Many advertisers, local or indeed National businesses instinctively seem to understand the use of PPC or Pay per click advertising. Being used to paying for advertising through media such as Yellow Pages and other publications, they are used to measuring return on investment (ROI) as they have used paid advertising many times and understand how to measure it's effectiveness.
Statistics show, however that advertising with PPC alongside natural, organic search engine results gained through a carefully planned programme of search engine optimisation (SEO), both on page and off page can dramatically improve the click through rate to the target website. In the end, the goal of all such advertising is to get your customers to your website and nothing more.
When advertising with pay per click Google gives the advertiser two broad options. Advertising in search results, advertising in websites content or indeed many choose to do both. Advertising in search means that results are displayed in Google under searches, and in its distributors search results. Google content advertising applies to those websites who choose to incorporate “Adsense” into their websites. As adsense rapidly expands, it is now viewable on millions of web pages throughout the web. However, many advertisers are shunning this in favor of merely advertising in search results.
There are several reasons for this, and the first is trust. This has been a result of smaller websites, through to adsense empires choosing to embark on Click Fraud. Although this issue occurs in search it is far less dominant. Those who commit Click Fraud on search are those trying to weaken a competitor’s ROI. With Adsense the same applies, along with the website owner trying to increase his revenues using similar tactics.
Although many are rejecting content advertising, there are still those who feel it provides a similar ROI to search. A reason for this can be found through in the fact that more and more advertisers are only choosing search. As this occurs the advertiser has less competition so the price of the word reduces. Advertisers are also finding a good ROI from publisher’s websites who decide to actively promote the advertiser’s services within their content. An example of this can be realized from when someone is discussing printing services, and actually directly recommends the advertiser’s services. This is a positive move for both the publisher and the advertiser, and a good way for publishers to move forward. Despite this, publishers still have to remember, to not be too obvious in doing this, or savvy buyers will definitely calculate the publisher’s intention.
Your competitors will undoubtedly be clicking your PPC advertisements (be honest- haven't you?) and that will cost you money. The bottom line is that when you combine PPC with organic or natural search, both clickthroughs actually increase. This is truly a case of where the sum of the parts is definitely worth more than the individual component. So if you really do want to increase your clichthrough rate (and thereby improve your ROI), you definitely need to combine both strategies. Please get in touch if you want to know more.