Search Advertising
Pay-Per-Click For B2B – Cost Effective Lead Generation
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is what made Google one of the richest companies in the world, so you might think "Why give them my hard-earned money?" Well, the reason people are so anxious to spend money on Google is because they deliver a good product with a tremendous ROI. And it's relatively democratic too. You compete for position and traffic with other advertisers by outsmarting them, not just outbidding them.
Let's talk about how PPC works. Google's official name for their PPC program is AdWords. These ad listings often appear at the top of a search on Google, and also on the right side of the search results page. Companies who want to advertise here sign up for a Google AdWords account and create campaigns of specific ads designed to appear when certain keywords are triggered in a search.
Every time someone clicks your ad, two things happen.
- The user is transported to your landing page where you've created an engaging space for your content that encourages a conversion; and
- Google charges your account an amount up to, but not exceeding, your bid price. You set a maximum daily budget; when enough people have clicked your ad in any given day to reach your limit, Google stops presenting your ad.
The clickthrough rate (CTR), represented by the number of people who clicked the ad divided by the number of impressions in a certain period, goes up. Then, the cost-per-click (CPC), or actual amount that Google charges your account every time someone clicks on your ad, goes down.
In every analysis we've done, PPC outperform directories such as ThomasNet by at least a 10:1 margin in traffic, and the inverse in cost. So, while a $200 monthly budget in AdWords can easily yield 100 clickthroughs, ThomasNet programs often cost $1,000 per month and only deliver half that traffic. While the engagement level from a B2B directory tends to be a bit higher, it hardly makes up for the enormous difference in cost and effectiveness.
Generating leads to your website from search terms that you can't rank for organically is one good reason to consider a PPC program. Another equally important reason is research. This is particularly relevant if we have little historical background on site traffic from which to make decisions regarding search engine optimization. Testing a variety of messages and keywords in a PPC program can tell us a lot over a short period of time about what kinds of terms and messages will work and how competitive it will be to rank for organic search.
While Google isn't the only company offering a paid search program, it is definitely the single most popular PPC advertising system in the world. If you can succeed with a Google AdWords campaign, you will be able to translate those skills to other providers down the road.