Pay per click advertising has got a reputation amongst the internet of being one of, if not the, best ways to gain contextual traffic to a specific landing page. However, why has PPC got a great reputation? What makes PPC advertising the most used form of online advertising?

It is important to know why PPC is so good and effective for so many different types of advertisers. There is no point joining PPC if you don’t know why it is the best advertising program out there. As well as this, knowing the bad sides to PPC will also make you more aware of the program in general preventing a potential failure campaign from being created. Here are the pros and cons to PPC advertising.

Pros

• Instantaneous traffic – What makes PPC so popular is the fact that it is like a switch to traffic. You can turn a campaign on and instantly gain traffic. Fast results are never a bad thing: especially in markets that need to react fast to changes!
• ‘Pay per click’ – Unlike competitors to PPC such as banner advertising, advertisers only pay for the traffic they gain. This means their adverts could have billion of views without a click and still not pay a dime. This is great because advertisers know their money is not wasted and will gain them results.
• Select your target market – PPC allows advertisers to finely select the people that their advert is shown to be it by singling them out due to their gender, age, location, device they are using, time of day it is to the keywords they searched for. This results in more contextual traffic with a much higher conversion rate.

Cons

• It can get quite expensive – If you are one of the unlucky few that have keywords that have large CPCs, you will find that your campaign’s budget will be drained very quickly. Depending on what keywords you choose to bid for depends on how expensive your campaign will be. To put in into perspective, there are some keywords that bid for more than $50!
• Campaigns need to be run by someone– Advertisers think that once a campaign is up and running, no more work needs to be done to it. This is wrong. PPC campaigns always need somebody to manage it. I look at it as running a website, you don’t just write one article on a website and stop there? You continually update the website with more articles.
• PPC is advert-based – Whether you like it or not, you need to realise that PPC’s core is based on advertising units that, over the years, people have blocked out. A recent article showed just how much people ignore paid search results and go straight to the first organic result instead. You will have to face that some of your traffic will simply look straight past your advert.