Are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads a short term strategy or a long-term commitment?
That's what we sought to find out when we talked to PPC experts who've seen success with their campaigns.
We’ll be discussing this topic, and others about PPC in our fireside chat via Google Hangout on July 29. Don’t forget to RSVP!
Short Term Strategy or Long-term Commitment?
PPC can be a great source of revenue for businesses of any size if used meticulously. Yes, PPC can be a short term strategy as you can see the results very quickly as compared to other sources and make changes to get better results. A/B testing on landing pages, ad copies etc. can be a great way ofnot only improving the conversions but also in finding out the USP of your product.
Shreyans Jain, Digital Marketing Manager at EduPristine
PPC can work well as both a short term strategy and a long term strategy. It really depends on your business and the goals you are trying to achieve. Running an ad campaign for a short term promotion during the holidays (or during the busiest season for your business) is a great way to get an extra boost of leads into your sales funnel.
On the other hand, long term campaigns allow you to fine tune and optimize your ads based on all the data AdWords collects for you. This allows you to make your campaigns much more efficient ultimately lowering your cost per acquisition.
Tim Kelsey, Director of Client Marketing Services, Pronto Marketing
Yes it can. But it needs to be specific. Seasonal campaigns or new product/service releases can be very effectively complemented by a CPC campaign. If you are pursuing a benefit from your campaigns for the general service or product you need to have a longer period of exposure, at the very least to test your campaigns/landing pages and Ad copy in order to maximize the return value of your AdWords budget. 1 Month is usually a good period for short term campaigns and 6 months for general CPC advertising.
Martin Milanov, Digital Marketing Expert, Fair Point GMbh
Depending on the industry, your business, and your cost per lead, PPC can be a short-term strategy, but you need the data to have a successful campaign or you could burn through a lot of money very quickly. For seasonal businesses, as well as others, you have to determine at what price you break even and how many products or services you would have to sell to justify an ROI. PPC can be a great long-term strategy because you can turn the campaign on and off as you wish once the campaign is running optimally. Further split testing with more data can further improve the campaign to improve the ROI.
Matt Boaman, VP of Product Development and SEO, EZSolution
A PPC campaign can be effective immediately. For example, we work with a hot tub company in Ottawa. We started their PPC campaign in the early spring and they had 843 visitors to their website in the first 30 days of the campaign. PPC does not need to be a long term campaign, but over time we can optimize a campaign, so it is improving steadily. Time gives us valuable information that we use to improve results. For example, if the goal is more phone calls or form submissions, we can track which keywords are generating these and adjust the budget accordingly. For example thee Hot Tub Company had an increase in conversions of 27% in the second month of the campaign because of optimization.
Brock Murray, Web Marketing Specialist, seoplus+
A PPC Campaign can be a short term strategy; however a long strategy is recommended as campaign performance will increase over time. PPC Campaigns require extensive preparation before the launch and consistent fine-tuning after launch. When fine-tuning your campaign, you will learn that you may be triggering irrelevant keywords, some targeted locations do better than others, only a portion of targeted keywords convert well, etc. You can never guess these things. You can only take action based on campaign statistics.
Tom Bukevicius, President, Supero Media Corporation
Running a campaign on Google can take up to 3 months to get good results. The first month of your campaign is collecting the data; what is working and what is not working, the second month is taking that data and applying it to the campaign (optimizing); spending budget on what is working, by the third month, you should be getting expected results.