Most of Google’s revenue comes from its Adwords PPC (Pay-Per-Click) web marketing. With advertising revenues totaling almost 116.3 billion US dollars in 2018,, Adwords has led the movement of PPC web marketing. Paid search engine marketing is not as effective as organic search engine optimization, simply because search engine users often trust the non-sponsored listing more. For this very reason, many marketers prefer to stick with organic search engine optimization(see my last blog for more on PPC web marketing versus organic search engine optimization). As far as targeting the right audience, Google Adwords can only be targeted according to keyword, location, and search history.
On the surface, the competitors for Google’s PPC web marketing are Bing and other ad networks. However, few contenders with no search function at all, are slowly but surely rising through the ranks: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It may surprise you that social networking sites are competing with the top search engine for revenue, though there are many crucial differences between the two.
LinkedIn as well as Facebook offer PPC web marketing that doesn’t just stop at location and search history. Unlike Google, LinkedIn and Facebook’s PPC web marketing has the power to target users based on gender, age, role, interests, affiliations, marital status, and more. Facebook ads are generally cheaper than Google ads—though they sometimes garner less of an audience than paid search engine marketing with Google.
As marketers, we have to decide between the high traffic and visibility of Google’s paid search engine marketing and the highly targeted PPC ads on LinkedIn or Facebook and other social networks who use PPC ads.
In order to choose the right mix for your PPC web marketing, it’s important to weigh the different options and see the whole picture. You need to take into account the forecasted amount of traffic, compare conversion rates, assess the amount of competition, and determine pricing. Every advertiser is in a different situation and, at the end of the day, we all want to get new client leads while minimizing out of pocket expenses.
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