Why pay per click ads?
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a high value channel for pull marketing wherein your customers qualify themselves for your products or services upon arrival. Compare this to all the unopened spam and junk mail you discard every day. The same thing happens to most of your costly push marketing programs.
Interestingly, before you even launch one of these marketing vehicles, there’s already an important difference with PPC for the sake of your marketing ROI. PPC ads only cost money when someone clicks one of your ads. You can get a million impressions and never pay a cent if nobody clicks. For traditional advertisers out there who track impressions, maybe that’s reason enough. But when you compare this cost model to a traditional direct mail campaign, the business case gets stronger still. Direct mail costs you money to design, to print, and to ship before it ever reaches a customer’s desk – or recycling bin.
Pay per click advertising targets the right people, at the right time
Another strength of PPC is that it allows you to place your message right in front of just the right prospects, exactly when they’re looking for it. This is the advantage of pull marketing, and the benefits it offers over traditional push techniques are mouth watering. But like any other marketing channel, you have to do it properly if you want it to work.
Putting all the benefits of PPC together
You’re talking to a larger number of higher quality prospects for less money. Despite these advantages, many firms manage to fail with PPC. Making it work for your company hinges on using the right words: the right keywords, the right ad text, the right words on your landing pages. Pay per click advertising isn’t difficult, but doing it well is time consuming, detail oriented, and process driven.
Three fundamental reasons that search marketing can offer you superior ROI:
1. Pay per click leads are better qualified
The first reason is psychological: your message appears when your prospects have announced that they’re thinking about your product or service. In other words, your prospects are in the right frame of mind to accept your offer. They’ve self-qualified themselves. Imagine how well a burger joint could do if it could instantly deliver a hamburger to you as soon as you felt hungry.
2. Pay per click leads are less expensive
The second reason is cost: the most effective forms of pull marketing only cost you money when your prospect clicks your ad. Imagine if your print shop only charged you for the 2% of direct mail pieces that get a response. With lower costs, it’s a lot easier to achieve positive marketing ROI.
3. Pay per click leads can come from anywhere
The third reason is reach: rather than a billboard in a few neighborhoods, or appearing in one magazine issue to a single subscriber list, or even mailing to a list of people who were interested in your product or service sometime recently, your message can reach nearly anyone in the world who uses a computer. Of course, you can target smaller areas if you choose: cities, countries, etc.
There’s a lot going on in best-practice text ads. And mobile ads like this one are more important every day.
What clients are saying…
Where we get the best results for our efforts is SEO. You have to improve it constantly, but it is a very powerful and honest form of marketing. If you truly have a site that prospects will find useful, Google will reward you.
Allan Wille,
CEO, Klipfolio Inc.
Search Warrant took our existing content and repositioned it for SEO. We just review keywords and discuss priority, and Search Warrant takes it from there. The process works really well.
Brendan Ziolo,
Sipera Systems
Search Warrant helps us ensure that we are using industry-leading techniques…We see Search Warrant as a partner in a very collaborative program. It’s a really valuable relationship.
Cathy Kirkpatrick,
Vice President, Alphabet Creative.
