like hard work or very demanding and technically difficult. However the alternative of PPC is also demanding because campaigns also require a lot of skill and knowledge, particularly in terms of researching keywords that are not only going to attract the right traffic but also be affordable enough to be profitable. Campaigns also require constant monitoring and adjustment to achieve goals efficiently.

10. The risks of getting PPC wrong
Getting PPC right can certainly deliver traffic but things can quickly and expensively go wrong if you make mistakes. I personally ran a campaign which delivered hundreds of clicks but no sales because the font on my landing page had gone haywire making it illegible. That was an expensive way to achieve nothing except learn a valuable lesson. Other risks are perhaps paying for traffic for terms where you already rank well for in search results. Also Google and other search engines watch the quality of your advertising and website and are prepared to punish you with high ad costs if your quality dips.

Of course, apart from PPC advertising, you can also use paid search, banner ads, AdWords and the rest it as part of your marketing strategies to promote your small businesses online.

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