You’ve heard the term, PPC, over and over, but what exactly does it mean? Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that is popular on the Internet and used to push traffic to a particular website. Advertisers pay the publisher, usually the website owner, whenever an ad is clicked. You might also think of pay-per-click as the amount of money spent to get someone to click on an advertisement. From engineering services to dental scrubs, there’s no restriction on the services or products that can benefit through PPC ad campaigns.
Pay-Per-Click is Now All About Mobile
According to Nielsen and Google, consumers readily use their mobile devices to surf and shop the Internet for services and products. However, consumers aren’t just shopping and spending money randomly; they’re spending time conducting research. The research affects both their online and offline purchases. Consider that 56 percent of mobile users research their purchases, and 71 percent of smartphone users compare prices before making a purchase. This is why mobile is the new frontier for pay-per-click campaigns.
Attracting Mobile Users
Both Bing and Google offer marketing services that make it easy to target the mobile market. To compete successfully, companies will have to devise advanced mobile advertising strategies to beat their competition.
Mobile Will Get Bigger and Better
It stands to reason that websites will have to optimize for mobile. It’s easier to optimize when the ability to measure results is available. Pay-per-click advertising allows marketers to gain valuable information about their website’s metrics. Results are more difficult to see through pure SEO (organic search) or social media. With PPC, measuring and understanding the results rarely fails.
Estimated Total Conversions
Consumers can be finicky when it comes switching between mobile devices. This makes it difficult, but not impossible, for marketers to determine how their online-advertising dollars drive conversions. Measuring conversions is unique to each business. Google’s Estimated Total Conversions gives the marketer an overview of how their advertisements drive conversions. This gives marketers far better insights on how much to bid for keywords and how much to allocate for budgets.
Estimated Total Conversions shows conversions in real-time along with insights into how many devices it will take to complete a conversion. In the future, it will also track phone calls and store visits as part of the entire conversion process.
Social Pay-Per-Click
Social pay-per-click is the other side of the coin. The focus is on your audience rather than a keyword. More businesses are beginning to see the value in integrating social media with day-to-day business operations. Thus, social PPC is starting to gain momentum. Social PPC is when marketers place ads on a social network like Facebook. The ad is free, or a small fee is charged. When someone clicks on the ad, the owner of the social site will charge a minimal fee for that click.
Pay-per-click, whether on a commerce or social media site, is here to stay. It provides revenue for the site owner and gives the marketer an edge by placing ads in strategic locations. Plan your marketing around the right type of PPC campaigns, and keep an eye on where your customers are likely to be: their mobile device.
