Why PPC May NOT Be For You by Brian Newmark

Why PPC May NOT Be For You, by Brian Newmark
Lately I’ve had a lot of people write to me with something like:  Brian Newmark, should I utilize PPC to help grow my business?  My reply is typically: PPC is great, but…
It can bring instant traffic to your site. The traffic can be absolutely targeted as per your demographic requirements.
You can target blogs, websites, social media, search engine ranking pages and pretty much everything online with PPC
PPC is an absolute must for almost any online business.
And yet, PPC may not be for you.  I know, as a PPC guy, telling you not to do it may sound a little funny, but over the past ten years I have seen too many companies waste thousands or tens of thousands on Pay Per Click with little to show for it.
There are many reasons why PPC might not be the best use of your marketing dollars.  In this article, we will discuss several reasons why.
1) It requires funds:
PPC can be expensive
Yes, there are a few genuine ways to do PPC at a cheap budget or even free, for example coupon codes or vouchers, or getting discount or special offers. But for most businesses a long term plan will involved a significant expense.
If you have a smaller budget for PPC then your potential reach for your campaigns will be much smaller. You won’t be able to attract a huge audience. PPC works best with a good budget. Heavy banner ads are for branding, text ads targeting specific keywords are for results in terms of conversion. Targeting demographic and being more specific, targeting USA or the European population etc. will raise the costs even more. Doing all this will make your PPC campaign a success, but it will also add up to the costs.
2) It requires Planning:
PPC requires a lot of planning and research.
Surely anything can be outsourced, but that will only increase the budget further.
Keyword research is only one aspect. The first thing that needs to be determined is the objectives that are to be achieved from your PPC campaigns. Is the campaign mainly for branding purpose? If this is a priority then you must include your logos and other branding information in your banners and do heavy banner ads. If the primary purpose of the PPC campaign is to get conversions, then the products and the sales page need to be analyzed first.
The secret to a good conversion starts with an optimized sales page or landing page. A good sales page should be up to the point with no distractions, just the thing to sell and more information about it. If you have an image on the sales page, that image’s primary purpose should be to catch the attention and divert it to the product that needs to be sold. A sales page can be setup for more than just selling products, it can be to catch email ids for building an email list etc. But the basic rule still applies.
Once the sales page is ready, start working on the keywords that needs to be targeted in the PPC campaigns. The long tail keywords convert well. That is how the research should start and then you can eventually choose some other keywords that can get the conversions.
3) Constant research:
This is one of the biggest issues with PPC. You can’t just do it once and let it run for ever. This is a mistake I made many times in the early years and learned my lesson the hard way.  Sadly all these years later, I’m still seeing people make this mistake.  Managing a PPC campaign is a daily or at leats weekly responsibility.  Withing a few days of launching the campaign, it will require review, modification and updates. The keywords that you research and place, might not get any traffic at all, one of those reasons can be someone else bidding on the same keywords with a higher price. Things change in the PPC world pretty quickly and thus requires a lot of research on a regular basis.
4) Things can go wrong and you can lose money:
With PPC, you do take a certain amount of risk. Your campaign has every chance of failing and your conversions might not be enough.
But this is not the only way you can fail, you might get all the traffic you could from a campaign that was targeted well and yet you may not see enough conversions.
People might not buy your product, your website might crash and you can lose traffic, your sales cart might get broken etc. There are a number of things that can go wrong with a PPC campaign and one must brace them for the potential loss.
5) Other marketing methods might be cheaper and better:
There are a number of other marketing methods that can be used. There are many alternatives to PPC, starting with SEO and Content Marketing (my other area of expertise). If you are already ranking on page one for the keywords that you want to bid on PPC, I feel there is minimal additional benefit for doing a PPC campaigns.
All other marketing methods like guest blogging, banner ads, email marketing, organic social media shares etc. works in their own way. If they are providing more conversions then why go for the expense. Why spend money if the free or low cost option giving you a similar returns.
Remember, it is the ROI that matters the most. If PPC isn’t giving you enough returns, just dump the whole PPC idea.
By: Brian Newmark
Brian Newmark is based in Villanova, PA.  He is an internet marketing consultant working with high profile individuals, foreign governments and multinational corporations.  You can also visit Brian Newmark’s blog about content marketing which is at www.BrianNewmark.com