Pay per click or cost per click has revolutionised online marketing in terms of driving instant and targeted traffic for your website. Paying for traffic is looked upon by some webmasters as a waste of money, but for those of us that actually understand the way search engines work, we know that paying for traffic, if done correctly, can be an excellent way of increasing sales and enquiries for your business.

Although we are in complete favour of using pay per click and we do so for many of our clients, we do realise that there are advantages and disadvantages of paying for traffic for many business owners. For some, it just means an extension of their existing marketing or advertising budget, for others it means having to find more money to throw at something to get extra sales.

Below, we take a look at the reasons for and against using pay per click to send traffic to your website.

Reasons To Use Pay Per Click

Immediate Traffic – No other form of advertising can work so quickly, because as soon as your campaign is live you can start seeing traffic and visitors to your website within the hour. This means that you can immediately see if things are working and then change them if they are not, putting you in complete control of your advertising campaign.

Targeted Traffic – Because you can bid on specific keywords and not go outside of these, you can be sure that when someone searches for that keyword and hits your site, they are going to be as targeted as possible, which should, in theory, make them a much better visitor than just general search terms.

Increased Exposure – PPC increases your exposure as a business because you begin to put yourself on the same level as your rivals and competitors immediately, without sometimes having to go mad with the money. You can have as many adverts as your budget allows and there is no limit to the keywords, so you can really boost the exposure of your business with pay per click.

Competition – Using PPC effectively means you can compete with any of your rivals or competitors, as long as you have a big enough budget. There is no reason why you can not be alongside a rival that turns over millions, as long as you are willing to pay the correct amount to get you competing with the big boys in your industry.

Reasons Not To Use Pay Per Click

Need A Budget – Like any form of advertising, either offline or online, you have to set aside a decent budget or you are not going to get anywhere. Throwing ten pounds a month at a campaign is not going to achieve anything, so you need to make sure you have the money to really run a successful campaign.

Some Keywords Expensive – If you are selling mortgages, insurance or travel for example, your keyword bidding is going to be quite high, so be prepared to pay for it. As keywords get more popular they do become expensive, so trying to keep on top for a keyword can sometimes be impossible unless you have an open ended money pot.

Constant Maintenance – To get the most from your campaign you have to constantly work at it, changing keywords, testing adverts, increasing bids. You can not simply set up a campaign and leave it go the distance, so you will need to spend a lot of time really making this work.

Competition – If you want to compete against the big rivals in your industry then you are going to have to be prepared to chuck some money at this. This is not always the case because many of the big organisations are sometimes not as switched on with PPC as some smaller ones, but it is fair to say your bigger rivals can force you out of the bidding campaign.

As we mentioned at the start of this article, we recommend that any website that can afford to do runs a small cost per click campaign, because if it is set up correctly, it can be massively effective. Many people do have bad experiences with cost per click but this is mainly due to human error where they have set things up wrong or have simply misunderstood how it works.