If you have read the numerous articles both on PPC.org and other related websites, then you won’t need convincing that pay per click advertising is one of, if not the, most effective form of advertising online, both for publishers and advertisers. For publishers, Adsense simply enables websites to make the most amount of money for the amount of traffic the website generates. For advertisers, the contextuality that can be achieved with PPC, along with the complete control over advertising campaigns, makes PPC advertising one of the preferred choice for people worldwide.
However, as much as PPC is effective, it is only as effective as the way in which you use it. The best way I can describe this is in engineering terms of a simulation model. Any model is only ever as good as the data you put into it.
Here are two times you can effectively use PPC, to your advantage, to promote something, such as a product or a service for which you want to sell online.
#1 When the Product/Service is Launched
The best time to use PPC is at the time when your product or service is launched. This is because:
- At the launch of a new product/service, the world does not know it has been launched. Promotion is key when something is launched so your product/service can get recognition and start gaining sales.
- It is common for a product/service to be released at a time that will produce the most revenue. For example, look at the tech industry and you will notice a trend that products are released at the start of fall. This is so that the promotion of the tech can be conducted the whole way through the fall in preparation for the Christmas holidays shopping sprees.
#2 To Attract Web Users Away From Competitor’s New Products/Services
As well as using PPC at the start of your product/service’s life, it is also a good idea to use PPC at the start of your competition’s product/services’s life. This is because the hype surrounding the new competitor’s product/service could be used to your benefit. For example, relating back to the tech industry, from having a new phone released, a lot of people will start to weigh up, in their heads, whether they can afford the new phone, whether it is worth buying and if they are actually going to buy it.
At the same time, if another company promoted their cheaper phone, the web users that are in this mindset may look at the cheaper phone as a better alternative, enabling the manufacturer of the cheaper phone to capitalise off of the other phone’s promotional launch.
Ultimately, if you were to take something away from this article, it would be the fact that PPC advertising has a lot of strategy involved in when to use it to gain the most effectiveness out of it. Yes, you could use it anytime during the year to gain an advantage of some sort. However, from strategically using it at certain points of the year, you could make your campaign run much better, with more conversions and at a cheaper cost.