It’s always one of the first questions businesses ask when talking about ads. Do you use organic traffic or do you pay for ads? There are 3 reasons why paid ads are vital to your online growth and your ability to scale.
#1 Speed of results
In today’s fast-changing services world, speed can be the difference between your service being chosen or a competitor’s one being chosen.
Search engine optimization (SEO) certainly has a huge effect on potential clients being able to find you, but its biggest drawback – despite being successful – is that it takes time. You have to research your keywords, and metadata, and ensure you are backlinking your content as well.
Your content will affect your rank, over time, there is no doubt about that but paid ads will affect your bottom line much more quickly.
Organic ads can take anywhere up to 3 months to rank – depending on the competition for the keywords. They should form a vital part of your overall strategy as well though.
Paid ads should come first
With paid ads you can begin to see it by the end of the week; sometimes even the following day.
Both types of traffic are crucial to a business being successful. As a rule of thumb, though, paid ads should come first because of the speed, the data and the results.
For any service or product, you need proof of concept before you can even think of scaling up and proof of concept will be shown quickly by the data you generate from paid ads.
Quickly test all parts of a campaign
Speed also allows you to test what’s working or not working with your PPC ad and to do it quickly so you are not wasting money on parts that are not. In other words, you get to test your ad copy, landing pages, and ad creative and even get to test the placement and colour of call-to-action buttons.
#2 Accurate Customer Targeting
Another advantage of paid ads is that you get to decide who you put your ad in front of unlike organic traffic. With organic traffic, you can get some ‘tyre kickers’ who turn out to be a waste of time and effort.
With paid ads, you can decide who your target audience is. You can choose to advertise to people in a certain geographic area, and base the ad on their interests, what they earn, or what products they normally buy online. The list and choices are endless.
With paid ads, you are using machine learning and machine learning continues to improve with every ad campaign.
#3: Analytics you can use to fine-tune
As a natural follow-on from accurate customer targeting, you will be able to target your ideal customer and see every action they take from the time they see the ad to the time they leave it.
It allows you to see the most profitable conversion path quickly as well. You get to see the common behaviours of those who take action. This data helps identify friction points quickly; the common points where people drop off the conversion path.
It can show you who the ad is reaching, who is buying, and at what stage they are taking action and all these parts of an ad campaign can be tweaked for even better conversion. Analytics can show what needs to be changed totally where there is disconnect or friction in the process.
All the advertising platforms are happy to share this information with you because they want your money. Therefore, from their perspective, they give you the most accurate data as well as the best results possible.
There are reasons that paid ads should be the cornerstone of your online marketing strategy because of their speed and benefits.
We are here to help you if you need any guidance on strategy or ad creative.