There might be a lot of reasons you've decided not to go with pay per click advertising as a part of your campaign. However, there are a lot of benefits to pay per click advertising that might surprise you. Today's video covers the many benefits of PPC, when you should invest in PPC, and how adding it to your strategy can effect lead conversion.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello and welcome to our video on the benefits of PPC advertising. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me.
Yeah, good afternoon Chad. A lot of people come to us very eager to start search engine optimization. Certainly in our reseller community they have a lot of demand for SEO. Anyway, we're always talking to them about the benefits of putting PPC in in addition or even running pay per click before you run SEO. Sometimes it's a hard argument to make so we've been diving into the research and see some excellence stats out there that support our premise, so let's help our viewers understand the benefits of pay per click.
Yeah well the first thing we found that is really a fantastic stat is that when you have the top position in the search rankings and you're running-- so that's organic ranking and you're running pay per click advertising as well, someone has determined that about 50% of your paid search clicks are actually incremental clicks. Ones that you would not have gotten had you not been running that paid search ad. And that's a really interesting piece of information because what a lot of people have always asked is, well I already have that position one ranking. Why should I run PPC advertising? Aren't people always clicking on the organic ranking first anyway? So that's a fantastic stat that we just discovered here.
Right, and you hear that all the time. I never click on those ads. Of course Google is very large company that makes revenue from those ads. We know that's not true. And here you have data supporting the idea that even with top rankings, there is incremental value to running PPC advertising. You should be doing it in addition.
Exactly. So really, if you hold that first spot in search rankings, what the study goes on to show is that it actually gets even better as you move down-- well the incremental benefit goes up as your ranking goes down the page. So someone who's in position two to four organic ranking is actually going to see an 82% of any clicks they get from paid search would be incremental. And then if you're below-- if you're five or below, actually clicks you get from paid search or 96% incremental to ones that you would of had if you had not been advertising in paid search. So those are just fantastic stats that really say for even those people with great organic search rankings, there's more to be had with pay per click management.
Yeah and I guess you could hear that and think well the argument is as my rankings come up I should turn down my pay per click advertising, but again we want to just emphasis we're talking about incremental visits and incremental leads that you wouldn't have gotten. These are new sales leads you wouldn't have gotten at all, so I think that as long as your cost per lead is at a place that's manageable, there's still a very strong business case here to run this even when your rankings get to the top of the page.
Absolutely. So some other benefits of per click advertising, one of the main ones is diversification. And we talk about this a lot in these video blogs where really the ideal thing is to have a very diversified online marketing program. So what pay per click allows you to do is to say you've got a great strong ROI from your SEO campaign, but it's very important to have other legs to the stool of your online marketing program just in case something were to happen to those organic rankings or as we just talked about, that there's actually still more out there in terms of incremental clicks and incremental business that you're missing when you're not diversified.
Right. You don't want all your eggs in one basket. That's true in your stock portfolio, it should be true in your internet marketing strategy where you get your inbound leads.
Exactly. And then the final reason that we'd like to talk about in terms of benefits of pay per click advertising are really that it's just time to market and the ability to test with pay per click. So as we know from, again, talking about this a lot, really you should be setting expectations around six months, even a year to get good organic rankings on a term that you currently don't have any rankings on today. So in the time that it takes to get there through all the content marketing that we talked about many times, with pay per click, you can actually get there very quickly and test out are the leads that come in from those keywords that I think will be good keywords to rank on organically, how do they actually convert, and maybe do I need to fine tune my website or fine tune my message so that the people who are coming to my website on that term actually decide to contact me and complete my lead form. So again, the final benefit there is that you get a great test bed and you also can more quickly move and get traffic from new terms.
Right. And this argument gets very time because people seem ready to wade into SEO and know that it's going to take six to 12 months as you said Chad, but they somehow are resistant to doing a one month beta test using PPC to get immediate feedback on keywords-- which ones convert, which ones really bring the right people, talk to some of them on the phone, and really collect some market intel before they make that yearlong commitment. That just seems like good business to me. And I know people push back and say, oh PPC advertising is too expensive, but if you take an approach like you're prescribing here which is test it out. Spend a little bit of money. Sure the cost per lead might be a little high, but what you've done is you've avoided potentially lots of costs chasing SEO on terms that just don't work for you, and that in the long run could be a winning strategy. Again, suggesting PPC advertising is very advantageous.