What You Need to Know for Choosing the Best PPC Platform to Optimize Your Ad Performance

Pay per click advertising is an important component of digital marketing for businesses that are looking to earn fast traffic and major traction online. When perfectly optimized, PPC brings targets your audience and delivers highly qualified prospects directly to your door. In fact, it’s so effective that it converts at a rate that’s 50% higher than visitors that come to you through organic search.
For many businesses, the decision to invest in pay per click is easy. What isn’t so clear is which platform to advertise on. With AdWords, Facebook, Bing and numerous other platforms available, deciding which is the best fit for your business can be a challenge. After all, even though PPC generally produces an impressive ROI, there’s still an investment involved, and you don’t want to blow your marketing budget on the wrong choice.
Making the right choice starts with a clear understanding of the different platforms and what each can offer to your growing brand. Here’s an overview of the top PPC platforms to help you find the best fit.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is often seen as the shining start in the world of PPC. Some businesses consider it the “only” choice and with good reason. Google currently earns nearly 80% of search ad revenue in the United States. From a business perspective, going with AdWords makes sense if you’re looking for guaranteed exposure.
Google has an incredibly broad reach, which makes it ideal for practically all industries and niche businesses. There’s also the fact that Google is constantly looking at what its users want and how to best appeal to them, which means advertising on the platform is practically a sure bet – if you have the marketing budget to back it up.
The fact that Google’s traffic is so massive means that there are a lot of businesses competing for the same digital space. Even if you’ve never done well in economics, it’s easy to understand how the competition can make AdWords a costly investment for businesses in highly competitive industries.
Even with all of this in mind, it can still be argued that with the right strategy, AdWords can be an effective PPC platform for any size business – including those just starting out with limited marketing funds. The key to success with AdWords is knowing what you’re doing, and that’s something that can take some time.
To get maximum traction out of the AdWords platform, you’ll need at least a basic understanding of concepts such as bidding, negative keywords, match types and other elements that have been known to scare novice advertisers off. After all, even if you go with a basement level budget approach, each click still costs money and unless your ads are targeted to the right audience there’s a chance they’ll fall flat.
Still, you shouldn’t let this discourage you. With a little effort AdWords becomes easy to understand and use. It also never hurts to seek some guidance from a PPC professional who can help you understand how to maximize results with your ads on the platform.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is often the first platform that businesses turn to when they’re ready to try their hand at building visibility through social media engagement. With a couple billion people logging in on a monthly basis, it seems logical that adding PPC to your current social media strategy is only going to exponentially increase your reach and results.
Facebook’s paid ad platform comes with some good perks for businesses. For example, it’s easy to target your ads based on demographics, engagement and other behaviors. This type of specialization allows you to create ads that really speak to their audience. Plus, when someone is hanging out on social media, they’re more likely to engage or click on something out of pure curiosity.
When Facebook made news about how they were changing their user experience and focusing in on quality and relevance for their user base, a good portion of advertisers started running around like their hair was on fire. Everyone was worried about what the change in algorithm and focus was going to mean for both organic and paid reach on the network.
So far, the results haven’t been nearly as devastating as everyone thought they would be. However, the task of reaching audiences organically has become more complex and paid ads are quickly becoming a necessary tool for establishing connections with consumers. If you’re trying to build a presence on Facebook, but have shushed ideas about paid ads, it could be time to rethink your strategy.

Bing Ads

With giants like Google and Facebook claiming so much of the PPC attention, Bing tends to get pushed into the background as a viable pay per click platform. This is, unfortunately, at the detriment of many businesses. While it’s true that Bing doesn’t have the same volume of traffic as Google, it’s a platform that will put you in touch with nearly 1.5 million monthly users that are likely to never see your AdWords campaign.
People who use Bing often do so because they don’t like Google. They’re devoted to their choice in search engines and they’re probably not going to switch anytime soon. Depending on the type of business that you’re in, Bing Ads can provide a more strategic approach for meeting your target audience. This is especially true if you’re target is at least 35 years old, college educated and fairly settled in the family and career.
Plus, there’s the benefit of less competition. Since fewer people use Bing, fewer businesses choose it as their PPC platform of choice. If your marketing budget is on the smaller side and you want to invest in PPC without competing with businesses that dwarf you in size, Bing is a great option for creating a strategic, targeted and effective PPC campaign.

What About the Others?

Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and Bing Ads represent some of the more popular PPC platforms, however they make up only a fraction of the options. As a growing business, you have many pay per click options to consider.
We would like to help you understand the pros and cons of each platform and create a winning PPC strategy. Contact JLB today and let us introduce you to the PPC management team that will optimize your paid ad performance.