In today’s world, a significant portion of sales, exchanges, and transactions occurs in the digital realm, including social media, online platforms, and websites. Businesses have recognized the virtual landscape as essential for promoting their products and services, enabling them to connect with fresh audiences, particularly tech-savvy younger generations, to expand their reach and achieve their goals.
One of these major spaces is the Google search engine, an expansive virtual area where billions of users land daily to find out particular information or look for specific products. Here is when paid search enters the scene by promoting businesses’ products in the search results pages.
But what are exactly the Benefits of Paid Search? What are the advantages of appearing in the first spots of paid search results?
This article discusses and reflects on this topic by considering all the factors that make this Pay-per-Click PPC strategy one of the best options when it comes to digital marketing.
What Is Paid Search Advertising?
Paid search involves brands, marketers, retailers, or advertisers paying search engines to position their ads higher on SERPs. Most popular search engines, i.e. Google or Bing, offer this service to businesses.
Paid search is a good strategy to drive traffic to websites by using ads rather than organic content and complete SEO strategies. Paid ads require ongoing management to ensure the effectiveness of the strategy.
What Are the Main Characteristics of Paid Search Ads?
Paid search ads appear in the first positions on the search engine results page, whether it’s Google, Bing, or Yahoo, among others. Paid ads commonly appear above and below the organic search results.
Every paid search ad has three main components: a title or headline, a description, and a display URL.
- The headline. It’s the most prominent text in advertisements, typically the first element that catches a user’s attention when they encounter the ad. It should contain relevant keywords of your industry or product to drive attention and make potential customers click on it.
- The description. The description text is the largest text of the ad, containing benefits and crucial characteristics. You should also include a call-to-action to incentivize potential customers to click the ad. It allows you to type up to 80 characters.
- The display URL. It corresponds to your website address, which is noted in green just below the headline. It shows a compressed version of your URL to add more clarity to the ad.
What Are the Main Benefits of Paid Search Ads
We’ve summarized the twelve main advantages of applying paid search ads, which undoubtedly will boost your marketing strategies and enhance your business.
- More Visibility
Using paid search as your main digital marketing strategy leads you to have more exposure since your advertisements might appear in the first place on SERPs. Besides, your ads can also appear in the major search engines, getting thousands of visualizations per day.
Google Ads – formerly Google Adwords – nowadays boasts over 6 billion ad impressions each day. It means paid search ads reach millions of search engine users daily, which undoubtedly leads to an increase in awareness and visitors to landing pages where purchases are completed.
- A Higher Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate is the percentage of people who see your ad and effectively click on it. It is calculated by dividing the total number of impressions by the number of clicks.
As we mentioned above, Google servers more than 6 billion ad impressions and an average click-through rate (CTR) of 3,17% across all industries.
In this context, a click-through rate over the average means more traffic to your website or landing page. Using targeted ads in the popular search engine allows you to reach an over-average CTR, raising awareness among potential customers of what your product is and how it can work out their issues.
Raising awareness is especially great for newer companies, startups, and small businesses that imperatively need their brand’s name to stand out on the market. A higher click-through rate also means an increase in conversions due to the number of potential customers checking your product.
- You Bid for the Keywords You Consider Relevant for the Industry
Suppose you haven’t created a paid search campaign before with your Google Ads account. In that case, the platform allows you to select relevant keywords to categorize your brand or product and show your ad to potential interested customers.
The process of allocating a particular budget to a specific keyword is called keyword bidding. With this process, you set a budget for each target keyword in a Google Ads campaign. This way, you determine how much you are willing to pay when a random Internet user clicks on your ad. It is also known as cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
Using the keywords you need to set increases the possibility of reaching people who might show interest in your goods. This is the final purpose of any paid search strategy: target customers and ensure they click the ad!
- Entice Customers with a Higher Purchasing Intent
The idea of building advertisements through Google Ads is to attract highly interested prospects with a grand chance to complete the purchasing process. As such, generating more qualified leads is one of the top benefits of an effective paid search campaign, especially for small businesses looking to bring more leads to their websites.
The leads you reach through PPC or paid search will be highly interested in acquiring your products even before seeing your ads. It means your target audience will be committed to your product and probably will complete the purchasing path.
- A Cost-Effective Relationship
Paid Search as a part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy works faster than a Search Engine Optimization approach since the latter can take weeks or months to deliver notable results. It means that the money you allocate to your ads will show more effective results in the short and medium term, achieving a tighter, cost-effective relationship.
Moreover, since in paid search strategies, Google Ads only take your money when someone clicks your ads, you won’t pay for users who do not have a real interest in your advertisements. In other words, you will only pay when your ads effectively reach a user. In this sense, we can say that every penny you pay for these PPC advertising efforts is totally justified.
- It Deliveries Almost Instantaneous Results
One of the strongest points of paid search marketing is that it produces fast results. We already mentioned this is the “cost-effective” paragraph, but it does not hurt to mention it again.
When you complete your ad copy and run your paid search strategy, your ads will be immediately displayed to potential customers according to the keywords they type during their searches.
