PPC advertising is one of the more popular ways to make a website (and therefore a business) more successful. However, if used incorrectly this may not be the case. Some of the failures in using pay-per-click advertising can be traced back to the belief in myths that have already been disproven.
So before you embark on a misguided PPC strategy, let’s first make sure you’re not basing your campaign on patently false beliefs. Here are some myths that you really should stop believing:
- PPC leads to super quick results. This is a commonly believed myth even today. Some tend to view the matter in simplistic terms: PPC is fast, organic SEO takes months. But the truth of the matter is that PPC advertising results don’t lead to overnight success. It takes time too.
- The top spot gets the most traffic. This myth is probably because of the SEO truism that getting the top spot in organic search gets you the most traffic. So it must be true for PPC as well.
Technically, this is true—the top PPC spot also gets the most clicks. What’s astonishing is the discovery that positions #2 and #3 led to many more conversions compared to the top spot. The 2nd position had 3 times the conversions of the top spot, and the 3rd position was even better at 4 times the top spot conversion.
How can this be? It’s thought that the top spot attracted a mass audience, but the 2nd and 3rd spots received higher quality clicks – those people were more discriminating than the mass audience attracted by the top spot.
- If you’re doing well with organic SEO, you don’t really need PPC at all. When it comes to attracting customers to your website, you can’t really limit yourself to a single approach. You need to do PPC as well as SEO. In fact, you should have better success when you also add email marketing and social media to your campaign.
Just because you’re doing well in organic search doesn’t mean you can forego PPC. It’s been found that paid search actually got you 1.5 times the number of clicks you get from organic search. So if you’re already on top of SEO, you can more than double the number of clicks you get when you also use PPC with it. All you really need to do is to use paid ads for the same keywords, so that you get two mentions for that particular search.
- Keyword stuffing works for PPC. Lots of people do this. They put in as many keywords as they can on their PPC ads, because that really boosts the traffic. The problem is that not all that traffic is actually of any use for you. Meanwhile, if you use too many keywords it may result in greater expenses and the money could have been used to improve conversion instead.
- PPC campaigns generally run by themselves. This is a mistake, and it can be a very expensive mistake if you’re not careful. What you need to do is to monitor your PPC campaign constantly, while you keep on testing and bidding on new keywords to generate your results.
Yes, it does seem like a lot of work, but that just confirms a fact in PPC and SEO marketing: you need an expert to take care of things so you can take care of your company in many other aspects.
Hire an expert in PPC advertising. That’s a truism in online marketing that’s been proven time and again!