If you advertise in a newspaper, on television, or on a billboard, you pay for the space that your ad occupies. You’ll nearly pay an arm and a leg for a two-inch square in a local magazine or in the newspaper, and billboard costs can be upwards of thousands of dollars.

PPC adopts the same idea of an ad in a newspaper or magazine, except your ad shows up in search engines. This leads a lot of people to believe that you have to pay for that real estate in search engine results, but that’s one of the huge benefits of PPC — you don’t!

Instead of paying for the space that your ad takes up in results pages, you only pay Google for your ad when someone clicks on it.

This makes PPC management cost extremely reasonable because the only time you pay Google is when there is serious potential for making a sale. We say serious potential for a sale because PPC ads are so targeted that when people click on them, they’re usually ready to purchase a product.

In fact, PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than visitors who arrive on your site organically.

That’s just benefit number one of this web marketing strategy.

If you’re looking for another reason to adopt a PPC campaign, the time it takes to deliver results is fantastic.

Since ads start to show up for your targeted keywords as soon as you make a bid on that keyword and have a great quality score, it’s not out of the question to see more traffic to your website within the first week of starting your PPC campaign.

When it comes to other long-term strategies, like SEO (search engine optimization) or email marketing, it can take a few months to really reap the benefits — though those benefits are amazing, and worth the wait.

However, if you’re looking for a strategy that delivers fast results, PPC is the strategy for you. Just make sure you audit your PPC campaign often to ensure it's working properly. You can also check out our failproof guide to PPC auditing.

Tracking results is one of the most important parts of any campaign. Without being able to dig into the analytics of your campaign, you won’t know what elements are working, and what elements are failing.

When you’re able to track the results of a campaign easily, it’ll become obvious which elements of your campaign you need to shift to see better results.

For example, A/B tests are a great way to track how users interact with your ads. You simply decide on a variable to test and make two, identical ads, except for that variable.

Let’s say for one ad, you use a photo of a person wearing the clothing you’re trying to sell, and on another ad, you have the clothing hanging on a hanger.

With A/B testing, you can easily check analytics to see which ad is performing better, and the results can help you fine-tune your ad to ensure that it gets as many clicks as possible.

On a more general note, you can use Google Ads to track the success of your ads in terms of clicks, conversions, and more. This can give you insight into whether or not your target audience is clicking the ad, if you need to target better, or if you should change the wording in your ad.

Result tracking is priceless, and the fact that PPC campaigns allow you to do so easily is a huge benefit.

The fourth benefit of PPC ads is that they’re hyper-targeted.

Many marketing tactics allow you to use targeting to reach your most qualified customers, and PPC is no exception. In fact, PPC is one of the most highly-targeted strategies available.

Your ads allow you to target your specific audience with specific content that is most valuable to them.

Here are a few ways Google Ads allows you to target your audience:

1. Demographics: One of the best ways to target your customers, the demographic audience targeting allows you to serve ads based on a user’s location, gender, location, and even the kind of device they use to search.
2. In-market: In-market targeting is one of the most effective ways to target your audience. That’s because it allows you to reach customers that have been searching for products and services that your store offers. This allows you to have a leg up on your competition since your ads show up — almost intuitively — to customers who are the most interested in your products. Your ads can be served to users that have previously purchased something from your website, or users that are interested in what you sell.
3. Custom intent: When you set a custom intent audience within Google Ads, you’re able to choose words, phrases, and keywords that relate strongly to those who are most likely to make a purchase on your website. Not to mention, you can also add website URLs, YouTube content URLs, and more to fine-tune your targeting even more.
4. Remarketing: One of the most beneficial PPC strategies out there, remarketing allows you to essentially re-serve your ads to users who have clicked on your ads before. Remarketing ads are extremely beneficial because they keep your business and products at the top of customers’ minds — especially those who were close to making a purchase before.
5. Similar audiences: To take your PPC campaign a step further, you can also target similar audiences to the ones that you target with your remarketing campaign. For example, if the overall demographic of your remarketing list is 30-year-old women, and the intent is to purchase skin-softening lotion, you could also serve this ad to other 30-something women — regardless of whether they’ve searched for your product. Their similar interests and demographic triggers the ad when you target in this way.
6. Content keywords: Targeting specific keywords within the content of your ad allows your ad to appear to users who search that key term. The great thing about targeting with keywords is that you can change them to reflect the season, the holiday, etc. You can hand-craft the keywords you use to target a specific demographic or search intent, too.

With PPC ads, it's like hand-feeding your customers an easy way to purchase one of your products. That’s because after a user clicks on one of your ads, they are served a landing page.

A landing page includes an element that entices users to take the next step in the buying process, whether it be providing you with their email address, or even making a purchase.

Some examples of landing pages would be a page with a contact form on it, a page with a quote form, or even a page where a user can simply click “buy now.”

No matter how your landing page is set up, it’s the first place a user will go after clicking on your ad — which creates the perfect opportunity to hand-feed your audience an easy way to buy your product.

PPC ads can increase your revenue due to the increased qualified traffic they bring to your website. This allows you to see a huge revenue increase for your business — and quickly.

As soon as you win a bid for an ad in your industry, those ads are live — meaning that they can be served to users who search for the keyword that you choose to target.

PPC ads ensure that you take up valuable real estate at the top of a results page, which helps you to gain more traffic to your website.

In fact, on average, 41% of clicks go to the top three paid ads that show up on search engine results pages. That means that ad clicks account for nearly half the clicks that are made on the first page of results.