How Much Does PPC Cost? 

As you’ll be aware if you read our previous Marketing Mondays blog post you’ll know that pay per click (PPC), is a form of online advertising that can have a wide range of advantages for brands. These include the opportunity to make an instant impact, as well as the fact that you won’t pay anything for it unless someone actually clicks on one of your ads.  

Indirect and Direct Costs of PPC

This brings us neatly onto the matter of how much you will have to pay for a successful ad campaign on a popular PPC platform such as Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). The fact is that as powerful as PPC marketing can undoubtedly be, there is both a time and financial cost element to it. The amount of time you’ll need to invest in PPC, for instance, can be especially high when you try to manage your PPC presence in-house, instead of using an agency. 

Then, of course, there will be a financial cost for your use of PPC ads. This isn’t necessarily restricted to whatever you’ll need to pay Google for every click your ads attract. After all, if you use an agency, they will charge management fees, and even if you don’t, you’ll still be effectively paying any in-house PPC staff of yours a wage to oversee your ad campaigns. 

Inhouse vs Agency PPC Management

While the broad principle of PPC may seem simple enough, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to get the most out of a Google Ads campaign without previous experience and knowledge. That’s because the actual execution of an impactful campaign can actually be extremely complex, reflecting the highly specialised nature of this field. There’s an immense amount of advanced information that you’ll have to get your head around if you intend on ‘going it alone’. 

Even if you hire an established PPC professional as a member of your team, it takes a lot of time and effort to properly research, create, implement, analyse and fine-tune an effective PPC campaign. Plus, hiring just the one person means you’ll be forced to place all of your faith, time and financial investment in this one person. But doing that, in turn, means you’ll have to account for sickness and holiday pay each year. Depending on your budget, sticking to just the one in-house PPC expert may still be a more expensive route than using an agency. As you can see, the ‘real’ Google advertising cost for you and your business could accumulate to overwhelming levels quite rapidly. 

An Agency Can Greatly Help You To Minimise Your Google PPC Cost

With all of the above factors considered, then, it should be no surprise that so many companies seriously considering paid advertisement end up going down the agency route. It enables them to draw upon the services of trusted, established and proven professionals like our own here at Success Local, in the confidence that such experts will know all of the right strategies to use already, and won’t make any of the ‘classic’ mistakes frequently made by those having to learn PPC ‘on the job’. 

In short, pairing with a PPC agency is so often simply the most sensible and cost-effective choice.

A Few Other Thoughts On Reducing Your Paid Ad Expenditure

As we mentioned above, one of the things that helps to keep an organisation’s Google PPC cost base down is the fact that they only need to pay when someone actually clicks on their ads. But the reality’s a bit more complicated than that. 

Answering the question “how much does PPC cost?” is rather like answering “how long is a piece of string?”, as there are so many factors involved. These include such things as the paid search platform used, as well as the advertiser’s daily budget, end goals and the competitiveness of their industry. 

According to one analysis a few years ago, for example, firms in the insurance industry could expect to have to pay an average of £11 per click, compared to just £2 to £3 each for the likes of recruitment companies, dentists and estate agencies. 

Thankfully, Google Ads enables you to set a maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click. This will allow you to avoid the eye-watering amounts of money you may consider to be not worth the bother. 

A Quick Guide To The Google Ad Auction Process

The position in which an ad of yours appears on a search engine results page (SERP) relative to your competitors making bids, and indeed whether your ad appears at all, is determined by a lightning-fast ad auction that occurs whenever someone performs a relevant Google search. 

It isn’t just a straightforward case of ‘whoever bids highest, wins’, though. That’s because, alongside your maximum bid, the actual quality of your ad – as assessed by Google – and the expected impact from your ad extensions and other ad formats, will also be accounted for in the auction process. 

‘Ad extensions’, by the way, refers to the further information you may include with your ad, such as a phone number and more links to specific pages on your site. 

All of the above means that even if your competitors bid higher than you, you may still win a higher position than them – at a lower price – if your ads and keywords are good-quality and relevant. Note, too, that the actual amount you end up paying won’t necessarily be as high as your maximum bid figure, and you’re entitled to change your bid at any time. 

Make Sure You Know What You’re Doing With Your Ad Campaigns!

Of course, even a relatively low Google PPC cost for your company will still be largely wasted if you don’t have a clear sense of why you’re spending time and money on paid search marketing at all. 

So, whatever you do – and whether you perform PPC on an in-house basis or in conjunction with a dependable agency – it’s vital to set some clear objectives. This way, you can be sure of whether your business is getting a good or bad return on investment (ROI) from its PPC efforts. 

Is it heightened sales that matter to you above all else? In that case, you should be measuring the revenue your PPC campaign generates. Or if it’s brand awareness you’re aiming for, we’d suggest you track visits to your site. Meanwhile, in the event that you’re principally seeking leads, it’s the likes of contact form completions and calls you ought to be monitoring.  

Would you like to receive specific and tailored advice and guidance on the steps that your brand should be taking with its involvement in PPC, not least so that you can minimise your Google advertising cost? If so, don’t hesitate to give our paid search experts a call now, on 01788 288 800. 

Source for statistics: https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-strategy/cost-google-advertising-uk/