Since paid advertising targets specific search queries, your ads will be shown to people searching for a solution like yours. This way, paid searches drive immediate traffic to your landing page or site from search engines. You can even notice the immediate effect by entering Google Analytics and checking how your paid search strategy delivers results.
Parallelly, with PPC campaigns, you also will skip a lot of steps that can hinder buyers’ passage through the funnel. We mean the reading of extensive copies, the creation of content considering SEO strategies, etc.
But do not misunderstand us; you should work with both strategies simultaneously, PPC and SEO since both drive relevant traffic to your website and are great for increasing conversions.
- It Makes You Business Looks More Professional
In a nutshell, with paid search, your business gets better branding and projects a more accurate company image. This is because paying to position your ads shows prospects that you are willing to allocate resources to promote your business, being confident that your products and services are the best ones.
The more professional your business looks, the higher the chance that other professional businesses are willing to work with you.
- A Higher Conversion Rate
With an increasing click-through rate comes a higher conversion rate. In other words, with more people visiting your website and landing pages, there is a bigger chance that some of them will effectively complete the purchasing process.
Isn’t reaching a higher conversion rate the final goal of every business that allocates resources to paid advertisements?
Every business online driving budget in a PPC campaign will experience a significant increase in sales, which is a relevant benefit of paid search advertising.
- Better and More Accurate Analytics
One of the most important ad targeting tools that Google Ads offers is the possibility of measuring paid results in real time. Thanks to different metrics, you get analytics providing you with measurable results. Analyzing them will lead to pulling off accurate conclusions such as:
- The number of clicks. You will know exactly how many ad clicks a specific advertisement receives.
- The cost per click. With paid search, you accurately manage your ad budget by knowing and setting exactly how much you want to pay for each click. You can also set a maximum bid for keywords.
- The number of sales emanating from clicks. You will know how many conversions come directly from users that clicked the ad.
- Scheduling and Geo-Targeting Possibilities
Both Google and Bing Ads allow you to target audiences according to their location, ZIP code, neighborhood, area, region, and more. Geo-targeting is great for businesses that want to attract nearby customers to their physical stores or just promote brick-and-mortar products.
Both platforms also allow you to plan the strategy by scheduling the release of the campaign, the inclusion of new ads, or the launch of a particular product or offer. Scheduling is a great tool for addressing a specific audience at the right time when you consider there is a bigger chance they will complete a purchase.
- An Impressive Return on Investment (ROI)
An improvement in the conversion rate means, necessarily, an increase in ROI since the money you’ve spent will return after customers complete purchases. Besides, since you have better control over how much you spend for a click, you also know how many sales you need to make to recover the investment.
- Increase Brand Awareness
Even though display ads are better for creating brand awareness, PPC advertising is also a good approach to increasing brand awareness due to more and more people learning about your brand and product. Keep in mind that a good campaign manager using the right keywords, headers, and descriptions will put your ads in the first spots, where all users can see them.
What Are the Setbacks of Paid Search Campaigns
Not all aspects of the paid search world are beneficial. This advertising method also has some drawbacks that are worth mentioning, and that can undermine your business goals.
It Can Be Extremely Competitive
Most businesses internalized in paid search advertising know that this online marketing strategy brings multiple benefits to their organizations. However, all of them will be struggling to appear in the first spots of SERPs by trying to reach an excellent ad rank.
Your company will have to compete with other companies in the industry, trying to position their sponsored ads at the top of search engine results. It won’t be easy! As such, we encourage you to work together with a professional marketing agency like GamerSEO to establish the best bids, create the best ad copy, and win your place in the ad space.
GamerSEO will improve your paid search campaign performance by considering all the features that make your business special and unique in the industry. We encourage you to send us a message through our contact form. Let’s talk about your objectives and find the best solution.
Lack of Visually Engaging Ad Formats
As paid search ads are just integrated with a header, a description, and a URL, they do not have an image or visual element that appeals to the senses. In this context, you should complement a search ad strategy with display ads that allow you to show powerful images that engage with the target audience. Besides, a display ad strategy will also allow you to select the best ad placement for your ads and use several creative assets.
Consumers Are More Reluctant to Click on Paid Ads
Consumers respond better to organic results since they believe that organic content is more reliable. However, users effectively looking to purchase a particular product won’t hesitate to click on paid ads if these offer the benefits they are looking for. This is why you should build a joint strategy based on paid and organic approaches.
Budget Determines Visibility
The budget you allocate for certain keywords decides the degree of visibility of your ads on search engine results pages. The higher the budget per keyword, the higher the possibility that Google ranks your ad better. Consequently, paid search is a risky bet but one that brings dozens of benefits to your organization.
Leveraging all the Advantages of Paid Search
As you have been able to read in the previous paragraphs, there are various benefits of paid search. A strategy of this nature undoubtedly will drive traffic to your website and increase revenue. Contact us to implement the PPC perspective and reach the best results possible. GamerSEO is here to help you!
A PPC specialist who started with organic social media. For several years, the core of his activities are:- Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Twitter Ads, Linkedin Ads. He has led campaigns with a global reach, e.g. for FootballTeam, G2A, ETOTO, as well as many smaller campaigns in the sports, construction and financial industries. Has full focus on ROAS. Privately, a fan of football, history of wars and Star Wars.