We initially started our firm focused on just Pay Per Click (PPC), also known as Cost Per Click (CPC) as well as Product Listing Ads, Retargeting and programmatic campaigns like Display Ads and online Video Pre-Roll Ads on various publisher websites as well as brand safe sites like YouTube. We started in Paid Search and Paid Ad networks and it remains a cornerstone of our business since it is one of the primary means of generating leads and boosting sales online, especially when results are desired faster, which is typically the case.
At times, we may need to tweak an existing website or build landing pages to improve conversion results, which our team of web designers can handle, working with most major content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify, Magento and many others. Otherwise, we direct search traffic to the home page or specific pages on the website.
Pay Per Click ads are typically on Google, Bing and Yahoo showing relevant text ads in the search results pages (SERPs). There are other variants to PPC that can get specific, such as showing Google PPC ads at the top of Gmail accounts based on keyword targeting of the inboxes of those recipients or displaying Google Pay Per Click advertising in Google-owned portals like YouTube and others sites that are part of the Google search network.
Social Media Ads has similarities to cost per click ads and tends to cost less than PPC campaigns, so it is an option if the audience is a fit. Social ads are different than PPC ads though since Pay Per Click results are intent driven since the web visitor specifically typed in phrases to find what they wanted online, whereas social media advertising really displays ads that can function like CPC, each time it’s clicked, yet the ads are shown based on the profile of those social media accounts, not due to a search request on a social channel.
We can provide minimum recommended PPC budgets as well as suggestions of which services or products to promote. If an analysis was desired of existing CPC campaigns, we can analyze the campaign from the targeting, keywords, ad copy, extensions, page position, landing page and etc to provide an audit report along with recommendations for further improvement. For potential clients that wish to test us out vs. competition, we have suggested approaches in order to run a comparative performance test to measure our team to other Paid Search agencies.
For those seeking a long-term online strategy to boosting leads while avoiding PPC costs, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing and growing positive Testimonials across a variety of review sites, industry portals and social channels are all good investments to harness more traffic naturally and organically via major search engines. The tradeoff to not paying Google and Bing for clicks and sales is the amount of labor involved to get results and then maintain those results as competition seeks to out-position your listings online as well as the time it takes to appear on relevant search results pages (SERPs) which are Page 1 and Page 2 of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Most firms are impatient and want leads immediately, so the tolerance needed for SEO results is not for everyone. However, keep in mind, grabbing as much virtual real estate via PPC, SEO and Reviews listings on the SERPs is the ideal tactic to surround a potential buyer with more of your messaging (via the search listings) than your competition.
Lastly, a service we highly recommend for PPC campaigns, as well as other lead generation campaigns we offer that tend to be overlooked, is lead tracking of online and offline campaigns. It is not uncommon for us to work with various clients that have limited data on what is working across all their campaigns. We like to apply analytics to all our campaigns since it helps us better optimize each program and improve them faster, which then boosts results and ROI since it lets us and our clients know where their money could be best spent.
