Programs like Google AdWords, Bing Ads, AdRoll, SteelHouse, Facebook Ads, and others, offer ways for merchants to promote their websites quickly and obtain a wealth of data that can be used to make campaigns more cost effective at generating sales.
Shopping Ads – Showing your products in search results on sites like Google and Bing.
Text Ads – Running text-based ads in search engine results, email browsers, and other placements.
Display Ads – Serving banner advertisements on other relevant sites, like Blogs and News sites.
Re-Marketing Ads – Displaying ads on other websites, especially banner ads, for people that have been to your website or taken a similar positive action.
Video Ads – On sites like YouTube, you can show your own video commercials, have ads next to videos, and take similar actions to connect shoppers to your website.
Social Media Ads – Using the very advanced demographic and interest targeting of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can get your ads in front of the right audience.
Why PPC? You can launch a campaign relatively quickly, measure the success of various keywords and targets, and build winning campaigns faster than you can with SEO. You’re also getting in front of a different audience. Keep in mind that some shoppers are more likely to interact with Ads, and others are more likely to look at organic search results. One traffic source doesn’t necessarily replace the other.
Why doesn’t everyone focus on PPC? Simply stated, you’re always paying for clicks. The day that you stop paying to run ads, you stop getting new traffic. While PPC may help you to earn long-term customers and referrals by growing your customer list in general, in the long run, it’s often cheaper to get traffic through SEO rather than PPC.
Additionally, since PPC is typically priced in an auction style system, many very competitive industries can lead to expensive ads thanks to bidding wars between rival businesses. Depending on your average profits from an order, or a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with your business, PPC may or may not make sense.
SEO and PPC work well together. Organic rankings in search engines, and running ads in unique places like Instagram, have a unique value and don’t negate each other. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving targeted shoppers to your store. Businesses of scale that have marketing budgets for both will typically focus on both among other campaigns.
