PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Many businesses use PPC because it is one of if not the best way to advertise a business online. However, there are some business and advertisers that are starting to use PPC as a result of something else. This ‘something else’ is the economic climate: the depression we are currently in. Many advertisers are finding that sales are decreasing and in some way, you could predict this from the low growth markets have shown. To end this failure, people feel that if they increase their advertising and PPC budget, more people will see their product and therefore buy it increasing sales. As nice as that sounds, it’s not always the best option for a business. As the economy has got more extreme, so have people’s ‘last ditch’ attempts at ending the failure. PPC cannot always be considered the answer for everything.

Below are a few different situations many businesses are facing due to external factors. The problem is that many of these businesses are seeing that their advertising budgets should just increase to counteract this slump. However, PPC is not the answer to all worries in a business. There are better ways to overcome slumps in a business which I have highlighted below.

A Business Has a Decrease in Sales

The answer to this negativity by most businesses is to increase their PPC campaign’s budget bringing more traffic to their desired landing page. Yet, before you come up with an answer, you must understand why your sales are decreasing. Is it a seasonal thing? There are many reasons you may have for losing sales. If low brand awareness or low conversion rates are one of these reasons, you can then look towards PPC being the answer.

Our Profit Margin on Products/Services are Decreasing

This means that the profit made on each product or service is decreasing leaving you less profit in whole. Again, you may look to PPC as an answer as if profit margins have decreased, you can increase sales to counteract it meaning by pumping more money into your campaigns. However, why are your profit margins lower? Have your fixed costs and variable costs of your business increased? With the rate of inflation of oil rising prices of everything, you should consider your profit margins to naturally decrease in a depression.

Our Business is Losing Market Share in Our Market

This means that you are not having as much dominance and authority over competitors in your market. Market share is the portion of a market controlled by a particular company or product. A decrease in market share can say one of two things to a business. The first is that the competitors around you are gaining market share from you because they have better products, advertisement and more sales than you. The second is that it’s not your competitors fault for you losing market share but your own. Your business may have had loss market share for internal reasons. Either way, the answer to this failure needs to be the same. You need to think about being niche (unique). There are always niche markets even in the most saturated markets. Your aim therefore is to try and diversify yourself from the market telling potential customers, ‘Hey! Look at my product: it’s better than my competitor’s product because…’ This, like all new campaigns in a business, will require huge investment in online advertising such as PPC as you are in the early stages of a product life cycle where brand awareness is at it’s lowest. As much as this could affect you financially, the benefits to getting this right and increasing your market share outweigh the negatives considerably.

I agree that PPC is one of few advertising forms that can adapt to you and your business. However, it is not the answer to every problem you will face in your business. If you are having a tough time one month then yes, an increased PPC budget can give you that extra push you may need in sales. The problem is that PPC is not as effective as a long term answer if primarily used for short term problems. Let me give you an example. If you are going to need money for a long period of time, you would not take out an overdraft, would you? The interest rate will be staggering as an overdraft’s purpose is to give you the opportunity to ‘dip’ into the red if you really need to. Long term loans are much more efficient and cost effective. Just like with PPC, it can be long term and short term for a business. My point is that don’t run a short term campaign long term and vice versa as you will find your campagin’s conversion rate and efficiency to decrease.