If you have had a website for any amount of time, you may have received those colorful mailers on occasion from search engines like Google advertising their paid search options. This may have you wondering if you might need Pay Per Click marketing as part of your strategy to succeed on the Internet.

Or, you may be wondering what Pay Per Click really is.

How we usually explain this to our customers is that Pay Per Click or PPC is a form of marketing that involves quite a bit of risk for a small business but is also inexpensive if your budget is small. Advertising is always a gamble: a company pays for something that might or might not attract more customers and lead to higher profits. There are few ways to control your audience with PPC and it takes some skill to get it right. When PPC works, however, a company’s conversion rates improve (ratio of clicks to sales). Does your firm need to run a Pay Per Click campaign? We at your Delaware SEO Services have put together this quick article in order to outline the method, drawbacks, and potential benefits, so that you can make a more informed decision going forward.

How PPC Works

Okay: Here’s the basic rundown. A firm – like yours, decides to run an internet ad campaign on Google or a smaller website. The advertising department develops a catchy slogan and an offer which is easily condensed into the size of a banner or even a smaller footprint on the page. They make it website- and/or mobile-friendly. An arrangement is made with the website owner to pay a certain amount of money every time a viewer clicks on the advertisement. Rates vary from pennies to over $1 (and you would also be paying a small fee if we were to manage this on your behalf).

Risks

There is no way to ensure that only people legitimately curious about your product click on the ad. Your PPC banner might fill up a few minutes in the life of a bored commuter waiting for a train or it could be clicked by the competitor who knows how PPC works. Out of 100 viewers you might get one customer or 0. You might have set up the account so your ad disappears after 100 clicks. Maybe you decided to let it run its course for a length of time regardless of the price. Either way, this could be an expensive failure.

Rewards

It might also work: that depends on how well you choose the site where it’s posted. I wouldn’t recommend placing a PPC ad for stump grinding on a website about seniors’ care for example: they don’t make sense together. Place the stump grinding ad on a landscaping website, however, and there’s already profit potential among natural readership. If you survey customers and lots of them found you over the internet, keep plugging away at PPC and learn from your mistakes. This is potentially a good route.

Alternatives

What would I suggest the average company do; one whose clients saw their newspaper ads, heard about them on the radio or from friends, or who answered an email campaign? Is it worth running a PPC ad? Can a company survive without it? Many firms never run internet ads of this kind and are successful but their other promotional methods are skillful, well-timed, and interesting. Their SEO strategies are strong because they involve excellent key word content writing and backlink selection. Web pages are well organized, attractive, user-friendly, and load quickly. With these essential pieces in place, the Pay Per Click approach isn’t necessarily worth worrying about. Then again, it’s an affordable additional approach if your budget is tight and could be the cheapest route for a firm with very little money to start with.