The Value of Paid Search Advertising to the Modern Marketer
What Makes Paid Search Advertising Valuable to Marketers?
Paid search advertising, otherwise known as PPC, is your most valuable marketing tactic. Too bold a claim to make? Maybe not. Let’s take a look at the value of paid search, and like any good data-driven marketer, let’s include the stats to hammer home our point.
Value 1: Expanding Your Reach
Google is responsible for 96% of all smartphone search traffic and 94% of total organic traffic. Would it be dramatic to say that everyone is on Google? Or even more dramatic to say everyone is on their phones? Reach them where it counts with paid search ads. You can hypertarget according to location and demographics or you can bid on relevant keywords. Google reports that paid search ads can boost brand awareness by as much as 80%, making consumers more likely to remember your brand and interact. Brand awareness is one of the key reasons that companies turn to paid search. Rather than think of paid search as an extension of your advertising dollars, consider it part of your lead generation efforts. With paid search, you can get your site on the first page quickly for relevant keywords compared to using organic SEO tactics, which are complex, meticulous and take time to see progress.
Value 2: Increasing Conversions
For every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses earn an average revenue of $2. That’s a 200% return on investment! Need we even say more? But we will. Paid search visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than organic visitors. Paid search allows you to appear with tailored messaging when people are actively looking for your product, meaning the appearance of your ads is both relevant and timely. You’re giving prospects exactly what they are searching for.
Value 3: Tracking Your Investment
paid search statistics are 1000x easier to track than SEO. Okay, so we made that one up, but it’s a truthful sentiment nonetheless. SEO takes months of strategic content production, website nips and tucks and browser crawling before you’ll see your pages or content start to improve their position. Not to mention, tracking those small changes can be difficult and time-consuming. You have full visibility into paid search metrics, including reach, impressions, click-through-rates and more. And, you can append any links with tracking parameters to track engagement onto your website, understanding exactly which paid advertisements worked and drove conversions. From PPC to MQL to SQL to ROI-and you get to track it all. That means that you know exactly how your advertising dollars are being spent and if its a worthwhile investment or if you need to switch things up a bit.
That my friends, is only a brief overlook at the true value of paid search, just in case you’ve been living under a rock—okay, that’s aggressive. But not as aggressive as your marketing can be with paid search and certainly not as aggressive as those rising dollars in your profitability dashboard.