RE: The Death of Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC): Not So Fast, Let’s Examine

This morning a post caught my eye: The Death of Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) (social media examiner) And here is what this respectable media outlet had to say.

"Yet while PPC seems to have become a staple of online marketing, there are clear signs that it is dying out as a lone marketing resource. For example, recent research has revealed that just 18% of SMEs using Google Adwords actually recoup their investment (Source: YouGov)."

Okay, so PPC is not a LONE solution. Nor is Social Media or Email Marketing. And ADWORDS has long been a testing ground for "messaging" in addition to advertising. It’s actually the DEATH OF CLICK TO BUY that we are seeing. Facebook is the WORST performer in Pay-Per-Click advertising, IF you are trying to track direct revenue per click. However, Facebook can give you access to more eyeballs than any other site on the planet.

So how is PPC advertising used today, if not for "click to buy?" Here are several ways that PPC is alive and well.

1. PPC in some channels still results in a huge percentage of sales. So "click to buy" does indeed work. Go ask Dell why their FACEBOOK ads go way up near Christmas and High School Graduation.

2. PPC is a fantastic way to target and understand the words and phrases that your customer base is interested in. A few days of an aggressive PPC campaign can do more than any keyword research tool you can subscribe to. Because the clicks and interest will be in the real-world market and not a database of statistics.

3. PPC can bring your most valuable keywords and phrases to light much quicker than any SEO program. So you use PPC at the beginning of your Search Engine optimization plan and use the findings to truly "optimize" the ideas that you have tested into a full-blown SEO site re-structure.

4. PPC is great for "message testing." You can get very quick results on ideas for an Advertising Headline by running a few PPC ads on Facebook. You can find out which email subject lines might result in more opens, by testing them as PPC ads. And while Facebook may not be very eCommerce-friendly, it is a robust message testing platform, with as much traffic and demographic targeting as you could ever care to pay for.

The Death of PPC is a nice headline, that would probably test much better than "PPC As A Lone Strategy is Dying." But that’s because if you’ve been in online marketing for any time, you know there are many components to an integrated campaign and many tools at our disposal to produce, refine, and measure the results.

Let’s see what those smart guys at Marketing Sherpa have to say about this:

Keep PPC in your toolbox. It’s fast. It’s effective and the results are real-time and real-world. So while the PPC AD might be dead as a revenue stream, it’s the "click to buy" part that is broken. Hopefully you’re not trying to convince your client that buying PPC ads is going to drive their success on Facebook. Because f-Commerce is still mostly myth. But PPC is alive and well.

Tags: death of pay per click, f commerce, facebook, facebook ads, facebook commerce, marketing sherpa, online marketing strategy, pay per click, ppc, search engine optimization, seo, social media examiner, social media strategy