When it comes to online marketing tactics, many companies hear that they need to implement pay per click (PPC) advertising in order to be successful. These companies are being told that PPC is the best marketing tactic available, and if they don’t use it, they’ll lose out on millions of potential customers.
But PPC advertising is not as wonderful as some companies make it out to be. In fact, PPC advertising has plenty of disadvantages that most companies don’t realize before they implement it into their marketing strategy. So before you jump on the PPC bandwagon, make sure to understand the following disadvantages.
1. Some advertising platforms are too broad.
The success of PPC advertising has a lot to do with the keywords that your company chooses to use as well as which advertising platform is placing your ads. In order to see success, it is important that your ad be placed on websites and on search engine results pages (SERPs) that use the same keywords and target the same audience as your ad.
Some platforms work well and place your ad on sites and on SERPs that exactly match the keywords you choose while others use more of a broad approach. What this means is that if one of your keywords is “apple” because you sell an item that works with Apple-related products, your ad could end up being placed on websites or SERPs where the term “apple” refers to the fruit. This could have a negative effect on your overall ad campaign.
2. It’s more expensive than you think.
Everyone hails PPC advertising because it allows you to choose the price you want to pay and set your budget accordingly. The problem is that if your budget is very low, you’re not going to do well against your competition if they have a high budget. Instead, you will need to be aggressive and spend more money. In order to get the best possible keywords for your business, you could end up dishing out a pretty penny just to have your ads placed above your competitor’s ads.
3. You could be the victim of click-through fraud.
PPC is also known to be great because it provides you with real time metrics and drives traffic to your site. The problem is that this traffic and these metrics could all be fraudulent.
Some PPC platforms such as Google AdWords place your ads on websites that have the same target audience and use the same keywords as your ads. But these website owners earn money from these platforms every time an ad is clicked through from their website, which means that many website owners are fraudulently clicking through on these ads just to put money in their own pocket.
4. It’s not very easy to understand.
Having a thorough understanding of PPC requires some research, and many businesses simply don’t have the time and resources to figure it all out. Many businesses think that they can implement a PPC strategy themselves through Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, but what they fail to realize is all the additional bells and whistles that come along with it, such as campaign dimensions and quality scores. Attempting a PPC ad without having an understanding is not going to have much success for your business, so you may need to hire a professional company to do this for you.
5. Many people don’t click on the ads.
Most people know an ad from a link when they’re performing a search, and most users will ignore the ads and focus solely on the actual content generated. The same thing goes for ads on websites. Most people will tune out the advertising being placed on the screen and focus on the items that actually matter to them. People don’t like being interrupted, and that is exactly what PPC advertising does.
So before you dive head first into PPC advertising because you think that it can do no harm, make sure that you understand these disadvantages and weigh them against the reasons you want to add it to your marketing strategy.
Julie Myers is a keyword strategy expert who writes valuable online marketing articles for SEOMAP.
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