In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads. PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path that your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer.
A major benefit of PPC advertising run through Google Ads is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the Google Ads tool in combination with Google Analytics. You’ll see high-level performance details, including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals). There’s no mystery to your PPC performance.
Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors in jumping into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO efforts, which often takes a lot of time and attention to get the same positioning and traffic that Google Ads offers within minutes of launch.
Google Ads’ auction and the algorithm involved have the final say of where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you. The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and to optimize while your ads are running and try new tests every day.
On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained, and business end goals are not siloed.
Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other. Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience.