8 Top Benefits of PPC Advertising

Are you curious about the benefits of PPC Advertising?

The PPC advertising model has revolutionized how organizations of all sizes market themselves to their target audiences.

Before PPC advertising, companies relied on one-to-many advertising formats like print ads, billboards, and television or radio spots. These traditional advertising mediums could reach a wide audience, but ad space was always expensive with a high entry barrier for smaller companies.

Today, PPC advertising networks like Google Ads have lowered the entry barrier to mass advertising and empowered firms of all sizes to target specific online audiences with messaging that’s optimized to drive sales. As a result, 2019 saw companies around the world spent a total of $106.5 billion on search advertising and nearly $162 billion on display advertising.

We created this resource to highlight some of the top benefits of PPC advertising that are driving its widespread adoption and rapid growth.

8 Top Benefits of PPC Advertising

Easy to Get Started

PPC advertising felt a lot more complicated when the first pay-per-click advertising models were released in the mid-1990s. After years in the business, Google has gotten the set-up process for PPC advertising down to a science. Anyone with a Google account can start running ads across the Google display and Google search advertising networks in a matter of minutes.

Image: Google is the leading ad network for PPC advertising and it takes just a few minutes to set up your account and start running ads.

The financial barrier to entry for PPC advertising is also exceptionally low compared to traditional print media formats. Instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a billboard rental or ad space in a magazine, advertisers can start serving digital advertisements to highly targeted demographics with a budget of just a few dollars a day.

Pay Only for Results

The pay-per-click advertising model is extremely attractive for small and medium-sized businesses. Pay-per-click means that advertisers only pay for an ad placement when it generates a tangible result, such as a click or a phone call from a user. This is one of the major benefits of PPC that makes it accessible for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and lone advertisers.

Think about what happens when you rent a billboard – you pay up-front for the rental fee, but there’s no guarantee that your shiny new billboard ad will produce even one qualified inquiry for your business. That creates a lot of risk for small businesses who can’t afford a national brand awareness campaign, but still need to connect with their audiences in a cost-effective way.

The PPC business model has helped millions of advertisers mitigate the risk of low-performing ad buys by charging for ad placements only when they generate actual interest.

Free Brand Awareness

One of the best things about running PPC advertisements on Google search and display networks is that they generate completely free brand awareness.

As an advertiser, you’re only charged a fee when a user clicks on one of your advertisements – but even if users don’t click on your search ads every time, they still appear at the top of the search results.

Image: PPC Search Ads appear at the top of the search results for relevant keyword queries. We didn’t click on these ads, but we still saw them and read them – that’s free brand recognition for the advertiser!

That means users are seeing your brand name, seeing your URL, and reading your ads all the time – and it doesn’t cost you a single thing unless the click through to your website – at which point you can start converting them into a customer.

Full Data Transparency

One of the key benefits that organizations of all sizes get from PPC is the ability to transparently track data and metrics related to campaign performance.

The ability to accurately quantify the performance of an advertising campaign has two important benefits for businesses. The first is that organizations can easily measure ROI to justify their spending on PPC advertising. Organizations can track exactly how much they spend on advertisements, how many times ads were viewed, how many clicks were generated, and how many downstream conversions can be attributed to those users.

Image: Track your PPC campaign results on Google Ads, then use Google Data Studio to create visualizations for analysis and reporting

The other benefit of data transparency is continuous improvement. Organizations can optimize their campaigns for increased profitability by testing ad variants and comparing their performance across KPIs like click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC).

Predictable Costs

PPC advertising is one of the most effective marketing channels available for small businesses.

Another key benefit of PPC advertising is that advertisers can easily control and predict their advertising costs by setting average daily budgets for each campaign that help control monthly ad spending.

Image: Google Ads lets advertisers control their ad spend by setting daily budgets for each campaign

In addition to controlling daily ad budget, advertisers can choose between “standard” or “accelerated” delivery, which impacts how quickly the budget will be depleted throughout the day.

Customized Audience Targeting

Customized audience targeting is one of the greatest benefits associated with PPC advertising. With traditional marketing mediums, targeting ads on a personal level is basically impossible – but with PPC, ad networks offer a plethora of targeting options that can help advertisers run more profitable campaigns.

Google Ads targeting options include demographic targeting, affinity audiences, in-market audiences, custom intent audiences, and similar audiences.

Image: Advertisers can create custom audiences using the Google Ads Audience manager

Advertisers can also build remarketing lists by collecting user behavior data on their websites, then target users on those lists with customized remarketing ads using the Google search and display networks.

Increase Qualified, Relevant Traffic

PPC search advertising is one of the best ways to drive more qualified, relevant traffic to your website.

Advertisers bid on the most relevant keywords for their products or services in the Google keyword auction, ensuring that their ads appear at the top of the search results for the most relevant search queries.

Those top advertising spots on the search engine results pages are not identified as ads by nearly half of Internet users, yet they get 46% of the total clicks on the page. On top of that, roughly two-thirds of all ad clicks are made by users with a strong purchasing intent.

Generate More Sales and Revenue

The bottom line when it comes to PPC advertising is that businesses of all sizes can generate more sales and revenue, at a lower cost, and with measurable, positive ROI.

Google claims that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, it gets back an average of $2 in business revenue.

Summary

Thanks for checking out our list of the 8 top benefits of PPC advertising!

Next, we’d recommend checking out our Intro to PPC lesson on Directive Institute, where you can learn the basics of formulating a PPC strategy and setting up your first PPC advertising campaigns.