Advertising online isn’t always effective. There are certain parameters and trends that make paid online advertising particularly effective. Review each of the following points and if you find yourself saying “that’s my business!”, you should seriously consider paid online advertising – Google AdWords – as an integral part of your marketing and communications strategy.

1) High Customer Value

Pay-per-click advertising costs money. Unlike content marketing and blog commenting, there is an upfront and continuous cost to paid online advertising. This means that pay per click advertising is more feasible when the customer value is high and the cost of acquisition (how much you spend to get a client) can be higher.

Is your lifetime value per customer high enough to justify acquiring them through a pay-per-click channel?

Suppose you can make $5,000 off a single customer. In that case, you might be willing to spend $500 to acquire that customer. But if you can only make $500 off a single customer, you have far less money to spend on pay-per-click advertising and you might not be able to compete – particularly if you are in a highly competitive industry.

2) Extremely Targeted Business, Ideally By Location

Google AdWords targeting is highly specific. You can target by language, location, device, keywords, and you can drill down into any of those categories with ease. You can show ads to people up to age 40 in one zip code and other ads to people over 40 in another zip code.

Is your business so targeted, that you have to rely on the targeting features of Google and Facebook pay-per-click campaigns?

So if your business is extremely targeted, ideally by location, pay-per-click advertising can actually be far more cost-effective than any other type of advertising.

3) High Search Volume Keywords and Low Competition

There are a lot of product and service niches that still aren’t advertising online, so you have lots of people searching for something and very few people advertising those products or services. This is an ideal opportunity for PPC advertising because it means that clicks won’t cost very much.

Are you in a niche product or service industry with a high search volume and relatively low competition for buying-related keywords?

4) Scalable and Trackable

The only way to track effectiveness with content marketing is to monitor Google Analytics. While this is moderately effective, it’s not rapidly scalable the way that Google AdWords is. AdWords will tell you exactly how much you’re spending and how many conversions that led to. If you want to increase the number of conversions, all you have to do is increase your budget. Then, within a day or less, you can see just how effective that budget increase is.

Is it important for your business to have a trackable and scalable marketing channel so you know you are getting a good return on your ad budget? If so, pay-per-click advertising is perfect for you.

5) Retargeting

Often, the most effective paid advertising strategy is to remarket to individuals who you already have some type of relationship with. This is often a website visitor or email subscriber. These types of marketing campaigns tend to be very effective because you already have some level of trust and credibility with the prospect. In order for retargeting to be truly effective, you need a lot of website traffic.

Do you have enough website traffic for remarketing to help you close new sales?

Conclusion

If you found yourself saying “Yes” to at least 2 out of these 5 questions, you should seriously consider paid online advertising for your business.