10 Reasons Why Google Adwords PPC Is Extremely Effective For Local Businesses

1. Only Pay When A User Clicks Your PPC Ad

This is the beauty of PPC advertising. By showing your ads on specific searches that are relevant to your business, you can focus advertising dollars on people likely to become customers. With the average click hovering around $2-$3/click, it is feasible for all businesses to generate ROI from Google Adwords.

2. Your Google Adwords Budget Is Flexible And You Can Adjust It At Anytime

Google Adwords allows maximum control over your advertising budget. You can adjust your ad ‘run-time’ based on almost anything such as day of week, hour of day, gender, age, weather patterns, and more. Overtime, you gain valuable insights on the times of day and users that perform the best for your business. You can then optimize and adjust by focusing advertising budget around those insights, giving you more bang for your buck.

3. Reach People Who Are Actively Searching For Your Service/Product With Google Adwords

This is the exact reason why search engines (Google & Bing) have become so valuable to businesses. There are over 100 Billion searches made on Google.com each month and growing. People literally rely on search engines to solve everything these days.

We typically use a search engine for 3 main things:

-Research to find an answer

-Shop for things they want/need

-Find entertainment

If you are a local service business, showing up during the research & shopping phases is critical. This is when people are deciding on who deserves their business, and having a strong Google Adwords presence will generate leads through phone calls and contact form submissions.

4. Use Google Adwords To Choose Any Geographic Locations To Target Your Ads

Adwords allows you to target by a custom radius around a pin, choose zip codes, cities, states, congressional districts, and more. You can use these options to show your ads to very specific areas and demographics. This helps to ensure that you are focusing on areas that have historically generated revenue for your business. You can then make sure to maintain your ‘search market share’ (Search Impression Share) in that area and the immediate area around your business.

5. Bid As High Or Low As You Want For Ad Positioning

The amount that you bid per click in Google Adwords has a significant impact on where you will show up on the page. Each page of Google Search Results can have up to 4 text ad spots on it. Since up to 85% of Internet users never leave the first page of Google Search, positions 1-4 are the most competitive and sought after ad spots.

There are a few general strategies or schools of thought around which position will generate the best ROI:

(1) If you are showing up in the number one spot you are likely paying more per click than other advertisers (unless you have a very high Quality Score), but have the best chance of getting a click. (2) If you are number 4, you are still on the first page, will be paying less per click, and could get more clicks dollar-for-dollar. (1) is a more aggressive approach and (2) is more conservative. Both strategies can perform well and typically it depends on your budget and business goals when deciding which approach to use.

6. Pick Best Hours Of The Day And Days Of The Week To Run Ads

It’s apparent that some days and hours are probably not ideal to advertise for your business. These are hours that might generate clicks, but no desired (valuable) actions are taken for your business. That is why it is best practice to block certain times of the day after you gather enough data to deem times unprofitable. If you do not have the budget to gather enough data to find these days/times for your business, typically Monday-Thursday, 9am-6pm are the peak hours for local search traffic.

7. Show Up Only For Google Searches That Have A High Probability Of Generating Revenue

With many other forms of marketing you may spend money advertising to people who aren’t interested or looking for your product. Oftentimes this happens with traditional media (direct mail, print, TV, Radio) because you can’t accurately gauge how effective your advertising campaign was. This results in many wasted advertising dollars. With Google Adwords, you can target searches that people make when trying to find a service you provide. Not only that, but you can then track their behavior (phone calls, contact forms) and find out how profitable certain keywords are to your business. Over time, you can focus on the most profitable and relevant keywords, giving you peace-of-mind knowing that your advertising is effective.

8. Full Transparency In Terms Of Amount Spent & The Quality Of Users Sent To Your Website

By adding advanced user tracking code (Google Analytics & Adwords Conversions) to your website, you can track the visits of users to your site and see exactly what they are doing. You can also place values on these actions (calls/contact forms), which gives you an exact cost for each action taken.

9. Utilize Google Adwords & Website Data (Google Analytics) To Improve & Leverage Your Campaign

Google Analytics is the most widely used website tracking software. By using it to track valuable actions on your site, you can use it to make decisions that will improve the performance of your ads. When certain devices, operating systems, browser types, age groups, and etc. perform differently, Adwords allows you to adjust to spend money on segments of users with the best ROI.

10. No Long Term Advertising Commitments; Pause & Enable Your Google Adwords Ads Whenever You Want

Unlike Traditional Media, Google Adwords doesn’t make you pay by the quarter or even month for advertising. You can shut off your ads and pause them whenever you like. If you prepaid a monthly budget, you can even get a refund of all monies not spent.

Learn more about our Done-For-You Google Ads PPC Management services.