You might have heard the terms SEM and PPC while discussing Digital Paid Marketing, but both terms are typically used interchangeably. Although they may have similar results when it’s about getting the website traffic, these two paid marketing approaches are completely different. These two strategies avail you to boost your website appearance on the search results page with different marketing objectives such as lead generation, sales/conversion, and brand awareness.
Whether the objective of any business marketing is to gain traffic or boost sales (for eCommerce), paid advertisements is always a priority for start-ups, small business as well as for big enterprises.
But due to more usage of the term SEO, SEM & PPC are a matter of confusion among the new marketers and companies. To see what both are, why, and how businesses use them in their marketing strategy, let’s check out every single aspect here.
How paid internet advertising does helps you to achieve your business objectives?
Boost Results
Organic Search Engine Optimization takes effort and a long period of time. You won’t get results right from the next day. In that case, you can generate instant results (traffic, sales & brand reach) in almost no time.
Effective Cost Budgeting
Paid ads usually need less budget than traditional offline hoarding of your brand. You can put up your budget as per the target audience size, locations, and keywords in pay as you go approach.
Scalable and Measurable
You can see every possible KPI’s (metrics) through the ad campaign setting tools like Google Ad words. Those KPIs may include keywords, views, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate that helps you to scale and measure your ad campaign easily.
Increases Brand Awareness
Search Engines Paid Ads also helps the brand to reach the audience and imprint its name and logo over time. Even if the CTR (Click-through rate) is less, the impression makes the appearance of the brand website on SERPs when the user searches for a particular query. This brand recognition leads to sales conversion in the future.
Importance of Creating & Managing Effective Paid Search Ads Campaigns
If you think of randomly placing pay-per-click or search engine marketing ads and hoping for huge sales – you’re probably quite disappointed by then. Search ads truly are science as much as an art form, which is why it is in dire need of businesses to hire professionals to achieve their marketing objectives (sales or brand awareness). Dedicated professional only ensures their PPC or SEM advertising delivers real results.
So, you can’t simply create a quick and pithy ad and sit back and wait for sales to come flowing in. There’s quite a process involved in creating a truly remarkable (and revenue-generating) ad.
There’s a comprehensive process involved in creating a performance-oriented and profitable search ad campaign.
- Research Best-performing keywords
- Analyze your competitors (and learn from their results!)
- Setting budgets and KPI’s metrics.
- Create and launch Digital ads.
- Define a sales funnel and refine your call-to-action
- Continually test and refine your advertising
Without each of these steps in place, you’ll quickly find that you’re getting impressions — but few actual clicks, engagements, and sales from your online advertising.
Without these steps, you can never run a profitable search advertisement. In order the generate the ROI you’ll need a dedicated expert or agency who will do these by analyzing your business objective.
Now, let’s dig deep into how SEM and PPC work together to drive maximum ROI and sales for your business.
SEM vs. PPC
What is SEM?
SEM is an abbreviated term for Search Engine Marketing. SEM is more like a process for creating paid advertising campaigns that appear in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Advertisers pay by bidding to target keywords based on their potential customer search terms.
Basically, SEM is used for promoting products and services to people as they search for them. Search engines are very crucial about giving the search results therefore SE's uses complex algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are fetched on each query of people.
In paid search advertising (SEM), sponsored ads appear at the top of the search engine results pages to prefer over the organic results. Let’s say that someone is looking for a service or product online. he/she go to a Google / Bing and type a search term (also called as keywords)On your search results page, you’ll often see the ads of many companies whose keywords match your search queries.
These ads appear on different positions of a SERP (top or bottom) depending on their bidding while setting up the ad campaign. These paid listings are relevant to your interest or search, making it like that you will surely click on them. See How to Setup SEM that meet your marketing objectives here:
What is PPC?
PPC (Pay Per Click) is one of the models of paid search advertisement in which advertiser pay a cost each time on their ads is clicked. Essentially, it comes under the SEM that buys visits to your site, instead of waiting for the organic visit from the long process of SEO.
While running the paid advertisement on the PPC model, the amount of money you pay for each click – depends on the CPC of the target keywords which will be used by the user. The CPC will be different for different keywords, it can vary from highly searched keywords to less searched words or phrases. High Search Volume keywords are usually more a PPC cost of around $10 to $20 or more while low search volume keywords may only cost a few cents per click.
Check out more about PPC in detail, if you’re about to use it for your business here
PPC or SEM - Which should I choose?
PPC is the best, simple and instant way to get your business ad to the top of the search engine results while SEM compasses both organic and paid marketing that ensure long-lasting results once they are achieved.PPC can be best for eCommerce and big brand or product launching while SEM is best for corporation websites for long-term execution to achieve brand stability and customer retention. If you’re looking for any of these services you talk to a Digital Marketing consulting company today to determine the best option for your business goals and objectives.
Do you still have confusion over PPC & SEM? No worries! We’re happy to assist you! Just leave your queries in the comments below.