When the Idea of Pay per click (PPC) advertising started in 1996—with goto.com being one of the first search engines to actually utilize PPC advertising in 1998—online advertising has never been the same.
While many other forms of online advertising has since emerged, Pay per click is still by far one of the most used online methods of advertising.
Reasons behind its popularity include:
• You only have to pay if someone clicks on your advertisement and actually visits your website
• For search engines, you can have your advertisement come up based on matched keyword terms for your product or service
• You are allowed to set a bid amount of how much you are willing to pay per click
• You can set a budget on the amount you want to spend each day
While PPC advertising is an excellent way to generate traffic to your website based on whatever search term you prefer, you can’t rely on sticking with only one keyword term in the long run. Therefore, PPC advertising is not a good long term advertising strategy.
Below are 4 Reasons why you can’t stick to using PPC advertising in the long run:
1. Barriers of Entry Are Easy
Anyone can place a bid for PPC, making it easy for anyone to compete against your keywords. This is unlike other mass advertising methods, such as television advertising, where the cost to advertise is significant—making it harder for competitors to market. With this in mind, you must consider the fact that your competition can easily advertise with PPC as well, which can increase the bid price and lower your conversion rate.
To give you an example, at one time I had bids for one search term as low as $1.00 per bid. I also had a very high conversion rate because the competition was low. However, about one year later, competition started kicking in and the bid went up to around $1.80. Not only did my cost-per-click go up, but my conversion rate went down due to the increase of competition. This ended up being so significant that I had to decide to get out of the game for that search term.
2. Changes in Search Preferences
To give an example, consider the search term “computer repair.” Before, that might had pretty much been Microsoft Windows desktops. However, with the technology of today changing, that could refer to Apple Computers, tablets, and even smart phones. Sure maybe the person wanting their tablet repaired should had typed, “tablet repair,” but to some of these people searching—a tablet to them is really just a computer. Therefore, you can’t control users search preference, and it can change over time.
3. PPC Isn’t Really Good for Branding
While PPC Is great for getting users to your website quickly and presenting them with a product or service they are seeking, it is not good for branding your business in the long term. Really it’s just a way for you to get traffic to your website quickly based on whatever search term is being utilized. If you want to really brand your products and services online, you need to consider other online marketing methods—considerably online content marketing.
4. You Are Dictated By the Rules of the PPC Advertiser
Google by far is the most used and popular PPC search engine provider. Google doesn’t determine the amount you will pay per click based on your bid price alone, but by also using ad rank algorithms. These are consistently changing and can make it hard to keep your bid low in the long run. Also, sometimes new rules can come into play that can damage your old keywords, such as the rules changing for using a competitor’s business name to advertise. When you decide to utilize PPC advertising, you are dictated by whatever rules and policies that are set by the PPC provider.
In Summary
PPC advertising is still a great medium to utilize for marketing your business online, and I recommend it to anyone that can find successful keywords to bid upon. With PPC you can quickly get traffic to your website based on keywords that matches your product or service you are offering. However, because of the 4 reasons just mentioned, you can’t simply rely on PPC in the long run. If you want to remain successful with PPC, I recommend that you are continuously looking for new keywords for your business to utilize and continue to find ways to help keep your bids at the lowest level possible.
